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Filip Kovacevic, "KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
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- [00:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [01:01]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
So good, so good, so good.
- [01:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [01:22]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Philip Kovacevic about his book titled KGB Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union, published by the University of Toronto Press in November 2025. This book takes us into maybe mysterious, definitely pretty ignored world, but really fascinating, where we've got Soviet spies, like actual Soviet spies in the kgb, sometimes counterintelligence spies, but like spies people. Okay? That's what we're talking about here. And those spies, or at least some of them, also wrote things, wrote spy fiction, for instance. And that's really interesting in and of itself, right, that people whose day job is spying for real wrote about it for fun as well. But of course, it's also interesting to think about what they wrote and what we can find out about real spying from fictional spying from the people who have literally done both. So we have a whole bunch of things to talk about here, all the sexy, mysterious, ridiculous things that involve Cold War Soviet spycraft. I mean, we're going to have fun with this. So, Philip, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your work.
- [02:47]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Thank you, Miranda, for inviting Me very happy to be here.
- [02:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you too. Before we get too far though, into the world of spies and what they wrote about, can you introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [03:04]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
I'm a professor with more than 25 years of teaching experience in Eastern Europe, Russia and the United States. I was born in Montenegro in a small town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea called Kotor, but I lived in the United States for a long time and I'm teaching at the University of San Francisco. I'm a research scholar of KGB Institute Institutional History, Operations and Personnel. And I have a blog called the Czech is Monitor. And I also write on substack KGB stuff by Filip Kovacevic.
- [03:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, this is clearly then a long standing interest. What led you to write this particular book then?
- [03:47]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Well, you know, I just love secrets, you know, the Secret World. I'm fascinated by secrets by uncovering secrets. It's like being an archaeologist really, only you don't have to dig for the artifacts in the ground. But you look at texts, you'll go to the archives, you find these documents, you discover voices that have never been known about before. And this book in particular comes from my interest in literature and also the Secret World. And I looked at the field of intelligence studies and I noticed that there were books about Western intelligence officers who became spy fiction writers. People like Ian Fleming and John Le Carre and Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. And then I looked at the other side, the Soviet side, the other side of the Cold War. And I noticed that there were absolutely no books about KGB officers who wrote spy fiction. And so I decided to look into that and the book is the result. In fact, it's the first book on this subject in any language, including Russian. And so I hope it will be translated worldwide. In addition to that, I was trying to find a way to understand the Soviet and Russian intelligence culture. And I thought that perhaps looking at spy fiction can tell us a lot about the values in this community, these cultures, the aspirations, the goals, the fears that they had. And I thought perhaps, you know, the way Freud said about the unconscious, you know, the unconscious being royal, dreams being dreams being a royal road to the unconscious, I thought perhaps spy fiction could be the royal road into understanding the unconscious and the conscience of the kgb. Well, you be the judge. The book is out there in the world now.
- [06:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's very true. And of course, explained like that, it makes a lot of sense, right? Like how better to understand the values of the people in the KGB than to read what they've written. Right. But as much as that's really obvious when you explain it that way, was that always obvious? Like, as you said, there's been writing on the Western side kind of thinking, ooh, what can we learn about the real MI6 from James Bond? That's something we kind of are used to thinking about. This is obviously, as you said, the first book in any language. But do we know if, for example, the CIA ever thought to look at this fiction to understand the kgb? Or did. Did the Western intelligence services not even know about this fiction?
- [06:43]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Yeah, that's a great question. And in fact, when I started this research, I found out that I had the CIA as my predecessors. CIA analysts back in the 1960s were studying KGB spy fiction. And in fact, they wrote reports about it and gave these reports to the British intelligence. So in other words, there was this early open source methodology to understand what's going on in the secret Union, Soviet Union, because we need to understand the Soviet Union was what's called the Secret Leviathan. In fact, there is a book on this with this title by Mark Harrison, which I recommend to your listeners.
- [07:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In fact, I interviewed about him, I've interviewed him about that book, if anyone wants to go find out that way.
- [07:35]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Oh, that's great. And so the Soviet Union was essentially the secret society par excellence. There were even secret cities of tens of thousands of people living there. They were secret, they were not on the map. And other Soviet citizens had no idea perhaps that those cities existed. Of course, especially people outside of the Soviet Union did not know about their existence. And so this approach was something that. So my question was, did they reveal something in the spy fiction? What could this spy fiction tell us about the Soviet society in addition to telling us something about the kgb? And what's important to understand is that this fiction, this was a project, this was something that was done in the service of the state. So we are not talking about critical fiction here. We are not talking about John Le Carre, you know, being skeptical about the limits and the reaches and the possibilities of British intelligence. We are talking about the people who were essentially fighting, fighting operationally fighting on a different front, the front of words. They were using, they were using culture to glorify their own image in their society and also to shape the hearts and minds of Soviet citizens, the readers of this fiction.
- [09:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a really key point. And I think we want to emphasize it even further because some of the things you talk about in the Book. It's kind of individual authors who work for the KGB and want the KGB to look good, but. But it's also the KGB as an institution that is publishing fiction, right?
- [09:24]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Yes. You know, I mean, KGB has different periods in its history, and it was in the. Let's say, in the 1960s that it began to open up to the Soviet citizen. It began to want to tell about its work in a way that would make it appealing to the Soviet citizens to. To give it legitimacy and also to have trust in it. And so they were essentially trying to develop heroes that could show to the Soviet citizens how great of a job the KGB is doing to defend them from who they were, saying they were enemies. The west, especially the west, the CIA especially. And so in this way, it was a controlled effort. However, there were some authors who were following the trends in Western spy fiction, and they thought that the Soviet Union could offer an alternative to the west in this field. In other words, their idea was that this fiction should not only be oriented toward the Soviet citizens, but it should be oriented to the rest of the world in trying to show the rest of the world that the Soviet model and the Soviet system was better than the Western system. So, in other words, there were some authors who wanted to create an alternative to James Bond, to have kind of the Soviet James Bond who would be more. Who would be, I guess, more sympathetic to the injustices of the world than the Western James Bond created by Ian Fleming. So this was an ideological battle in addition to being the battle of the craft of spy fiction.
- [11:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Craft, yeah. Keeping those two fronts in mind, I think, is helpful as we continue the conversation. And I want to get into some of these authors and the stories now that we have this context of kind of the multiple things that they're trying to do here. So thinking then about those goals and realizing them, you discuss in the book that Roman Kim was the most influential Soviet spy fiction writer in the early Cold War period. Now, that's a pretty high bar given the lofty goals that you've just outlined for us in terms of the KGB's reputation, in terms of making the Soviet system generally look good. So can you tell us more about who he was and why he was so influential?
- [11:59]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Yes. Roman Kim was a very interesting person. He was a Korean who was born in the Russian Empire in the city of Vladivostok, and he was educated in Japan. And so he returned from Japan to the Russian Empire. This was the time of the Russian Revolution. And in the beginning, he was recruited by the other side, by the anti Soviet side. But pretty quickly, he decided to work for the Soviets, essentially first of all as an undercover journalist in the part of the Far east controlled still by the Japanese. And then later on, when the Soviet Union was victorious against the Japanese in the Far east and was able to take over Vladivostok, he was invited to Moscow to work in the central. At the time, it was called OGPU in the central administration. And his work was directed against the Japanese diplomats in Moscow. In other words, because he was educated in Japan, he, of course, spoke Japanese and understood Japanese culture. And he was used by the Soviet intelligence in the 1920s and the 1930s, essentially to try to recruit Japanese diplomats and Japanese businessmen who were in Moscow at the time. However, what happened to him was that he was arrested by his own people, by the nkvd, because he himself was suspected of being a Japanese spy. And this connects to the situation in the late 1930s in the Soviet Union when Stalin thought that there were so many internal enemies and that whoever essentially had contact with foreigners, even if these contacts were supposed to be on the behalf of the Soviet Union, that they were actually working for the other side, that they were suspect of being traitors to the Soviet Union. So, Roman Kim, with his biography, the fact that he was educated in Japan, even though he was a patriotic Soviet counterintelligence officer, he was arrested. He was arrested, he was tortured in jail, and he was almost executed. In fact, it's interesting what saved him from execution was his own imagination. He saw that most of his colleagues were already executed, and even the person who signed his arrest warrant, which is paradoxical, was arrested and executed before Kim. So what Kim decided to do, he decided to confess that he was a Japanese spy, but that he was not an ordinary Japanese spy. He decided to say that he was the chief Japanese spy in the Soviet Union, and in addition to that, that he was the illegitimate son of a Japanese foreign minister. So in other words, he pretended to be the biggest. The biggest Japanese spy in the Soviet Union that he could be. And this is what saved him. Paradoxically, this is what saved him, because the Soviet officers who interrogated him thought that, my God, this is such an important person we have. We should save him, perhaps to exchange him with some of our spies if they get arrested by the Japanese. And this is how Kim was able to survive the peak of the. The purges until somebody else came to be in charge of the Soviet secret service. Somebody else, Lavrenti Beria, who decided to stop these unjustified persecutions and to give Kim a Chance to work on behalf of the Soviet state. He was not let out of prison, but in prison his conditions improved and he was able to do the translation work and the analysis work directed against Japan.
- [16:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's such a wild story.
- [16:14]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
What a story. So with all this experience after the war, he decided to write spy fiction. He decided to contribute to the defense of Soviet state using his imagination and his skills rather than working in the field. And in fact, he could not, because of his past, he could not really work in the field anymore.
- [16:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, what better proof could you need that you have a good imagination if he manages to get you out of that kind of scrape?
- [16:43]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Yeah. Yes. It was the question of life and death. And he made it. You know, if you read his fiction, and I read all of it and I write about it in my book, you know, you get to understand that a part of his project was also therapy, you know, because every single of his novels had some kind of a torture scene. So in other words, he was trying to work out his own trauma through the spy fiction at the same time. At the same time offering a kind of an alternative to the Western spy fiction. What I mean by this is that in Kim's spy fiction, it is the Soviet Union that wins in the end. It is the allies of the Soviet Union that wins. So in other words, his first novel is about the Korean War. And in his novel, the North Koreans are the heroes and the South Koreans and the Americans are the villains.
- [17:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense and goes back to what you were saying earlier around kind of the ideological project that a lot of this fiction is aiming for. Right. That's speaks to the kind of bolstering the image of the Soviet system that they end up being kind of the good guys that win and that sort of thing. The kind of link between fiction and real life is not just in his writing, though. I mean, what a story, you know, that's such a stranger than fiction type story. But you also talk about some other authors who were sort of more in the field doing quote, unquote, kind of on the front lines, I guess, spy work, but who also were writing fictions. So one of your authors has an incredibly long name that I'm not going to try and pronounce. The initials, I believe, are Z V, R, which is much easier for me to use. But do we have any sense of like, in her writing, for instance, whether there's also parts that are taken from real life or real things she did? The way that, like the torture scenes in Roman Kim's work might have been sort of, as you said, therapy for him. Do we know if there were links in her real world work and her fiction? This episode is brought to you by McAfee. I got a message that our flight was canceled, but they can put us on another flight and we just need to confirm our credit card info. Wait, I got a security alert from McAfee. It flagged that message as a scam. McAfee's scam detector automatically spots and alerts you to suspicious texts, email, emails, and deep fake videos. Learn more@mcafee.com online protection.
- [19:21]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Kraft Mac and Cheese is the best thing ever. It's even better than pop music. You look just as natural enjoying us at age 13 as you do 55. Kraft Mac and Cheese. Best thing ever. Yes, here we are talking about Zoya Vasquersenskaya Rybkina, who was one of the very few women in Soviet intelligence. She was a top ranking officer in Soviet intelligence and she worked in Europe during World War II. She was based in Stockholm in Sweden, a very, very important place for espionage during the World War II because Sweden was neutral. So you had pretty much everybody there in Stockholm. It was a kind of Casablanca, you know, that we know from the film Casablanca and excellent acting of Humphrey Bogart and others. So here we have the case of somebody who was a foreign intelligence officer. Remember, Kim was a counterintelligence officer. Kim was based in Moscow, working against foreign diplomats in the Soviet Union. Well, what Zoya was doing was different. She was sent out of the Soviet Union to be in a foreign country and try to gain information from the citizens and diplomats, the officials of the country she was based in. However, when she, when she wrote, and this was in the late 1950s, the KGB was still not ready to open up a bit to the Soviet public. In other words, they were still not understanding this strategy of soft power, of how to manipulate the hearts and minds without using force. So when she began, when she essentially retired from the work in the Soviet security system, I mean, her story is also very complicated because he was allied with people who lost power within the Soviet secret Service and then was essentially pushed out. So when she started to, when she wanted to say something about her experiences, she could not be open about that. She had to camouflage her experiences by writing and get this about Lenin and Lenin's work and Lenin's family. What she realized is that those early revolutionaries, Bolshevik revolutionaries, when they were persecuted by the tsarist regime, when they had to live in Europe and also essentially, be careful, be on the lookout against the surveillance of the counterintelligence services of various European states, like the British and also Swiss and others. They developed a set of habits that resembled the tradecraft employed by spies. So, in other words, Lenin and his colleagues had to become like spies to be able to conduct their activities in Europe. They had to be careful about the surveillance, the infiltration of their groups, and all of that. And this is exactly what real spies do in the field. And so Zoya realized that because writing about Lenin was what the Soviet Union encouraged. After all, Lenin was. Was seen as the father of the Soviet system. And if you wrote about Lenin, you could even get awards. And so she decided to write about Lenin and Lenin's adventures from the perspective of somebody who was a spy. And I talk about this in the book. When she wrote about Lenin, you know, Lenin in her work is like James Bond, only without sex and alcohol. And so you get all the tradecraft. It's just that there is this veneer or the framework of ideology that she had to have in her novels in order for them to be published. And she was quite successful in even getting awards by the Soviet state. And some of these purportedly stories about Lenin, but actually stories about spies in the field have been made into films in the Soviet Union.
- [24:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Do we think, therefore, that the kinds of things she was describing Lenin as being up to in her books were those taken from what the KGB was actually up to at the time she was working from them?
- [24:31]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Yes, I would say so. Remember, she worked for the. For the Soviet security before there was the kgb. She worked for the nkvd and later on for the mgb, which is Ministry of State Security. So in other words, what she spoke about was the intelligence tradecraft, exactly what Soviet spies would use in the field when they were sent to Western countries. For instance, fake identities. You know, Lenin used fake identities when he lived in Finland, when he lived in Sweden, he pretended to be a German engineer. You know, he had a whole set of identities that he used in his daily life in these countries. Also, he frequently used disguise. He even dressed up as a priest. Imagine that, this atheist dressing up as a priest to get away from the Tsarist secret police. So in other words, they were just like real spies. The Bolsheviks were like the spies of today. Of course, they had a different goal. They were also successful. You know, they were able to essentially to outsmart the Tsari system and later on come to power in the Soviet Union. And they, of course, used the knowledge that they had to go against their enemies. And this is why the Soviet Union was so successful in many ways in kind of not having a lot of spies in the Soviet Union, especially in the early period. In fact, the CIA had a lot of trouble to get any agents in the Soviet Union for a long, long time. And this I connect to the mentality, to the mentality of the people who, who were running the Soviet Union. And guess what? In today's Russia, there is the same mentality, because it's, again, the people with a lot of experience with intelligence and counterintelligence who are running the country. Think about Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who's been running Russia for more than two decades. In fact, this is why it is so interesting and important and relevant to study the KGB culture, because the KGB culture, even though the KGB as an institution is gone, the KGB culture and mentality is still with us. And the people who run Russia today essentially grew up within this atmosphere, this cultural milieu created by KGB spy fiction and other fiction that was also supported by the Soviet state. So in studying the KGB spy fiction, we get an insight into what and how somebody could become Vladimir Putin, really. And I mentioned him in my book and how he himself said that he, and this is a quote, that he is a perfect product of Soviet patriotic education and KGB spy fiction was. Was a component of this education.
- [27:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely worth emphasizing. And especially what can be learnt about the KGV and its predecessors and sort of descendants, as it were. So we've obviously spoken about two authors you discuss in the book in particular, but the book is not just about the two of them. There's also some others that you talk about, Oleg or Vladimir. What other things can we learn about kind of the actual intelligence work and the KGB culture from looking at their novels?
- [28:14]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Yes, yes, I talk about. My approach is kind of chronological, so I start in 1950s and then in the 1960s and 1970s, we have KGB getting actively into this effort of trying to influence the hearts and minds of Soviet citizens. So we have people who used to work for the KGB who are now essentially are motivated by the KGB itself, because they are talented writers to make an effort on this literary front as well. And here you mentioned Oleg Gribanov, he wrote under a pseudonym, Oleg Shmelyov, and he worked with somebody who was also a veteran KGB officer, Vladimir Vostokov, that. That was his pseudonym, his real name was Vladimir Petrochenko. And what they wanted, what their books were about, it was about the strength of KGB counterintelligence, because the plot of their main trilogy is about the Western Intelligence officer who is sent to the Soviet Union to spy on the Soviets, and yet is. Is essentially recruited by the KGB and sent back, sent back to the west now as a KGB agent to spy on the west, at the end of his mission, he's successfully exfiltrated out of the west back into the Soviet Union. So in other words, what they try to show in their novels is that the KGB counterintelligence is not only powerful, but it's also seductive. And it knows how to recruit somebody who used to be their enemy, but has now become their friend. And so, in other words, their books show that the west is in danger of losing its agents and, and even officers by sending them into the Soviet Union. You know, they come back, transform, and then do damage to their own former employers. And in their books, we see how the KGB was essentially a state within the state. So in other words, a Soviet citizen who picked up a book by Ole Gribanov and Vladimir Petrochenko, for instance, a book like Residents, the title is the Resident's Mistake, could see how powerful the KGB was because they were able to manipulate the entire system in the Soviet Union to create a story for this Western officer sent to spy to the Soviet Union to believe in. In other words, the KGB was able to manipulate the court system, the transportation system, the businesses, everything to make up a story that would get somebody recruited to work for them. And I have to add that this officer, this Western officer sent to the Soviet Union had Russian roots. In other words, he was the son of a Russian immigrant, somebody who left Russia after the Communist takeover and was living in the West. So this man was born in the west but had Russian roots and was sent back to the Soviet Union to spy on the Soviet, but is converted to now work for the Soviet state. And I say this because this is exactly what the Soviet Union wanted to do. They wanted to convert the hearts and minds of all Russians, not just the Russians living in the Soviet Union, but also the Russians living beyond the Soviet borders to work for the Soviet state. And we are seeing the same thing today where the Russian state is trying to put pressure on the Russian diaspora to work in the interest of the Russian state and not in the interest of the communities and states that they live and governments that they live in right now. So in other words, in my book, you see this continuity that's very, very important to understand, especially if you want to understand the processes, social processes. We need to understand their history, how they came to be. And so in this book, I show that this culture came to be in the 1920s and 1930s, 1940s, but it hasn't gone away. The institution disappeared. But the new institutions that are essentially replicating the old values have sprung into being. And this is why. This is why some defectors, some recent defectors from Russia have said that the books by Oleg Ribanov and Vladimir Petrochenko and the films based on those books are still very popular in the educational institutions of the current Russian security services, like the fsb, the Federal Security Service. So in other words, the content of these stories still works to essentially to activate, to activate the values that the rational state needs to sustain itself and. And also to project its agenda beyond its borders.
- [34:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is a really key continuity that I'm so glad you've emphasized and speaks to kind of, I suppose, an obvious fact, but I think it's worth making explicit that the reason that this continuity is there is because the people in power keep thinking it works, right? Keep thinking it's a good idea to maintain these things even as the institutions themselves change. So do we have any sense of what they might be basing this on? Like, for example, the KGB's own publications that you talk about in the book? Obviously they had a whole series of fiction that they published to try and make themselves look good and convince the public. Do we have any idea of, like, whether or not people liked them? I mean, you've given some examples there that we have from recent defectors. Do we have any more evidence or information about the reception to this fiction?
- [34:59]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Well, that's a great question. In one of the chapters of the book, I cover a whole. It's an anthology, a serial anthology called Checky Stories that was explicitly created by the KGB Press Bureau to promote KGB values. And let's be clear about these values. What were they? There were Soviet patriotism, political vigilance, complete dedication to the Communist Party. So they were. So KGB essentially tried to create the kind of defenders, guardians consciousness in its members and also in the general population. The kind of image of the Soviet Union they had was of the fortress that was besieged by decadent forces, and that it was the officers of the KGB working together with the Soviet citizens who were going to defend this fortress and make it shine in the world. And so in order to do that, the KGB invested a lot of financial resources, a lot of money, and created a whole series of books called the Czechi Stories. They're eight volumes and they were published in hundreds of thousands of copies. So we are talking about gigantic print runs not seen. I mean, if you look at the Print runs of these books, they're amazing. And they were out there. Any Soviet citizens could pick them up. And they were especially targeting the young people, the young people of the Soviet Union. They were concerned about something they called ideological diversion, which is defined as the influence of Western media and Western values. So they tried to counteract these values in the stories that they wrote. And I studied these stories very methodically and meticulously, and I found out that most of the stories in these anthologies called Czechi Stories were about the Cold War. So even though there were stories about the period before World War II and during World War II, most of the stories were about the KGB struggle, the KGB operations against the West. And there you had different. In these stories, you had different types of characters. And the characters who were interested in the west were portrayed very negatively. So in other words, this kind of fiction tried to create a perfect Soviet citizen. It tried to inspire loyalty to the system. Now the question, of course, is, well, what happened? The kgb. The KGB was connected to the Communist Party, and it was essentially designed as the fighting force of the Communist Party. While the Communist Party disappeared, the Communist Party is gone, but the KGB remained. So in other words, what happened is that it was just this ideology that was removed, but the values themselves have remained the same. In other words, instead of Soviet patriotism, we talk about Russian patriotism today, instead of, we talk about political vigilance. Again, complete dedication. We don't have the Party anymore, but we have the country. So in other words, it's the same format. It's just that Marxist Leninist ideology has been removed. So the structure has remained the same, but some elements of the structure have been removed and the new ones were put in. But the basis of it is subordination of the individual to the collective, to the state. And this is exactly. This is like the essence. The essence of this mentality is subordination of the individual to the collective. So a checkist sacrifices himself or herself for the good of the state, in their case, also the good of the Communist Party. So we have a structure that in its essence is not really valuing individual rights, individual freedoms, individual thinking. It's about the preservation of the collective, of the community that's defined community defined by the people at the top. Because the KGB system was extremely hierarchical. And in fact, in the KGB fiction, spy fiction, you'll see a clear hierarchy where, let's say we have a hero who's a young man, this young man, a young officer. He's successful because he listens to his superiors, he has A mentor, and then this mentor has a mentor. And I call this the Czechist triad. I say Chekhis because Chekhis, for people who don't know, is a collective self description of the members of Soviet and now Russian security and intelligence services. And it goes back to the first Soviet state security organization called the Cheka, the All Russian Extraordinary Commission of Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage. And the Russian acronym is cheka. And so the Cheka is derived from the Cheka. And so it's interesting that even today the officers of Russian State Security, Russian intelligence, call themselves checkists. So there is clear commitment to the name. And also what I show is to the values, the collective over the individual. And this is very important to understand. And this is seen in the fiction, in the fiction that these KGB officers wrote and also promoted in the Soviet system.
- [41:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, the continuities you're making between the Cheka, kind of before the KGB and where we're at today are really quite clear. And so I can imagine that there will be listeners who not only want to read your book analysing this, but may also want to read some of the actual works of Soviet spy fiction themselves. Are any of those available to English reading audiences now? Or if there are, are there any that you'd actually recommend people go look up?
- [42:19]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
The answer is no. The answer is no. The most. In fact, almost all of the novels, novellas and short stories I discuss in my book have no English translation. And so. But of course, perhaps my book will encourage people out there to translate them into English and other languages. And so it's not possible to find them in English. The CIA in the 70s translated some spy fiction from the Soviet Union, but they did not focus specifically on, on KGB spy fiction. In fact, my research found that there were some KGB officers writing spy fiction at the regional level, at the level of Soviet Republic, let's say in Ukraine or in the Russian republic of Dagestan, who were not known, they were not known by the CIA, in other words, the CIA translators, the CIA analysts, they looked at spy fiction written by writers living in Moscow and perhaps in St. Petersburg. And there are some. So it's possible to find some of these CIA sponsored translations of some Soviet spy fiction, but not the spy fiction that I talk about in my book because I focus on people who were members of the secret world of the kgb. And this is very important because those people know the inside story. You know, there could be talented people, talented writers writing about spies from outside, from, from, from outside the spy world. And that's that's great. There are some wonderful, wonderful novels written by people who did not work in intelligence. However, there. There is this touch of authenticity that people who were in intelligence have. And so there are right now, for instance, in the United States, people like Ilana berry or David McCloskey or Almakatsu, former CIA officers who write excellent spy fiction with the understanding of the spy world. Of course, they would not reveal any classified information, but the sense, the atmosphere is there. And so the sense and the atmosphere is also in the KGB spy fiction, and this is what's attractive about it, is that perhaps it's possible to learn a bit about their tradecraft and their approach to intelligence and counterintelligence. And there is also something that's very curious. You know, when I began writing this book, most of the novels and novellas and short stories that I talk about were out of print. They were published back in the Soviet period and never again. However, in the last four or five years, so many of them keep showing up. They have been reprinted by current Russian publishers. So in other words, what's happening in real life is exactly what I talk about in my book, is that KGB spy fiction is coming back. It's coming back because the regime in Russia today is becoming so similar to what it was in the past, minus, as I said, minus the Communist, Marxist, Leninist ideology. Because there is no more the ruling class right now. It's not the Communist, it's the Czechists. And in fact, it seems to me that this literature that I talk about in my book is one of the pillars of this shackist mentality. In other words, had there not been this literature published at the time, the checkists of today would not have been able to form such a coherent. Such a coherent group, elite group. In other words, the fiction published in the 50s, 60s and 70s provided them with a sense of group identity that they could relate to and made them able to essentially take power in the late 1990s in Russia and keep it to this day.
- [46:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, the fact that there aren't English translations of this fiction makes this book that you've written even more important and I'm sure interesting to listeners. And so it's good that it's out in the world. And of course, that means it's off your desk, too. So before I let you go, is there anything you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [47:05]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Yes, of course. You know, I work all the time. I spend a lot of time in the archives at this point of time. I work at the Hoover Library and Archives on the campus of Stanford University, where I study KGB files from the Lithuanian kgb. And I write about my findings on substack KGB stuff by Filip Kovacevic. It's easy to find and I have revealed a lot of operations and personnel not known before. So I'm very, very excited about this work. And I'm also working on a new book project that focuses on KGB and CIA intelligence education. And this has also never been done before in this comparative context. I was able to obtain some actual lecture notes of KGB officers taking classes at KGB schools. And I'm really excited about that. And so we now know, I mean, I now know and my readers eventually will know what was taught, what was taught at KGB schools. And of course, there are some declassified reports and studies of CIA intelligence education from the 50s, 60s and 70s. And it will be so interesting to see to what extent the two types of educations are different or similar, how they influence each other. Even at this point of time, I can say that CIA had a course on Marxism Leninism that its officers had to take the same way. KGB had a lot of material about the Western services. It had its own top secret textbooks on US Intelligence, on British intelligence, on German intelligence. It was a serious effort to understand the other side and to try to prevail in this secret war on these invisible fronts. The CIA, as we know, has been more successful than the kgb. However, the KGB has not disappeared, has not given up, and he's now playing it's the second time, second halftime. And it's so fascinating to try to understand the kind of the intellectual, the cultural atmosphere and structure behind the values of both services. Because one service, the CIA, represents the values of a democratic state and the kgb. And now the Russian services like the FSB and the SVR and the gru, which is military intelligence, represents the services of an authoritarian state. But how do you educate the officers to support one or the other? And this is something that intrigues me at this point of time. And I'm doing a lot of work on that and can't wait to be able to say more about it. Perhaps next time we meet on this program.
- [50:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Certainly sounds like you have lots to keep you busy, so best of luck with those investigations. And while you're doing them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled KGB Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2025. Philip, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:05]
Dr. Philip Kovacevic
Thank you, Miranda. I really enjoyed the interview. Thanks a lot. Monster Energy. Everybody knows White Monster Zero Ultra, that's the og it kicked off this whole Zero Sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dream, Blue Hawaiian Sunrise and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster Energy punch. So if you've been living in the White can, branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe, and every single one is Zero Sugar. Tap the banner to learn more.