The Mind of Russian Spy Anna Chapman
BOOK REVIEW: Bondianna: To Russia, With Love
By Anna Chapman /Moscow: Bombora 2024 In Russian
Reviewed by: Filip Kovacevic, PhD
The Reviewer — Filip Kovacevic, PhD, teaches at the University of San Francisco and specializes in Soviet/Russian intelligence & counterintelligence. His new book KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union will be published by the University of Toronto Press in 2025. The author can be contacted at [email protected]
REVIEW — There is a Russian proverb that says that to argue with a beautiful woman is to anger God. In order to tell the truth, I guess I’ll have to take that risk. Anna Chapman is a beautiful woman but her book Bondianna: To Russia, With Love published in Russia several months ago is a flop.
Anna Chapman needs no special introduction. In June 2010, she became a household name after getting arrested by the FBI and charged with espionage on behalf of the SVR (Russian foreign intelligence service). After a brief stint in prison, together with other SVR spies arrested at the same time, she was exchanged in a spy swap.
Russian president Vladimir Putin welcomed his blown operatives as heroes and, as a result, she did not have to worry about her financial prospects ever since. For more than a decade now, she has been a constant presence in the Russian media sphere.
The public persona Chapman cultivated has been that of a woman of mystery. She hosted a long-running TV series on esoteric subjects, promoting conspiracy narratives. In contrast to her fellow spy Yelena Vavilova, the author of three spy fiction novels and the fourth soon to be published, Chapman was not known to have any literary proclivities. Bondianna is her first book.
Given the title, one might have expected this book to be a tale of Chapman’s espionage activities. However, the mention of Bond in the title is just a selling hook. Spying is far from being a major theme in Bondianna. A few spies mentioned in the book, including a young SVR officer based in London who supposedly spotted, assessed, and attempted to recruit Chapman, are consistently cartoonish. It is obvious that they have no relation to the real thing.
Indeed, this book is not about how great the SVR is but how great Chapman is. This is personal fantasy writ large. Craving to satisfy her megalomania, Chapman wrote a book that is probably useless to the SVR as a recruitment tool. That’s a good thing and yet another confirmation that she never really assimilated her intelligence training.
Everyone needs a good nightcap. Ours happens to come in the form of a M-F newsletter that provides the best way to unwind while staying up to speed on national security. (And this Nightcap promises no hangover or weight gain.) Sign up today.
Chapman tells the story of how she lived through the worst kinds of things that could happen to a person, overcame all adversity, and triumphantly discovered the meaning of life. The book is thus a mixture of a horror story and a fairy tale, though Chapman claims that it is based on true events. It is difficult to see how anybody could go through such extreme psychological ups and downs and still remain sane. Obviously, we are dealing with a fictional super-heroine, not the real Anna Chapman.
The core of the book are descriptions of Chapman’s romantic and sexual relations with men in her life. Nobody will be surprised to hear that there were a lot of them. Chapman explicitly writes how she used her physical attractiveness to get what she wanted. For instance, there is an episode when she gets a coveted job in a London hedge fund by playing strip poker with the owner and his friend.
Chapman also tells how she befriended the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, how he took her to lunch at the most fashionable London restaurants in his chauffeur-driven black Mercedes once a week, and how he confided to her what lay heavy on his soul. For all his millions, according to Chapman, Berezovsky was a deeply unhappy man because “Mother Russia” rejected him and he could never go back. She denies ever having slept with him. It would have spoiled their beautiful friendship, she claims.
There is another Russian oligarch named Viktor who in the book appears like Deus ex machina to give Chapman money every time when she is down and out (this happens quite frequently). He also takes her to Switzerland and India for a change of scenery, wardrobe renewal, and expansion of mental horizons. She states that she considers Viktor “one of the most amazing and generous people on the planet” and describes their intimate encounters and conversations in detail. I suspect that Viktor was her handler.
However, the main male protagonist of the book is Chapman’s British husband Alex. Chapman writes that she met Alex when she was already in Britain. She claims that she entered the country thanks to the invitation of another British man with whom she was romantically involved and whom she met while visiting her parents in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, where her father was posted as “a diplomat.”
Chapman writes that Alex already had a drug addiction problem when they met. This vulnerability was probably the reason why he was selected as a target by the SVR in the first place, but we can’t expect Chapman to tell us that. Instead, Chapman tells us that she fell head over heels in love with Alex. Never before (and never after) did she love another man like that. She even claims that Alex, who died of overdose in 2015, remained the only love of her life, though she had a child with another man after she had returned to Russia.
However, while they lived together, their relationship, according to Chapman, was far from harmonious. Alex grew increasingly abusive and violent towards her; on one occasion, he raped her, and on another, tried to kill her. She claims that she had no choice but to flee their apartment with the clothes on her back as her only possession. Yet she never reported any of this to the police. Perhaps she was afraid it would blow her cover, or perhaps the events were overdramatized to hook the readers.
Subscriber+Members have a higher level of access to Cipher Brief Expert Perspectives and get exclusive access to The Dead Drop, the best national security gossip publication, if we do say so ourselves. Find out what you’re missing. Upgrade your access to Subscriber+ now.
Chapman also relates a story of her botched abortion and how she was on the verge of death after she returned to her apartment. It’s gruesome but she claims that after voluminous bleeding brought out the remains of the dead fetus, she wrapped them up in a towel and put them in the freezer “between the frozen chicken legs and French fries.” She writes that her life was saved by the medical emergency crew she had called seconds before she lost consciousness. Apparently, she had fortuitously forgotten to lock her front door facilitating her rescue. After release from the hospital, she claims that she took the frozen remains out of the freezer, put them in a shoe box, and buried them in Hyde Park.
Chapman maintains that this horror story material made her divorce from Alex inevitable, but the divorce conveniently happened only when Chapman got ready to transition to other assignments, which, as we know, culminated in her being dispatched by the SVR to New York City. Alex, the marriage to whom enabled her to get rid of her maiden last name, and to become a British citizen, was thus removed from the stage like an actor in a theater play who has spoken his lines and whose presence has become obsolete.
The SVR intended to run the Chapman theater play for a long time but encountered a very sophisticated audience in the FBI who quickly comprehended what was going on and called the SVR bluff. Chapman soon got a plane ticket in only one direction, which brings us back full circle to the subtitle of her book: “To Russia, With Love.”
Chapman gushes forth about how wonderful it is to live in Putin’s Russia and how one’s roots are the most important thing in life. She even interprets the fact that she was born on February 23, which in Russia is celebrated as Defender of the Fatherland Day, as a sign of her profound tie with her native Volgograd (“from where Soviet Army began its path to Berlin”) and with Russia as a whole. And yet beneath these pathetic statements of second-rate patriotism, between the lines of her book, her nostalgia for London and the life in the West in general is palpable.
Still, considering her espionage past, it is highly unlikely that Chapman will ever be granted an opportunity to visit Britain or U.S. again. Likewise, as this review has shown, translating and publishing her book in English would hardly be a good investment for any major Western publisher.
Bondianna: To Russia, With Love earns a disappointing 1.5 out of 4 trench coats
The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.
Interested in submitting a book review? Send an email to [email protected] with your idea.
Sign up for our free Undercover newsletter to make sure you stay on top of all of the new releases and expert reviews.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.