The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service
by Andrew Meier
Norton, 402 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution
by Robert Service
PublicAffairs, 441 pp., $32.99
Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative
by Emil Draitser
Northwestern University Press, 420 pp., $35.00
Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West
by Edward Lucas
Bloomsbury, 372 pp., $26.00
Nowadays, we tend to place spies into a cold war narrative: East vs. West, intrigue around the Berlin Wall, Graham Greene’s Vienna, and George Smiley’s London. But the first and most successful Soviet spies emerged much earlier. The 1930s, W.H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade,” were a period of extraordinarily creative skulduggery for Soviet espionage.
