Ian Fleming’s Soviet rival: Roman Kim and Soviet spy fiction during the early cold war

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the life of Roman Kim (1899–1967), an ethnic Korean Soviet counterintelligence officer, and highlights his contribution to the Soviet spy fiction genre during the Cold War. Kim was born in Vladivostok and educated in Japan. He was recruited by the VChK in the early 1920s and was involved in a variety of Soviet counterintelligence operations directed against Japan. Arrested and tortured during the Great Purge, he was the only Soviet Japanese intelligence expert to survive. Kim was released after the end of WWII and reinvented himself as a writer of spy fiction, arguing that the Soviet Union must score victories against the West on the literary front. The article examines Kim’s impact on the literary Cold War by analyzing his most significant spy fiction works, none of which have been translated into English, and chronicles his influence on the later generation of Soviet spy fiction writers, such as Yulian Semyonov and Vasily Ardamatsky, much better known in Russia and in the West.