Published by Duckworth, 25 October 2012.
ISBN 978 0 7156 4377 8
This is the true story of the handsome, suave
master spy Dmitri Bystrolyotov who spied for the Soviet
Union in the inter-war years. Born in 1901, his mother was of
aristocratic descent but with feminist views which led her to have an
illegitimate child as a gesture against the rigidly conformist society of the
time in which class distinctions were legally enforceable. His father was a
member of the Tolstoy family but Dmitri never knew him and after his early
childhood saw little of his mother, the
Tolstoy family arranging for him to live with a foster family and for his
education. But the upheavals caused by World War I and even more the 1917
Bolshevik revolution changes his life from one of privilege to one of extreme
poverty while his experiences influence his political views, and in order to
escape the chaos caused by the conflict between the White and Red Armies he
escapes to Turkey where he is at first utterly destitute. His circumstances
improve slightly and when he makes his way to Prague he eventually comes to the attention
of the OGPU (the then name for the Soviet secret police) who recruit him as a
spy. His life changes absolutely; he becomes not just a spy but a master spy,
one of the most successful in Europe, stealing military secrets from Nazi
Germany, Fascist Italy and Britain, often employing seduction of embassy staff.
But the strains of his lifestyle, which could involve adopting several identities
in one day, and a series of catastrophic personal relationships, begin to
affect his already frail personality. He returns to Moscow - a mistake since Stalin’s terrible
show trials were just beginning. Like so many others who dedicated their lives
to their political and patriotic ideals he is arrested on false charges,
tortured, and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in the Gulag. Unusually
he survives but the account of those years, derived from a record he kept at
the time, is harrowing in the extreme. Even after his eventual release, life is
difficult but with the help of his devoted wife, whom he met in the Gulag,
he achieves a measure of happiness in
his old age until his death in 1975.
The author
of this book is about the only person who could have written it. Emil Draitser,
himself Russian, met Dmitri once when the latter was an old man. Due to the
still repressive nature of the Soviet regime, he did not tackle his subject
until he himself had left the USSR
and was well established in the United
States. By this time, Russia was presenting
in various books and films a sanitised version of Dmitri as being entirely
motivated by socialist patriotism, ignoring the more questionable aspects of
his activities and passing over his maltreatment by the government he had
served so devotedly and his eventual disillusionment with not only Stalin but
Lenin and the vast edifice of state repression under which so many people had
suffered. With the aid of the vast amount of materials unearthed from various
archives, Draitser has told a compelling story of a brave, complex, sensitive
and flawed man. A must for all those interested in twentieth century history.
-----
Reviewer: Radmila May
Emil Draiter was
born in Odessa, Ukraine, Emil Draitser has
published both fiction and nonfiction since 1964. His work appeared in leading
Soviet journals (Youth, Literary Gazette, and Crocodile) under his pen name
"Emil Abramov." He began his writing career as a freelancer
contributing satirical articles for Soviet newspapers and magazines.
Eventually, he was blacklisted for criticizing an important official, prompting
him to leave for the United
States. He immigrated to Los Angeles, where he earned a Ph.D. in
Russian literature from UCLA. In 1986, he took a job at Hunter
College in New York City, where he continues to teach.
Besides twelve books of artistic and scholarly prose, Emil Draitser's essays
and short stories have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Partisan
Review, North American Review, Prism International, and many other American and
Canadian periodicals. His fiction has also appeared in Russian, Polish, and
Israeli journals.
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