BOOK REVIEW: KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union
By Filip Kovacevic / University of Toronto Press
Reviewed by: Bill Harlow
The Reviewer Bill Harlow served as chief spokesman for the CIA from 1997 to 2004* and was Assistant White House Press Secretary for National Security from 1988 to 1992. He is the senior book editor for The Cipher Brief. A retired Navy captain, Harlow is the co-author of four New York Times bestsellers on intelligence and is the author of Circle William: A Novel.
REVIEW — In KGB Literati, intelligence historian Filip Kovacevic unearths the forgotten front of the Cold War — the one fought not with wiretaps or microfilm but with words. Drawing on archival material and long-lost Soviet publications, he suggests that the KGB’s venture into spy fiction was an organized campaign of psychological warfare, designed to shape both the self-image of the secret police and the political imagination of the Soviet public.
In the West, spy fiction has been enormously popular. Some of the best has been crafted by people with a background in intelligence before turning to writing. But while authors like Ian Fleming or John Le Carré had supporters and former colleagues in the clandestine world, there is no evidence that their literary efforts were official missions.
The Montenegrin-born Kovacevic is now an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco and is a leading scholar of KGB institutional history, operations, and personnel. He recalls that Allen Dulles and his CIA contemporaries promoted “true spy stories” in the 1950s to elevate the reputation of American intelligence and make espionage “socially acceptable.” The KGB, however, actively used fiction to try to police hearts and minds at home.
Beginning in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, the KGB’s Press Bureau encouraged officers and veterans to publish “Chekist fiction,” dramatizing real operations through the safe filter of ideology. These tales glorified the intelligence service as the moral core of the Soviet state — vigilant, incorruptible, and indispensable. The spy hero became a Soviet Everyman with government credentials.
Kovacevic shows that through novels, novellas, and serial anthologies like Chekist Stories, readers were taught to emulate the habits of surveillance and self-discipline that sustained the security state as the author puts it, the KGB “wasn’t just surveilling the public — it was teaching the public to surveil itself.”
The story reaches its institutional peak in 1979 when KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov issued Executive Order No. 40, creating cash awards for novels and films that portrayed state security in a positive light. Andropov’s decree made clear that the arts were now an operational front. Approved works had to promote “Soviet patriotism, socialist internationalism, political vigilance, and complete dedication to the Leninist Party.” Three thousand rubles — two years of wages — awaited first-prize winners.
Kovacevic places this move in revealing context: it wasn’t born from nowhere. A decade earlier, CIA analysts had already noticed a “major public-relations campaign to glorify Moscow’s intelligence services.” Declassified reports from 1965 show the Agency tracking this “crop of spy stories” as evidence of the KGB’s rising cultural influence. In other words, Western intelligence was reading Soviet spy fiction as early open-source analysis.
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Among Kovacevic’s most engaging chapters is his profile of Roman Kim, a half-Korean veteran of Soviet counterintelligence who began writing spy fiction after surviving Stalin’s purges. In the late 1940s, Kim urged his peers to create a Soviet alternative to Western thrillers — a literature that would defend reason, fairness, and patriotism against what he called America’s “orgies of whiskey and blood.”
Through Kim and later writers like Oleg Gribanov and Zoya Voskresenskaya-Rybkina, Kovacevic reconstructs a hidden crew of insider authors whose novels blurred confession, propaganda, and therapy. They gave the Chekists a conscience — and gave the Soviet Union the illusion of a humane secret police.
Kovacevic offers some interesting insights. For example, while no surprise, KGB alumni were required to submit their manuscripts to a review board. Kim submitted one draft that had a double agent who aspired to assassinate Stalin. The board directed that the intended victim be changed to Winston Churchill.
Western intelligence officers, particularly CIA case officers are routinely pictured as materialistic and riven with rivalries, jealousies, and bitterness. Narratives often suggested linkages between Western intelligence services and former Nazis, a theme that continues to this day with Russian propaganda about U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine.
When the Soviet Union came apart and the KGB was dismantled in the early 1990s a survey of Russian society showed that the KGB still commanded great respect among the populace for being smart, powerful and service oriented. So, one my observe that KGB’s literary efforts had paid off.
KGB-themed books and films from the Soviet era are still said to be quite popular with officers of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet KGB counterintelligence.
The book’s conclusion draws a straight line from those literary projects to the Putin era, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) has revived the tradition with its own prizes for “patriotic” art. Many of today’s Russian leaders — former KGB officers themselves — were steeped in the moral universe those stories built. The old archetype endures: the besieged fortress, the righteous spy, the decadent West.
KGB Literati is meticulously researched and detailed. It is not an easy read, jam-packed with unfamiliar names and pseudonyms both of real Soviet intelligence officers and their literary counterparts. But Kovacevic does the heavy lifting for his readers: summarizing a plethora of past publications – most never translated into English – and giving insights into how what another historian, Nigel West, calls “factional” where “first-hand knowledge of a practitioner, or a former practitioner, is drawn upon in a dramatic fictional account.” Kovacevic clearly shows that spy fiction was not an afterthought of the KGB but rather was part of their counterintelligence strategy.
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*All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
