Glorified Images of Soviet State Security and Intelligence Services: A Survey of Books Published in Putin's Russia Free

Books heaping praise on Soviet state security and intelligence services have proliferated in the Russian Federation during the quarter century of Vladimir Putin's rule compared to the eight years under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. The liberal orientation of book publishers during the initial post-Soviet decade—when even the memoirs of the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, who had been a double agent for the British MI6 foreign intelligence service, were published by a major Russian publishing company—has dissipated under the pressure of ever more draconian state control over media and cultural affairs imposed during the Putin era.¹ Putin's own professional background in the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) and the fact that he and other KGB veterans (so-called Chekists) became the “new nobility” of post-Soviet Russia created a favorable context for this publishing resurgence.² One of the preferred ways for aging Chekists to legitimize their political hold on power has been to write, or help publish, the books that glorify the activities of the KGB and its state security predecessors. Undoubtedly, they have also had a commercial interest in having these books published. However, considering that their access to state power provided them with a great deal of financial security, the Chekists’ primary motivation appears to be ideological—their desire to shape the “hearts and minds” of the future generations of Russians.

As a result, this veritable publishing tsunami of “Chekist-friendly” literature has portrayed the operations of Soviet state security and intelligence services as indispensable for the Soviet Union's rise to superpower status while at the same time downplaying or denying their responsibility for the state's eventual demise. The presence of such books for sale in major Russian bookstores and on the websites of online booksellers has contributed to the further affirmation and expansion of the Chekist mythology analyzed in Julie Fedor's well-researched, innovative Russia and The Cult of State Security.³ In fact, since the publication of Fedor's study in 2011, the potency of the heroic myth of the Chekists in Russian society has continued to grow, energized by the growing assertiveness of Russia in global affairs.⁴ For instance, the longstanding director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, in his capacity as president of the state-financed Russian Historical Society, has sponsored numerous cultural events and media programs glorifying the exploits of Soviet intelligence during the Second World War and the Cold War, as well as the activities of Soviet spies in the West such as Kim Philby, Rudolf Abel (William Fisher), George Blake, and others.⁵ As a result, the “Chekist-friendly” literature and related cultural practices have both reflected and amplified the oppressive climate in Russian politics by intentionally resurrecting the geopolitical narrative of Russia as a great power engaged in a global rivalry with the United States akin to the U.S.-Soviet Cold War standoff.

The focus of this article is on the operations of one segment of the cultural life in contemporary Russia involved in fostering a positive image of Soviet security and intelligence services: the Russian book publishing industry. As pointed out, this is by no means the only segment of Russian cultural life in which this trend can be observed. In addition to books, there are many other “Chekist-friendly” products of popular culture: documentary films, docudrama series, and feature movies shown on both television and the Internet. However, in contrast to Russian spy fiction and films, the contribution of the Russian book publishing industry to augmenting the Chekist mythology has never been studied in detail before.⁶ The purpose of this article is to survey the books on Soviet state security and intelligence services published in Putin's Russia by eight major Russian publishing companies: Molodaya Gvardiya, Algoritm, Kuchkovo Pole, Veche, Granitsa, Olma Mediya Grupp/Prosveshchenie, Eksmo-AST, and Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya.

Even though all of these companies have published works lauding the KGB and its predecessors, the extent of their actual ties to the Russian security and intelligence services varies. When information about this topic can be found in open sources, it will be discussed here. The publishers under consideration cater to different audiences, ranging from historically-minded upholders of the status quo to those seeking to be entertained by sensational spy tales. Hence, the publishers differ somewhat in the roles they play vis-à-vis the ongoing effort to highlight the greatness of the Russian state.

To be sure, a few independent book publishers in Putin's Russia have tried to buck the pro-KGB trend. At least until Russia's invasion in 2022, they were willing to publish books that shed light on the “old myths, fake statistics, and non-existent documents” that, according to the critics, the Chekist-friendly historiography invokes in creating its narratives.⁷ The most prominent among them until recently was the human rights organization Memorial based in Moscow and co-chaired by Nikita Petrov, one of the best-known researchers of Soviet intelligence history. Among Petrov's many published works are two invaluable biographical handbooks on the several generations of Soviet Chekists and also biographies of three heads of the state security apparatus—Nikolai Ezhov, Ivan Serov, and Yurii Andropov.⁸ But after Putin began his fourth and fifth terms as Russian president (in 2016 and 2020), Memorial and other similarly liberal NGOs were all classified by the Russian government as “foreign agents” and forcibly disbanded. Hence, they no longer have any impact within Russia on the public image of Soviet security and intelligence services. This makes it even more important and urgent to analyze in detail the pro-KGB publishing houses that are state-supported and have much greater influence than Memorial on the mood inside Russia. Under Putin, publishers sympathetic to the KGB wield power to shape the grand narrative on Soviet state security and intelligence in Russia.⁹

Even though the books these publishers bring out certainly do not provide complete and accurate accounts of Soviet state security and intelligence activities, we can nonetheless derive useful lessons by examining their content. First of all, we can learn how the state security and intelligence community in Putin's Russia perceives itself and what kind of reputational image it wants to project both domestically and abroad. Second, the books also make clear to what extent the self-image of the present-day Russian state security and intelligence operatives is grounded in the role that their predecessor services played in Soviet foreign policymaking and implementation. Third, these books increasingly play a pedagogical function in shaping social and political values and ideologies in the Russian public sphere. They “teach” Russian citizens to be suspicious of the West and to be on guard for alleged Western conspiracies aimed at Russia. In this respect, the books promote a reactionary conservative mentality fostered by the Kremlin to deepen the gulf between Russia and Western liberal democracies.¹⁰

The publishing company Molodaya Gvardiya was the biggest book publisher in the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, for instance, its publishing output was more than 40 million books a year.¹¹ Its name was derived from the fact that it was founded as a cooperative organization by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) in October 1922.¹² In 1938, Molodaya Gvardiya began publishing the book series The Lives of Remarkable People (Zhizn’ Zamechatel'nykh Lyudei, or ZhZL), which quickly became its trademark and which it publishes to this day. The series itself had roots in Imperial Russia, having been started by St. Petersburg publisher Florentii Pavlenkov (1839–1900) in 1890.¹³ In the early Soviet period, ZhZL was continued by a variety of publishers, including the publishing house set up by the famous Russian novelist and revolutionary Maxim Gorky (1868–1936). The first book in the ZhZL series published by Molodaya Gvardiya was a biography of Aleksandr Suvorov (1729–1800), one of the most successful Russian military commanders. It was written by the pseudonymous Soviet military historian K. Osipov (Iosif Kuperman, 1900–1957) with a print run of 50,000 copies, which was an average print run during the Soviet period.¹⁴

More than 30 years passed before a biography of a top state security figure was included in the ZhZL series. In the first several decades of the Soviet Union's existence, all matters related to state security were censored and kept secret from the Soviet public. The appointment of Andropov as chairman of the KGB in 1967 led to changes in the agency's depiction of its history and in its outreach to the public.¹⁵ This was quickly reflected in many areas of Soviet social life, including the world of book publishing. For instance, just two years later, in 1969, Molodaya Gvardiya included a biography of a state security chief in its ZhZL series for the first time. This was a biography of Vyacheslav Menzhinskii (1874–1934), the second chief of the Unified State Political Directorate (OGPU) from 1926 to 1934, written by Teodor Gladkov (1932–2012) and Mikhail Smirnov.¹⁶

Gladkov went on to become one of the best-known and most influential Soviet/Russian intelligence historians both during and after the Soviet era. He published four more books in the ZhZL series, including biographies of two Soviet undercover operatives during World War II, Nikolay Kuznetsov (1911–1944) and Dmitrii Medvedev (1898–1954); a biography of one of the most successful Soviet “illegal” intelligence station chiefs (rezidents) in the West, Aleksandr Korotkov (1909–1961); and a biography of Artur Artuzov (Fraucci) (1891–1937), the head of Soviet foreign intelligence (INO) in 1931–1935.¹⁷ Gladkov was trusted by the KGB and later the SVR and was given privileged access to secret documents. Although his biographies are sympathetic to the individuals whose life stories he recounts, they are not hagiographies. In many respects, they are the most reliable accounts available. In an obituary published in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a newspaper owned by the Russian government, Gladkov was described as “the founder of the genre” of intelligence biography in Russia.¹⁸ The obituary was written by Nikolay Dolgopolov (b. 1949), the deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper, who in recent years has become one of the most prolific and popular writers on the history of Soviet foreign intelligence.

The biography of Menzhinskii by Gladkov and Smirnov was followed in 1971 by a biography of Richard Sorge (1895–1944) written by Mariya Kolesnikova and her husband, Mikhail. Sorge was a German Communist activist and scholar who worked for the Soviet military intelligence agency (GRU) in China and Japan until his arrest by the Japanese police in October 1941.¹⁹ His top-secret reports indicating that Japan did not intend to attack the Soviet Union in 1941 allegedly made possible the deployment of Soviet troops from Siberia to the Western front and likely saved Moscow from Nazi occupation.²⁰ The Kolesnikovs’ biography of Sorge, replete with tales of his heroic espionage on behalf of the GRU, proved to be much more popular among the Soviet public than the biography of Menzhinskii. The initial print run was 250,000, and the book went through two subsequent editions, one in 1975 (with a print run of 100,000) and the other in 1980 (75,000). Its popularity was also no doubt helped greatly by the 1961 French film Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? [Who Are You, Mr. Sorge?], which was apparently liked by both KGB Chairman Semichastnyi and Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and (as a result) was shown widely across the Soviet Union.²¹

From the early 1970s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Molodaya Gvardiya published several more biographies of Soviet state security figures in its ZhZL series. The most important of these no doubt was Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), the legendary founder of the first Soviet state security organization (VChK, or Cheka) in December 1917, elevated to semi-divine status in the KGB collective identity and self-understanding.²² Dzerzhinsky's 15-ton steel and granite monument stood for many years in front of the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters, and the main Soviet intelligence educational institution was called the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB (today's Academy of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB).²³ Dzerzhinsky's biography was written by Arsenii Tishkov (1909–1979), a Soviet intelligence officer, diplomat, and educator who in his later years headed the Soviet foreign intelligence school (the 101st School), now known as the SVR Academy.²⁴ Tishkov's book, published in 1974 with an initial print run of 100,000, went through three subsequent editions (in 1976, 1977, and 1985), totaling an additional 450,000 copies, and remains the most printed security- and intelligence-themed book in Soviet and Russian history. The book's content, however, is heavily fictionalized. A more realistic, though still sympathetic, view of Dzerzhinsky's life and work can be found in the extensively researched biography written by the journalist Sergey Kredov and published in the ZhZL series in 2013 with a print run of 5,000.²⁵

During this same period, Molodaya Gvardiya's ZhZL series also included two edited volumes on Soviet state security personnel. The first, which discussed Soviet border guard officials, was published in 1973 and in a second edition in 1974, each with a print run of 100,000.²⁶ The second edited volume, published in 1987, discussed prominent officials of Soviet state security, such as Yakov Peters (1886–1938), Efim Evdokimov (1891–1940), and Mikhail Trilisser (1883–1940).²⁷ Interestingly, after this volume on the influential Chekists of the 1920s and the 1930s, no other biographical studies focusing on state security and intelligence were published in the ZhZL series until the mid-2000s. This is perhaps an indication that during the final years of the Soviet era and the first decade after the disintegration of the USSR—the years under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—the Chekists were no longer perceived as “remarkable people.” However, the domestic and foreign policy changes in Russia starting soon after Putin came to power spurred a much more favorable depiction of the Soviet state security organs.

The trend of Soviet-era intelligence biographies in the ZhZL series was resurrected by the publication of Gladkov's biography of Korotkov in 2005 (as mentioned). Since then, a substantial number of state security and foreign intelligence biographies have appeared in the ZhZL series, most of them published in the last fifteen years. The reason for this is the generous financial, logistical, and editorial involvement of Russian state security and intelligence agencies in the book production process as testified by the Molodaya Gvardiya long-time director, Valentin Yurkin. In 2016, Yurkin explicitly stated that “the topic of intelligence is well covered in Molodaya Gvardiya thanks to the SVR and the FSB.”²⁸ The most prominent example of the way Russian state security and intelligence organizations have worked closely with Molodaya Gvardiya can be found in Dolgopolov's books in the ZhZL series. His books underscore the elaborate public relation strategy used by the KGB's successor agencies to promote a positive image of Soviet intelligence activities, especially espionage operations against the West.

In addition to publishing the biographies of Menzhinsky and Dzerzhinsky, Molodaya Gvardiya published the biographies of seven other Soviet state security and intelligence chiefs in its ZhZL series. In 2006, the series reissued a biography of the fourth KGB chairman, Yurii Andropov (1914–1984), written by the well-known Soviet historian Roy Medvedev.²⁹ Medvedev's book was originally put out under a slightly different title by two much smaller Moscow publishing companies in 1999.³⁰ What makes the ZhZL series edition different is the glowing preface by Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin's closest associates, who was the FSB director at the time and later became the secretary of Russia's Security Council. Patrushev describes Andropov's tenure as highly effective in terms of professionalism and commitment to state security and lauds him as an ideal for today's Chekists.³¹ Patrushev's lavish praise of the book enabled Medvedev to receive first prize in the FSB literature competition in 2007.³²

Three years later, in 2009, the ZhZL series published a biography of Alexander von Benckendorff (1781–1844), written by the historian Dmitrii Oleinikov. Benckendorff was the founder of the Third Section of the Russian Imperial Chancellery (the 19th-century version of a state security apparatus) as well as the Russian Gendarmes Corps.³³ Oleinikov's book marked the first time that a non-Soviet state security chief was included in the ZhZL series. This was a significant development because it brings out the efforts of Putin's political circle, including the former KGB personnel in charge of Russia's state security organizations, to overcome the ideological divisions haunting and dividing Russia for more than a century. The fact that Andropov and Benckendorff are both deemed to have led “remarkable lives” (rather than one being declared “a hero” and the other “a villain”) points to a willingness to reconcile antagonistic trends in Russian history and develop an approach to state security and intelligence history that emphasizes continuities rather than schisms. The core of this new approach, which is reflected in almost all recent Russian publications on security and intelligence, is the commitment to Russia as a politically sovereign actor on the global scene (that is, Russia as a Great Power). Both Andropov and Benckendorff are perceived to have contributed greatly to that end.

Another high-level KGB official who was covered in a ZhZL biography was Leonid Shebarshin (1935–2012), the last chief of Soviet foreign intelligence.³⁴ The biography of Shebarshin, published in 2014, was written by the Russian journalist and writer Anatolii Zhitnukhin, who was, for a long time, one of the editors at Molodaya Gvardiya and even supervised the publication of the ZhZL series. Zhitnukhin's book also included a subtitle referring to Shebarshin's “tragedy,” suggesting that his warnings about imminent danger to the Soviet Union's survival were not taken seriously by leaders of the Communist Party and that, having been marginalized in Putin's Russia, Shebarshin ended up taking his own life in 2012.³⁵ Overall, Zhitnukhin's presentation is openly framed by Soviet nostalgia, though this nostalgia is derived from geopolitical rather than ideological concerns (as is typical among the pro-Putin historians and journalists).

Evidently encouraged by the positive reception of the ZhZL biography of Shebarshin, Zhitnukhin undertook a more controversial project, a biography of the disgraced KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov (1924–2007). Kryuchkov spent more than a year in prison after the failed August 1991 coup against the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in which Kryuchkov played a central role. The biography was published in 2016 with the subtitle “Time [History] Will Judge.”³⁶ Zhitnukhin gives a positive portrayal of Kryuchkov as a Soviet and Russian patriot who sacrificed his reputation and freedom for what he thought was the best course of action to protect the state's interest. In a TV interview about the biography, Zhitnukhin admitted that he shared Kryuchkov's political views and added that if he had not agreed with him, he would not have written the book.³⁷ This admission indicates the ideological framework of Zhitnukhin's work.

There are also two other Soviet/Russian and one German foreign intelligence chiefs whose biographies were recently published in the ZhZL series. One of them is Pavel Fitin (1907–1971), who successfully led the Soviet foreign intelligence service during World War II but fell into political disgrace after the death of Stalin and the execution of Internal Affairs Minister Lavrentii Beria (1899–1953). The biography was written by the intelligence historian and journalist Aleksandr Bondarenko (b. 1955) and initially published in 2015 with a print run of 3,000.³⁸ According to the head of Molodaya Gvardiya, Yurkin, Fitin had long been a completely forgotten intelligence figure, but, after the publication of the biography, the FSB district administration in Ekaterinburg, the city where Fitin spent the final years of his Chekist career, placed a memorial plaque on the façade of its headquarters.³⁹ In addition, the SVR unveiled a monument to Fitin in front of its Press Bureau building in Moscow in October 2017.⁴⁰ During the unveiling ceremony, the SVR director, Sergei Naryshkin, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer who has been one of the main promoters of the Russian government's efforts to glorify Soviet intelligence activities, emphasized the importance of strategic intelligence obtained by Fitin's intelligence directorate and its indispensable contribution to the Soviet victory in World War II.⁴¹ Naryshkin in his other state-appointed position as the head of the Russian Historical Society has made the field of history interpreted through a “Chekist-friendly” lens one of the main foci of SVR activities under his leadership.

The other Russian intelligence chief whose biography was recently published in the ZhZL series is Evgenii Primakov (1929–2015), also known as “Russia's Henry Kissinger” because of his geopolitical publications and international engagements. Primakov was appointed by Gorbachev to lead the foreign intelligence service in September 1991 and was kept on as head of the Russian SVR after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.⁴² The biography of Primakov was published by the prolific journalist and historian Leonid Mlechin. It came out the same year as the biography of Fitin (2015), and a second edition came out in 2017.⁴³ Primakov is credited by many Russian intelligence experts, including Mlechin, for preserving the “crown jewels” of Russian foreign intelligence at a time when Russia was on the brink of internal political, economic, and social fragmentation.

It should come as no surprise that the German intelligence chief whose biography was included in the ZhZL series is the former East German foreign intelligence (HVA) chief Markus Wolf (1923–2006). Over many decades as head of East German foreign intelligence Wolf, who grew up in the Soviet Union, closely collaborated with the KGB and played a role in many of its European operations. This perhaps also makes him a Soviet patriot and justifies his inclusion next to the likes of Fitin and Primakov. The biography of Wolf, published under Mlechin's name, appeared in 2015.⁴⁴

Even though the biographies of state security and intelligence chiefs from the ZhZL series seem to be popular among the Russian reading public, as evidenced by their repeat editions, much more popular are the biographies of Soviet foreign intelligence operatives, especially the ones written by Nikolai Dolgopolov (b. 1949).⁴⁵ Although Dolgopolov is now a leading figure in the Russian state-owned newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, he was for many years a foreign correspondent for the newspaper Komsomol'skaya pravda, focusing mostly on international sports. Not until the mid-1990s did he take up intelligence history.

Dolgopolov's first book in the ZhZL series, which became an immediate bestseller, was a biography of the British-born Soviet intelligence officer William Fisher (1903–1971), who coordinated the Soviet spy network in the United States until he was arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1957.⁴⁶ Upon being arrested, Fisher used the alias Rudolf Abel to try to mislead his captors and alert his KGB superiors that he had been detained. In 1962, Fisher/Abel was exchanged for the downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. The book was published in 2010 and went through three subsequent editions (two in 2011 and another in 2016).⁴⁷ Lucidly written with a sense of humor and including many previously unknown anecdotes from Fisher/Abel's life, the book gained a wide readership. Dolgopolov used the same approach with a biography of another internationally known (and exposed) intelligence operative, Kim Philby (1912–1988), a senior figure in the British foreign intelligence (MI6) service who spied for many years for the Soviet Union. Dolgopolov's biography of Philby, based on archival materials provided by the SVR and extensive interviews with those were closely associated with Philby in the Soviet Union, such as Philby's wife, Rufina Pukhova, was published in three editions (in 2011, 2012, and 2018).⁴⁸

However, Dolgopolov's most popular biographies are the four volumes of the chapter-length life stories of those whom he describes as “legendary intelligence officers.” The volumes cover both World War II and the Cold War and were published with the financial and logistical support of the SVR.⁴⁹ Dolgopolov has presented these books on numerous public occasions, including the annual Moscow book fair and various SVR-sponsored venues. The first volume, published in 2016, has gone through eight editions, the latest in 2021. A total of more than 35,000 copies were put out. The second volume, first published in 2018, came out in three editions for a total of more than 12,000 copies. The third volume appeared in 2023, and the fourth volume came out in 2024.⁵⁰ Dolgopolov's writings on Soviet intelligence have become so popular that he could easily be called the John le Carré or Ian Fleming of Soviet intelligence history. Yet, even though his books contain a lot of details about the lives of Soviet intelligence operatives not published before, his coverage of intelligence failures as opposed to successes is minimal. Cruelty and violence are airbrushed out. Though very interesting, the content of Dolgopolov's books has the SVR's stamp of approval and conforms to its version of history. Dolgopolov's recently published memoir is probably the most revealing of his books, put out by Molodaya Gvardiya in 2020 under the title From the Notebook of Nikolai Dolgopolov: From Françoise Sagan to Abel.⁵¹

Finally, it is worth noting that another author who wrote several biographies for the ZhZL series, Iosif Lavretskii, was actually writing under a pseudonym. In the 1960s and 1970s, he published biographies of Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), Pancho Villa (1878–1923), Benito Juarez (1806–1872), Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967), and Salvador Allende (1908–1973).⁵² However, it turned out that Lavretskii was actually Joseph Grigulevich (1913–1985), one of the most notorious Soviet illegals, whose last posting was as Teodoro Castro, the ambassador of Costa Rica in Rome and Belgrade.⁵³ He was abruptly recalled to the Soviet Union in 1953 in connection with the power struggles in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin's death. Grigulevich used the expertise he had gained during more than a decade of illegal work in Latin America to become one of the foremost Soviet historians of that whole region. Taking into consideration the importance of Grigulevich's intelligence activities and the quality and scope of his later historical work, Molodaya Gvardiya published a biography of him in 2005. It was written by Nil Nikandorov, a Russian journalist and writer who has lived in Latin America for decades and frequently writes on contemporary Latin American politics from the perspective of Russian national interests. Unfortunately, the book covers Grigulevich's espionage work only superficially.⁵⁴

In addition to biographies of Soviet state security and intelligence figures published in its ZhZL book series, Molodaya Gvardiya has created a book series devoted solely to intelligence topics under the title “File No . . . ,” referring to the top secret filing system in the Soviet state security archives. The series has featured several dozen books, covering a wide range of intelligence subjects. There are, for instance, encyclopedic reference books on Soviet civilian and military intelligence and counterintelligence, books on intelligence plots and assassinations, and fictionalized biographies of historical figures. Interestingly, a revised and expanded autobiography of the MI6 double agent George Blake (Georg Behar), who defected to Moscow in 1966 and died there in 2020 at age 98, titled Transparent Walls, is also included in the series.⁵⁵

Among the books on military intelligence and counterintelligence published by Molodaya Gvardiya, the most notable is the three-volume set on Soviet military intelligence by the GRU official historian Vladimir Lota (Vladimir Boiko, 1941–2017), covering the period from 1940 until the end of 1944.⁵⁶ There is also a volume on Soviet and Russian military counterintelligence by the historian Aleksandr Bondarenko (the author of Fitin's biography) which covers the period from 1918 until 2010.⁵⁷ Both Lota's and Bondarenko's research is based on declassified archival information from the Russian state security and military archives and describes hitherto little-known or unknown Soviet operations from the GRU's own perspective.

There are also two books in the series that engage in conspiracy-mongering to take issue with conventional Western accounts of certain historical events. One is a book on the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy written by a former Russian diplomat, now a well-known pro-Communist political activist and university professor, Nikolai Platoshkin (b. 1965). The book, titled The Assassination of President Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald—The Assassin or The Victim of a Conspiracy? (2007), delivers a harsh critique of the Warren Commission report.⁵⁸ Echoing implausible claims that have long been popular with conspiracy theorists in the United States, Platoshkin maintains that the assassination was a conspiracy between an anti-Kennedy faction within the U.S. intelligence community, the mafia, and Cuban émigré circles. He insists that the murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was merely a convenient fall guy—a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.⁵⁹

The other book discusses the Russian intelligence services’ assassination of the former KGB/FSB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko (1962–2006) in Great Britain. The book, written by Roy Medvedev's twin brother, Zhores Medvedev (1925–2018), and titled Polonium in London (2008), provides a convoluted narrative suggesting that Litvinenko was poisoned not by his former FSB colleagues under the orders of the Russian state, but by a person (or persons) in the pay of exiled Russian oligarchs whom Litvinenko was supposedly trying to blackmail.⁶⁰ Suffice to say that the “evidence” Medvedev presents is far-fetched.

To end on a lighter note, the series also includes a book by a prolific Russian investigative journalist Boris Sopel'nyak, titled The Soldier Called Rex: The Story of a German Dog Becoming a Soviet Intelligence Scout (2005).⁶¹ The book presents a fictionalized account about Rex, a German shepherd trained by the Nazis, who is captured and turned into a loyal and devoted frontline companion by a Soviet officer. Although Sopel'nyak claims that the book is based on documentary historical evidence, it is best seen as a youth-oriented patriotic spy tale that glorifies the wartime accomplishments of the Red Army.

The publishing company Algoritm was founded in 1996 by the Russian nationalist writer and literary critic Vadim Kozhinov (1930–2001), who toward the end of his life grew close to the Russian Communist Party leader, Zyuganov.⁶² The press's current editor-in-chief is Alexander Kolpakidi (b. 1962), one of the best-known Russian historians of state security services. Since the early 1990s, Kolpakidi has written and edited more than ten books on Soviet/Russian state security and intelligence services. He was one of the first Russian authors to publish a detailed history of the GRU (Russian military intelligence agency).⁶³ Kolpakidi is a public figure with an avid following in leftist circles in Russia who, until Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, was frequently invited to participate in various Russian television and radio talk shows to discuss the operations and personalities of Soviet state security as well as the history of the USSR in general.⁶⁴

Kolpakidi's approach to the study of Soviet and Russian state security and intelligence services is explicitly pro-Communist and grounded in Soviet nostalgia. He is highly critical of those in the Russian government whom he perceives as pro-Western and is staunchly supportive of Putin's hostility toward the West. Under Kolpakidi's editorship, Algoritm has become the most extensive and versatile, but also the most controversial and predatory, book publisher on Soviet state security and intelligence. The role it plays in the Russian book publishing industry is very different from that of Molodaya Gvardiya. Whereas Molodaya Gvardiya aims for conservative supporters of the status quo, Algoritm caters to elements in (or sympathetic to) the Russian Communist Party. For this reason, the production and promotion of its books are not logistically or financially assisted by any Russian state institutions, let alone the SVR or the FSB. In fact, Kolpakidi has gotten into several legal controversies with Russian officialdom.

In trying to be more open-minded than Molodaya Gvardiya, Algoritm has published several different book series on the lives of Soviet and Russian intelligence officers: “Lives of Remarkable Intelligence Officers,” “Grandmasters of Secret War,” “Women in Intelligence,” “Soviet Intelligence Officers in Cinema and in Life,” and “Memoirs under the Top-Secret Seal.” Each series has included up to twenty books. However, because Algoritm receives no government subsidies or any substantial financial and logistical assistance from state organizations, its print runs have generally been smaller than those of Molodaya Gvardiya, ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 per book.

Notable in Algoritm's “Lives of Remarkable Intelligence Officers” series is a book by Mlechin about the 26 chiefs of the Soviet and Russian foreign intelligence from the first head of the Foreign Intelligence Department of the VChK, Yakov Davydov (1888–1938), to the current head of the SVR, Sergey Naryshkin (b. 1954).⁶⁵ In the “Memoirs under the Top Secret Seal” series, Algoritm has gathered previously out-of-print memoirs by some of the best-known figures in Soviet intelligence, including Pavel Sudoplatov (1907–1996), Vladimir Semichastnyi (1924–2001), Nikolai Leonov (1928–2022) and Yurii Modin (1922–2007), as well as famous defectors such as Georgii Agabekov (1896–1937), Alexander Orlov (1895–1973), and Nikolai Khokhlov (1922–2007).⁶⁶ Semichastnyi's memoir deserves special mention because it was compiled from interviews he gave to the Czech journalist Tomáš Sniegoň in the 1990s.⁶⁷ However, shortly before Semichastnyi died, he enlisted the Moscow publisher Vagrius (now defunct) to publish the memoir without any mentions of Sniegoň’s contribution, even though Sniegoň had already published their joint work in Prague in 1998.⁶⁸ In 2016, Algoritm republished Semichastnyi's memoirs under two different titles without Sniegoň’s knowledge and consent. This not only indicates Algoritm's unsavory publishing practices but also shows how difficult it has become to acknowledge publicly the Western–Russian scholarly collaboration on security and intelligence research in Putin's Russia in contrast to the Yeltsin era.⁶⁹

However, a small number of intelligence memoirs were originally published by Algoritm. The most interesting among them is the memoir by Aleksei Rostovtsev (1934–2013) about his more than two decades (1965–1987) spent in the KGB rezidentura (station) in East Germany.⁷⁰ The memoir carries the attention-grabbing subtitle “I Served Together with Putin,” but in fact Putin is mentioned only a few times. Rostovtsev writes that though he remembers Putin well, he cannot remember anything concrete about him. This kind of “forgettability,” according to him, is the sign of a good intelligence officer. He does, however, tell of one curious incident involving Putin. When Putin once came to the KGB's East Germany headquarters, somebody made a comment: “Here comes the colleague from Piter [St. Petersburg] with a German family name.” Pute actually means “turkey” in German.⁷¹ This gives reason to believe that Putin was not well liked by his colleagues.

In addition, Algoritm initiated a book series titled “Women in Intelligence” to bring together under one label the memoirs of Soviet female intelligence officers previously published by other companies. This series has so far included the memoirs of Soviet female intelligence officers Elizaveta Parshina (1913–2002), Zoya Voskresenskaya (1907–1995), Anna Starinova, and Ruth Werner (Ursula Kuczynsk) (1907–2000), the last of which had originally been published in 1977 in East Germany, a repressive Communist state.⁷² There is also an innovative series titled “Soviet Intelligence Officers in Cinema and Life,” which focuses on books that compare the real lives of Soviet intelligence officers with their fictional portrayals in novels and movies. So far, this series has included books on the (allegedly) real-life prototypes of the main protagonists of Soviet spy novels by Yuliyan Semenov (1931–1993) and Vadim Kozhevnikov (1909–1984), such as Max Otto von Sterlitz (Seventeen Moments of Spring) and Aleksandr Belov (The Sword and the Shield).⁷³

Like many other book publishers in Russia, Algoritm often marks important dates in Soviet and Russian history by launching new book series. For instance, to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of the formation of the VChK in 2007, Algoritm initiated a book series titled “The Shield and the Sword.”⁷⁴ The series included more than a dozen books on Soviet state security operations and personalities. The most notable were a book by the former Soviet special prosecutor David Golinkov on the secret operations of the VChK and a book by Aleksandr Sever, an expert on intelligence, recounting the history of the KGB from a moderately critical perspective.⁷⁵

Algoritm's problematic handling of Semichastnyi's memoir was reflective of the press's dubious reputation both inside and outside Russia. In recent years, Algoritm has published books on Russian politics by Western authors, such as the well-regarded journalist Luke Harding of The Guardian and a long-time correspondent for The Economist, Edward Lucas, without their knowledge and permission.⁷⁶ These books were included in Algoritm's so-called “Putin Project,” which published Russian and Western books about Putin and his policies. In addition, Algoritm was investigated by the Russian state prosecutor's office for publishing what has been defined in Russian law as “extremist literature.” In particular, this refers to the publication of the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's autobiography and a 1920s novel by the future Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels.⁷⁷

The leading figures of Algoritm, including the editor-in-chief Kolpakidi, failed to explain why they published these books. In addition to drawing free (albeit negative) publicity and commercial gain, it is possible that they wanted to test the limits of publishing freedom in Putin's Russia. The outcome, however, did not surprise anybody. Even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the leeway for publishing in the Putin era had been strictly limited to the perimeters of the state-sanctioned patriotic narratives. Any publishers trying to transgress these parameters for whatever reason are likely to get the FSB Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional Order knocking on their doors.

In contrast to Algoritm, Kuchkovo Pole is a publisher that will never get in trouble with the FSB, one of the reasons being its very name. The Kuchkovo district of Moscow is adjacent to Lubyanka square, the famed location of the VChK-OGPU-KGB-FSB headquarters, which already broadcasts the publisher's affiliation. Kuchkovo Pole was founded in 1992 and has specialized in Russian history and memoirs concerning both political and military affairs and Russian art and culture in general.⁷⁸ Kuchkovo Pole, according to its website, has developed joint publishing projects with several Russian state institutions, such as the Federal Protection Service (FSO), the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive for Recent History, and several state universities. It is reasonable to suppose that, just like Molodaya Gvardiya, Kuchkovo Pole is financially and logistically assisted by the Russian state security and intelligence organizations. In fact, an examination of its publishing portfolio shows a more conservative and consistently pro-KGB editorial policy than at Molodaya Gvardiya.

Kuchkovo Pole publishes 21 specialized book series, three of which deal specifically with intelligence topics: “Secrets of Intelligence Services,” “Intelligence Services Past and Present,” and “Spy Passions.” Among the books published in the “Secrets of Intelligence Services” series is a memoir account by the long-time KGB foreign intelligence officer Oleg Nechiporenko, who personally knew Lee Harvey Oswald, having met him during Oswald's trip to Mexico. In the early 1990s, Nechiporenko published a book on Oswald's assassination of President Kennedy.⁷⁹ The key aim of the book was to absolve the KGB of any responsibility for the assassination. In contrast to Platoshkin's sensationalist account published by Molodaya Gvardiya, Nechiporenko's portrayal of the tragic event concurs with the findings of the Warren Commission report. Another interesting memoir published in this series is by Nikolai Golushko (b. 1937), a high-ranking KGB officer who was the head of the Ukrainian KGB and, after 1991, became the chief of Russian counterintelligence. Golushko's book includes interesting details and anecdotes about post-1991 relations between the Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services and has become especially relevant against the backdrop of Russia's war against Ukraine.⁸⁰

Kuchkovo Pole's “Intelligence Services Past and Present” book series has published well-documented academic studies of specific historical periods in the activities of Russian and foreign intelligence services. Notable in this series are books by Nikolai Kirmel (b. 1966), a former professor at the Russian Defense Ministry University, on the Imperial Russian intelligence services during the First World War (1914–1918) and the White Army intelligence operations in the civil war that followed (1918–1922).⁸¹ Kirmel is also one of the editors of the popular Russian intelligence online publication Chekist.ru, which offers extensive journalistic coverage of the current issues facing Russian state security and intelligence services and announces new books and lectures on the subject.⁸² Another book in this series was an extensive and detailed study of the historical and legal aspects of the U.S. intelligence community by Mikhail Dundukov.⁸³ This study later served as Dundukov's doctoral dissertation at the Law Faculty of Moscow State University in 2014.

The third Kuchkovo Pole book series, “Spy Passions,” publishes popular spy fiction novels, which appear to be widely read by officers of the FSB. For example, a 2009 spy novel by Nikolay Luzan (who wrote under the pseudonym N. Abin) titled “Phantom” Won't Get in Touch won first prize in the FSB annual literary award competition.⁸⁴ The novel is a spy thriller based on the idea that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited a mole within the Russian military-industrial complex who is pursued and eventually captured by FSB counterintelligence forces. Luzan himself is a Soviet/Russian counterintelligence veteran and holds the rank of a colonel. He received an FSB literature award for the first time in 2006, when, together with Iosif Linder, he won second prize for a nonfiction book on the Russian SMERSH counterintelligence agents who infiltrated the Nazi German intelligence agencies Abwehr and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst).⁸⁵ In 2013, Luzan was again awarded first prize by the FSB for a collection of his books, including another novel Operation “Mirage,” also published by Kuchkovo Pole.⁸⁶ He long ago emerged as the favorite spy fiction writer among veteran KGB figures in post-Soviet Russia.

Unlike Algoritm and Kuchkovo Pole, which are relatively small publishing companies, Veche ranks alongside Molodaya Gvardiya as one of the biggest Russian presses. In the first thirty years after 1991, it published more than twenty thousand titles in 50 different book series, putting out more than 100 million books in total.⁸⁷ The term “Veche” refers to the tenth-century Russian community assembly and is indicative of the company's political and cultural agenda. According to the website, the inspiration for its publishing activities comes from the words of the 19th-century conservative Russian court historian Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), who stated that history is “the holy book of nations” and therefore should be the main guide for the state's present and future.⁸⁸ The kind of historical literature published by Veche is explicitly supportive of Putin's assertive geopolitical push to establish post-Soviet Russia as a global great power. Veche aims to chronicle all the events of Russian history, portraying them as glorious achievements and victories over Russian geopolitical competitors in Europe and Asia.

In cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense and three other Russian publishers, Veche has published a book series titled “Library of Patriotic Literature.” Out of 100 books planned, most have already been published by Veche and others. In addition, Veche published 130 books on the history of Soviet involvement in the Second World War, celebrating the 65th anniversary in 2010 of the wartime victory. Moreover, Veche published books on the Romanov dynasty to mark the 400th anniversary of the dynasty's accession to the throne. Other books focusing on the First World War were published to mark the 100th anniversary of the war's outbreak. Veche is also known for publishing the literary works of the so-called Russian folk writers, such as Valentin Rasputin (1937–2015), which further underscores its ideological support of Putin's reactionary domestic agenda and bellicose foreign policy.

In addition, Veche has published a sizable number of books dealing with Soviet state security and intelligence. The main book series in this field are “Chronicles of Secret War,” “Military Archives,” and “Anatomy of Intelligence Services.” The press also has a book series on “Staliniana,” which has published more than a dozen laudatory books on Stalin.

The “Chronicles of Secret War” series, with fifteen books, is Veche's most extensive book series dealing specifically with Soviet state security and intelligence. It contains the accounts of various operations and operators of Soviet intelligence services presented in a non-academic, semi-sensationalist manner. In this respect, Veche's portfolio is closer to Algoritm's than to Kuchkovo Pole's or Molodaya Gvardiya's. Of particular importance have been books by Igor Atamanenko (b. 1949), a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who had two decades of operational experience outside the Soviet Union, and Vladimir Antonov (1943–2020), a former Soviet intelligence officer who reinvented himself as an official SVR historian.⁸⁹ One of the most interesting books written by Atamanenko and included in the series is a comparative analysis of KGB and CIA operations with the provocative title KGB vs. CIA: Which Was Stronger?⁹⁰ Of course, his answer to this question would hardly surprise anyone. In addition, Atamanenko is known as an accomplished writer of spy fiction.⁹¹

The book series “Military Archives” includes more than twenty books and has a broad focus on Imperial Russian and Soviet military operations, battles, events, and commanders. It also covers intelligence operations, including those conducted by the Imperial intelligence services.⁹² A valuable book in the series provides a biography of the Imperial Russian officer and strategist Aleksandr Verkhovskii (1886–1938), the last defense minister of Russia's Provisional Government in 1917, which includes his diary chronicling his intelligence activities in the Balkans (in Belgrade) before the outbreak of the First World War.⁹³ The series also includes a biography of General Nikolai Skoblin (1893–1937) who was a Soviet double agent within the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), the most powerful White Russian émigré organization based in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.⁹⁴ The biography was written by Armen Gasparyan (b. 1975), a well-known Russian-Armenian geopolitical analyst and media commentator. Gasparyan founded an award-winning and popular radio program “Theory of Delusion” on the Voice of Russia radio station (now on the Sputnik radio) devoted in part to discussion of intelligence agencies, both Russian and foreign. His political perspective is grounded in strong support for Russia's return to the great-power status, and his more recent publications are geared toward defending what he defines as Russia's national interests.⁹⁵

Veche's most recent book series on state security and intelligence, which started in 2018, is called “Anatomy of Intelligence Services” and includes more than a dozen books covering various topics. The most interesting books in the series are those focusing on the specific operations of the early Soviet intelligence services. For instance, Veche put out a book on Syndicate-2, the deception operation against one of the best-known Russian anti-Bolshevik radical leaders Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), written by the ex-KGB officer and intelligence historian Oleg Mozokhin (b. 1956) and the archival historian Valerii Safonov based on newly declassified documents from the FSB archives.⁹⁶ The series also includes a book on another famous Soviet intelligence operation of the 1920s, Operation Trust, the grand-scale deception against Russian monarchist émigré circles in Europe, written by the prolific historian Boris Sokolov (b. 1957).⁹⁷ Sokolov has come under attack from various quarters (especially pro-Putin forces) because of his writings about Soviet military operations during World War II. Yet, even his critics value his work on early Soviet intelligence operations.⁹⁸

The publishing company Granitsa was set up in the waning days of the Soviet Union by the editorial team of the well-known Russian/Soviet literary-artistic journal “The Border Guard” first published in 1906.⁹⁹ Its publishing activities in the 1990s were financially and logistically linked to the Russian Federal Border Service.¹⁰⁰ At that time, its publishing output was modest (about a dozen books a year) and focused mostly on journals and newspapers, including, for instance, “The Medical Journal of the Russian FSB.” In 2001, Granitsa greatly expanded its commercial activities and formally separated from the Russian government, though it remained a publisher of choice for various ministries, such as the Ministry of Defense, Russian state museums and academies, and the FSB. In its new, profit-oriented incarnation, Granitsa was initially headed by the former border guard officer and journalist Valerii Murin (b. 1951). In 2005, however, Murin left to take charge at the Ministry of Defense newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) and turned Granitsa over to his daughter, Yuliya Nizovtseva.¹⁰¹ Under Nizovtseva's leadership, Granitsa continued to grow, and its overall output by 2019 consisted of more than 5,600 titles, a large percentage of which are government-funded publications, most recently, by the Moscow city government.

Remaining faithful to its origins and the slogan coined by its first director, Murin, “the border is sacred,” Granitsa has published extensive historical studies of the Russian/Soviet border guard service. Notable in this respect is the massive two-volume history of the border guard service of the Russian Empire in war and peace by the historian Mikhail Chernushevich, which includes original archival documents.¹⁰² Granitsa also published a book by the historian Lyubov Ruseva on the activities of the Moscow Demining Department, which won first prize in the FSB annual literary competition in 2006.¹⁰³

In 2005, Granitsa published a fictionalized account of the activities of the OGPU under the leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky's successor, Menzhinskii. The title of the book was Secrets of the OGPU and Its Chairman V. R. Menzhinskii, written by Valerii Malevany and Andrei Malevany.¹⁰⁴ Valerii Malevany (b. 1946) went on to have a “distinguished” career in the Russian media world. Presenting himself as a retired general of either the FSB or the GRU and the winner of the “Golden Quill of the FSB,” Malevany was frequently invited on Russian television and radio to comment on various intelligence scandals, including, most recently, the Skripal affair. He published several books with sensationalist titles, including Stalin and Free Masons,¹⁰⁵ and claimed that he played a major role in Soviet clandestine operations in Angola and elsewhere in Africa.

Malevany undoubtedly would have continued the charade for a good deal longer had it not been for the work of the Russian investigative reporter Sergei Kanev.¹⁰⁶ In May 2018, Kanev wrote a carefully researched article proving beyond doubt that Malevany was an impostor. Nothing that Malevany had claimed was true: he never worked a single day in either the FSB or the GRU (let alone having a general's rank); he could not have been awarded the “Golden Quill of the FSB” because such an award did not exist; and most of the medals and decorations he sported on public occasions could easily be bought on the Internet. In fact, Kanev determined that Malevany's real identity was most likely Valerii Moskal, a convicted embezzler who served out a sentence in Soviet jails in the 1980s.

Why Malevany was allowed to play his fraudulent game for so long remains unclear. How could he fool the editors of Granitsa to publish his book under a fake identity? And why did the FSB and the GRU not step in to protect their institutional reputations? It is hard to believe that they were unaware that Malevany had never been one of their own operatives. Perhaps they let the pretense go on because his media commentaries were always in their favor. He consistently blamed Western politicians and intelligence services for all that went wrong in the world. Still, after Kanev's article appeared, Malevany's media footprint dwindled considerably.

The predecessor of Olma Mediya Grupp/Prosveshchenie, one of the biggest publishing companies in the world, was Olma-Press, founded in 1991 by two young graduates of the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University, Oleg Tkach and Vladimir Uzun. Born outside Russia (Tkach in Ukraine and Uzun in Moldova) in 1967, Tkach and Uzun initially specialized in publishing Russian translations of Western humanities and social science literature.¹⁰⁷ According to a 2001 interview with Tkach, their first book was a Russian translation of the German edition of Freud's selected works.¹⁰⁸ Soon, however, Olma-Press expanded its portfolio to include books by Russian authors, both fiction and nonfiction. Over time, it became the most popular publisher of Russian detective fiction, bringing on board Boris Akunin (Grigorii Chkhartishvili; b. 1956),¹⁰⁹ one of the most famous and prolific post-Soviet writers of detective and historical fiction. Akunin is best known for creating a long-running book series with the fictional nineteenth-century Russian detective and adventurer Erast Fandorin as the main protagonist. His four dozen novels have sold more than 30 million copies so far and have been translated into 30 languages, including English.¹¹⁰ In addition, books featuring Fandorin, such as The Turkish Gambit (1998) and The State Counsellor (2000), were successfully made into movies and became blockbusters on the Russian market.¹¹¹

In 2003, Olma-Press merged with the St. Petersburg publishing company Neva to form Olma Mediya Grupp, which remained under the control of its initial founders Tkach and Uzun. Furthermore, in 2011, Olma Mediya Grupp acquired the largest Russian textbook publisher Prosveshchenie, established in 1931, which held close to 40 percent of the Russian educational market. The deal was worth 2.25 billion rubles ($35 million in 2019 dollars).¹¹² Two years later, Arkadii Rotenberg (b. 1951), one of the richest people in Russia and a close ally of Putin (the subject of U.S. and European economic sanctions), bought a significant segment of Olma Mediya Grupp/Prosveshchenie and became a board member. Although Rotenberg's precise share in the company is not publicly known, anonymous sources cited in news reports place it at more than 25 percent.¹¹³ The publishing company itself, registered in Cyprus, was ranked by Publisher's Weekly in 2017 as 39th in the world with listed revenue of $343 million.¹¹⁴

Olma Mediya Grupp/Prosveshchenie makes little secret of its close links to Putin and his associates. Putin himself is one of the press's published authors. In 2008, Olma Mediya Grupp republished the book on judo Putin co-authored with Vasilii Shestakov (b. 1953) and Aleksei Levitskii titled Learning Judo with Vladimir Putin.¹¹⁵ Another edition of the book, with Rotenberg as one of the coauthors and titled The Art of Judo: From Play to Mastery (2015), appeared with an alleged print run of 7 million and was supposed to be delivered to every Russian elementary school.¹¹⁶ Thus, Putin's close ties with the publisher reinforced his cult of personality, reminiscent of the early Soviet leaders.

Moreover, Tkach and Uzun, the original founders of Olma-Press, have over the years received several prestigious awards from government institutions, including the FSB. For instance, in November 2018, Uzun was honored with a special medal given “for collaboration with the FSB.” Other recipients of the medal have included Valentina Matvienko, the head of the Federation Council, and Sergei Ivanov, a KGB veteran and Putin's close ally, currently a member of the Russian Security Council.¹¹⁷ On the other hand, Tkach entered Russian politics as a member of the ruling political party, United Russia, in the early 2000s. He represented the Kaliningrad region as a senator in the Federation Council from 2004 to 2022.¹¹⁸

Olma Mediya Grupp's extensive publishing portfolio has included several notable books on intelligence. In 2005, under the title Ours and Theirs: The Intrigues of Intelligence, it published the first book by Aleksandr Zdanovich (b. 1952), a retired general of the FSB who headed the FSB Public Bureau from 1996 until 1999.¹¹⁹ After retiring, Zdanovich completed a doctorate in history and became a professor at Moscow Pedagogical State University, one of the best-known universities in Russia. In December 2001, he announced the formation of the Society for the Study of the History of National Intelligence Services. Zdanovich stated that the aim of the society was to present the past and present activities of Russian state security and intelligence agencies in “a serious and truthful manner” while at the same time promoting their political and social mission.¹²⁰ He wanted the society to provide historical accounts of security and intelligence work that could inspire and motivate individual loyalty and commitment to Russian national interests. Thus, the raison d’être of the society was political, not academic. A similar function is performed by the FSB's Public Council, established in 1997. The council, which consists of KGB and FSB veterans who became wealthy businessmen in the 1990s, meets annually with high-level FSB officials to arrange an annual plan of promotional cultural and media activities. The 2019 meeting included discussion of the FSB's continued financial support for the official bimonthly journal FSB: For and Against and other activities to promote the agency's image in society.¹²¹

In addition to Zdanovich's widely read study of intelligence intrigues, Olma Mediya Grupp in 2005 published a Russian translation of The CIA's Russians, a book by a CIA veteran operative and station chief, John Limond Hart (1920–2002), discussing four Soviet double agents, Petr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, Yuri Nosenko, and “Mikhail,” published originally by the U.S. Naval Institute Press in 2003.¹²² Publishing works in translation has been one of the key business practices of Olma Mediya Grupp from its founding. However, the books chosen for translation are typically ones that align with the political and ideological agenda of the publishing company. In this case, Hart's narrative regarding the four Soviet double agents corresponds to the official narrative of the Russian intelligence agencies, though some Russian and U.S. authors have disputed the bona fides of both Penkovsky and Nosenko.¹²³

Hart's book was published in the book series titled The Dossier, which, over the years, included more than 100 books on little-known aspects of Russian history. The series included the memoirs of Soviet intelligence officers, such as a detailed account by Yurii Modin (1922–2007) of his work with the “Cambridge Five” in Great Britain in the post–1945 period.¹²⁴ Another notable memoir is by the long-time chief of the KGB Second Main Directorate's First Department Rem Krasil'nikov (1927–2003) in which he described a string of Soviet counterintelligence operations against CIA operatives in Russia.¹²⁵ The first books in the Dossier series were published in the mid-1990s, which makes it one of the longest-running book series on Soviet state security and intelligence services.

In 2016, Olma Mediya Grupp/Prosveshchenie caused a major surprise in Russian academic and media circles by publishing the diaries of Ivan Serov (1905–1990), the first chairman of the KGB. Supposedly, pages of Serov's diaries had been found by his granddaughter Vera Serova in the garage wall of his former summer home 25 years after his death.¹²⁶ The 700-page memoir was edited for publication by Aleksandr Khinshteyn (b. 1974), a member of the Russian parliament from the United Russia party with pretensions of being a historian. Khinsteyn's involvement, and the murky provenance of the document, caused some historians, notably Boris Sokolov, to cast doubt on the diaries' authenticity. Serova and Khinshteyn sued Sokolov and the radio station Ekho Moskvy for libel, but their case was dismissed by a Moscow district court.¹²⁷ Even intelligence historians sympathetic to the Putin regime who knew Serov personally, such as Gennadii Sokolov (no relation to Boris), found the description of certain events in Serov's memoir surprising and inconsistent with the statements he had made during his lifetime. Such is the case, for example, with the claim in the diaries that Oleg Penkovsky was not a bona fide spy for MI6 and CIA and was instead a KGB dangle and a Soviet hero.¹²⁸ In the end, the most plausible interpretation of the memoir's contents seems to be that it represents a mix of Serov's own writings and later additions by unknown KGB/SVR ghostwriters who planted the manuscript in the garage wall to be found by Serov's granddaughter.

Eksmo-AST is another giant company in the field of Russian commercial publishing. In the Publisher's Weekly ratings for 2017, it was ranked 35th largest in the world, slightly above Olma Mediya Grupp/Prosveshchenie, with listed revenue of $387 million.¹²⁹ Eksmo-AST publishes close to 120 million books a year and covers more than 40 percent of the Russian book market.¹³⁰

The publishing house was formed in 2012 when Eksmo acquired its long-time rival AST. Though the selling price was never officially disclosed, the value of AST was estimated to have been close to $400 million.¹³¹ One of the conditions for the acquisition was that AST would keep publishing books under its own imprint and remain in charge of its own distribution network.¹³² In the 1990s, both companies had book deals with the bestselling post-Soviet detective and mystery prose writers, such as Darya Dontsova (b. 1952), Aleksandra Marinina (b. 1957), and Tat'yana Ustinova (b. 1968).¹³³ AST worked more closely with foreign authors and acquired the rights to publish Russian translations of novels by Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Paolo Coelho.¹³⁴ In the mid-2000s, AST was investigated by the Russian tax authorities because of its extensive foreign contacts and Cyprus-registered offshore ownership. The company was eventually accused of tax fraud in an amount that exceeded its annual revenue.¹³⁵ In fact, the main reason that Eksmo took over AST in 2012 was to prevent the company's bankruptcy. Since then, the reputational standing of AST with the Russian government seems to have improved. A significant factor in this respect might be the steady stream of pro-regime books, including those glorifying the successes of Soviet and Russian intelligence operations.

Such, for instance, is the AST book series titled “Legends of World Wars.” The first book in the series was a joint research effort by a well-known Russian journalist and television host, Sergei Brilev (b. 1972), who is one of Putin's favorite interviewers, and Bernard O'Connor, a British historian. The book has a curious title Intelligence: The “Illegals” in Reverse—Cooperation of the Intelligence Services of Moscow and Britain during the Second World War.¹³⁶ The book is based on both British and Russian archival sources (including documents from the SVR archive) and describes the hitherto little-known wartime intelligence operation conducted jointly by Soviet and British intelligence agencies. Codenamed “Ice Axe,” the operation involved British military and intelligence forces who transported Soviet intelligence officers to their native regions in Nazi-occupied Western Europe.¹³⁷ Hence the “illegals in reverse” in the book's title. The book is written in a fast-paced, detective fiction style and was one of the Russian intelligence bestsellers in 2019.

The degree of access to Russian intelligence archives Brilev obtained for writing the book indicates the close ties he has formed with Russian leaders over the years. That is why many ordinary Russians were shocked to learn from the investigation by the late Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny (1976-2024) that Brilev is also a British citizen and owns valuable real estate in London.¹³⁸ The revelation caused Brilev's public reputation to plunge, and he was removed from the Russian Ministry of Defense Civic Council in January 2019.¹³⁹ However, his activity as a top-level Russian television host was unaffected by the controversy, and he remained the SVR's favorite documentary filmmaker. During the SVR-sponsored festivities surrounding the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the foreign intelligence service in December 2020, Brilev was entrusted with directing the agency's most ambitious media project, the documentary about the Spanish-born Soviet deep-cover intelligence officer Africa de las Heras titled “Our Africa in Latin America,” which involved traveling to Uruguay (where de las Heras was based for most of her espionage career).¹⁴⁰

Eksmo has published more book series devoted to intelligence topics than AST has. In the mid-2000s, Eksmo released two book series, “Invisible Front” and “Top Secret.” Noteworthy in the first series was a biography by Viktor Stechkin of Pavel Sudoplatov (1907–1996), the controversial head of special operations for Soviet foreign intelligence during the late Stalin era. Also appearing in the series was a biography by Vyacheslav Prokof'ev (an ex-Soviet Ministry of Defense official born in 1939) of Aleksandr Sakharovskii (1909–1983), the chief of the KGB's First Main Directorate from 1956 until 1971.¹⁴¹ In the 1950s, Sudoplatov and Sakharovskii had found themselves in the top echelons of the two powerful but antagonistic post-Stalin factions within the Soviet state security apparatus. Sakharovskii's intelligence career skyrocketed after the arrest and execution of Beria, whereas Sudoplatov ended up in prison. The fact that the same book series includes effusive biographies of both intelligence figures reflects the efforts that Eksmo, just like Molodaya Gvardiya and Veche, have made in trying to mend the ideological fissures of the Soviet past.

Another important book included in the same book series is an examination of Department S of the KGB's First Main Directorate (retained in the SVR organizational structure as a separate directorate), which dealt with the preparation and infiltration of Soviet illegals across the globe.¹⁴² The book is an eyewitness account by a retired KGB general, Vitalii Pavlov (1914–2005), who worked in Department S for twelve years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he, like many of his former colleagues, became a prolific (albeit unreliable) writer on intelligence themes. The book was originally published under a different title by a much smaller publisher in the mid-1990s.¹⁴³ Pavlov's most dubious claim is that Harry Dexter White (1892–1948), a senior official in the U.S. Treasury Department who was recruited by Soviet intelligence, strongly advocated harsh U.S. economic retaliation against Japan in order to incite a Japanese attack against the United States rather than the Soviet Union.¹⁴⁴ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr published an important article in 2024 debunking Pavlov's claims on this matter.¹⁴⁵

The second Eksmo book series from the mid-2000s, titled “Top Secret,” is openly sensationalist, and its aim seems to be to entertain rather than educate the reader. The series purports to unveil the world of the supposedly occult links and associations in the operations of intelligence services. Despite that, the series does include several well-researched historical studies of occult themes in the Soviet Union, such as The Occultist of the Soviet Union: The Secret of Doctor Barchenko (2004) by Alexander Andreev (b. 1949), one of the top Russian experts on the history of Tibet and Tibetan mysticism.¹⁴⁶ In the book, Andreev chronicles the pursuit of mythical places, such as Hyperborea and Shambhala, by the Russian biologist and explorer Aleksandr Barchenko (1881–1938) and shows how these myths were later manipulated for political reasons by the Soviet regime, including Stalin's NKVD. Another book along the same lines is The Chekists against the Occultists: The Occult-Mystical Underground in the USSR (2004) by a noted St. Petersburg professor and historian Viktor Brachev.¹⁴⁷ Brachev (b. 1947), who is the best-known researcher of the history of Freemasonry in Russia, describes how the Soviet state security organs set up fake Masonic lodges in order to spy on internal opponents of the regime. The book is based on documents from the FSB archive, and interrogation files of the suspected Soviet “occultists” are included in the appendix.

Another recent book series on intelligence themes published by Eksmo is called “Forbidden Wars,” which reflects the emphasis on special military operations in Russian defense and foreign policy decision making. Notable among the books published in the series is a new edition of Secret Wars of the USSR: An Encyclopedia (2016) by the Russian historian Alexander Okorokov (b. 1958).¹⁴⁸ Okorokov offers a comprehensive survey of Soviet military special operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America after the Second World War, based on both archival materials and interviews with special-operations veterans. Another important book in the series is Secret Operations of Military Intelligence (2017) by a prolific Russian intelligence historian and former military officer Mikhail Boltunov (b. 1952).¹⁴⁹ Boltunov has published more than a dozen books on various aspects of Russian military intelligence and was the first author to provide a detailed account of the top secret KGB special forces unit now known as the Al'fa Group.¹⁵⁰

The publishing company Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya was founded in 1957 when the Thaw of the Khrushchev years led to a certain degree of liberalization in the Soviet publishing industry and a partial opening toward the West. Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya was conceived of as a publishing arm of the most prestigious Soviet higher education institution for studying international affairs—the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). After the demise of the Soviet Union, MGIMO retained its prestigious position thanks to its continued close association with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the SVR. For instance, in a letter congratulating MGIMO on its 75th anniversary, SVR Director Naryshkin wrote that he was happy to be able to state that the “fruitful cooperation between SVR and MGIMO has increased.”¹⁵¹ He emphasized his satisfaction with the performance of MGIMO graduates who joined the ranks of Russian foreign intelligence. This cooperation is also reflected in the publishing portfolio of Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya. The roughly 5,000 titles published by the press have included a wide range of items pertaining to intelligence affairs, from textbooks and monographs to collections of documents from the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry as well as the SVR.¹⁵²

Most importantly, Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya published the official account of the Russian and Soviet foreign intelligence history in six volumes under the nominal editorship of Evgenii Primakov (1929–2015), the head of the SVR from 1991 until 1995 and subsequently the Russian foreign minister (1996–1998) and prime minister (1996–1998).¹⁵³ The importance of Primakov's strategic vision for Russian foreign and defense policies during Putin's first two presidential terms was immense. The six-volume, 2,784-page publication, titled Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence, went through several editions, the most recent being in 2018. However, some of the best historians of Soviet state security and intelligence services, such as Nikita Petrov, do not consider the collection a reliable scholarly reference. During a lecture on Soviet state security held at the premises of Memorial in Moscow in 2016, Petrov sarcastically referred to the multivolume publication as the “tales of Scheherazade [from One Thousand and One Nights]” because of its lack of grounding in archival research and its whitewashing of controversial episodes in Soviet history.¹⁵⁴

Another well-established intelligence book series published by Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya is called “Secret Missions” (Sekretnye missii). The series started in the early 1990s and expanded over time. In contrast to the intelligence book series put out by other Russian publishers, “Secret Missions” has featured many translations from English. For instance, it published the translations of Allen Dulles's classic The Craft of Intelligence (1959), the important book by Milton Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB (2003), and John D. Marks's The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: the CIA and Mind Control (1979).¹⁵⁵ In addition, the “Secret Missions” series has included translations of Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau, The Mossad: Israel's Secret Intelligence Service: Inside Stories (1978) and Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, A Complete History of Israel's Intelligence Services: Every Spy a Prince (1989).¹⁵⁶ After the CIA and MI6, the Mossad seems to be the most publicized foreign intelligence agency in post-Soviet Russia.

The “Secret Missions” book series also has included the memoirs of high-ranking Soviet intelligence officials, such as the retired Lieutenant General Nikolai Leonov (1928–2022), the long-time head of the KGB's Analytical Department, and the retired Lieutenant General Vadim Kirpichenko (1922–2005), the long-time deputy chief of the KGB's First Main Directorate.¹⁵⁷ Both of these memoirs shed valuable light on the KGB's conceptions and conduct of its operations. The series also includes a Russian translation of Markus Wolf's autobiography Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster (1997), which had previously been published in English and German.¹⁵⁸ Given the intensified activities of Russian diplomats and intelligence operatives around the world in the Putin era, the “Secret Missions” book series will likely expand further.

An examination of the portfolios of eight major Russian publishers has shown that the number of “Chekist-friendly” books on state security and intelligence services in Russia has vastly increased in the years since Putin began his third, fourth, and fifth terms as Russian president. The surge of publications has encompassed all conventional components of the genre: historical accounts, memoirs, journalistic investigations, and spy fiction. The main reason for this trend is to be found in the ideological need of Putin's regime to strengthen its domestic political legitimacy and to project an image of strength and success abroad. One of the ways of doing so is by emphasizing the continuities with the real and alleged “glorious” victories of Soviet state security and intelligence services during World War II and the Cold War, which, according to the Chekists, enabled the Soviet Union to gain the status of a global superpower. What we are seeing on the Russian political scene is the unabashed resurgence of what the final KGB chairman, Vadim Bakatin, called the “ideology of Chekism”—uncritical support for the structures of authoritarian power that promise to deliver security from external and internal threats in exchange for the suppression of democratic rights and freedoms.¹⁵⁹ Bakatin had been appointed to dismantle the KGB after his predecessor, Kryuchkov, spearheaded the failed August 1991 coup, but the state security organs proved resilient in the end. Putin's regime has restored the KGB to its Soviet-era place, freed from its Communist overseers.

In this context, Putin's regime considers the publication of state security and intelligence books as an effective ideological tool for its own legitimization because they present a Chekist-oriented narrative of the best ways to maximize Russia's global power and influence, as reflected in earlier historical periods when intelligence operations flourished. The not-so-hidden hand of the regime in this process of Chekist mythmaking can be discerned in the increasing financial flows and logistical assistance from the FSB and the SVR as well as the Ministry of Defense to the Russian book publishing companies.

However, a key question worth asking is whether the pro-KGB book publishing efforts have paid off among ordinary Russians. Public opinion research done by the independent Levada Center shows that they might have. According to the sociologist Lev Gudkov, public support for the FSB has risen dramatically, from 40 to 65 percent (two-thirds of the population), since the late 1990s, and support for the Russian military is even higher.¹⁶⁰ The growth in “Chekist-friendly” literature is far from the only reason for the increasing popularity of the Russian state security and intelligence services, but the impact of the publications is hard to deny, given their high visibility in Putin's Russia as described in this article. Together with the other products of Putinist popular culture, the publications discussed here have played a key ideological role in supporting and augmenting the two traditional functions of Soviet/Russian intelligence, that of the shield and the sword of the regime.

An earlier version of this article was presented at the inaugural conference of the North American Society for Intelligence History held in Washington DC on 20–21 October 2019. I am grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.