Volodarsky, Boris Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (review)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

REVIEWS 769 Volodarsky, Boris. Stalin’s Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2015. xxxiii + 789 pp. Illustrations. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £30.00. For the past sixty-odd years, the name of Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov has occupied a not insignificant place in the annals of modern espionage and Cold War history. In 1953, he surprised almost everyone, not least J. Edgar Hoover, by emerging from fifteen years hiding in the United States to publish The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes. The book not only dished dirt on the deceased Soviet strongman but also portrayed its author as a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer with a font of insider information. The FBI and CIA ultimately embraced him as a defector, and in 2001 his former FBI handler, Edward Gazur, further polished that reputation in Alexander Orlov: The FBI’s KGB General. In addition to claiming a general’s rank, Orlov presented himself as the chief recruiter of the infamous ‘Cambridge Spies’, Stalin’s personal emissary to war-torn Spain and the man who oversaw the movement of the Spanish Republic’s entire gold reserve to Moscow. In truth, he was none of these, or, for that matter, even Alexander Orlov. Rather, as Boris Volodarsky meticulously documents, Orlov was never more than a ‘mediocre intelligence officer’, if a rather good liar (p. 471). Furthermore, he convincingly demonstrates that Orlov was not even a genuine defector, but a ‘deserter’ who abandoned duty in fear of his life but who never disavowed his fundamental loyalties to Party and Motherland and who repeatedly lied to and deliberately misled his new American pals (p. 417). Volodarsky has the qualifications to take on the task. A career GRU (Soviet military intelligence) special operations and undercover officer through the 1980s, following the collapse of the USSR he relocated to Britain where he earned a PhD in intelligence history from the London School of Economics. Currently, in addition to writing, he works as a consultant for unnamed private companies involved in risk management and analysis. His other works notably include The KGB’s Poison Factory (Barnsley, 2009). The present volume is a herculean piece of research. The main text comprises some 60 per cent of the book’s more than 800 pages and is bolstered by two prefaces (one by Spanish Civil War historian Paul Preston), an introduction, appendices plus, more significantly, over fifty pages of bibliographic references and nearly two-hundred pages of notes. The latter are so full of additional information and commentary that they are almost a book of their own and occasionally more interesting that the main discussion. To make his case against the Orlov mythos, Volodarsky unleashes a vast reservoir of facts beginning on the first page and not stopping until the last. The reader is subjected to a relentless torrent of names, dates and details of SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 770 everything from operational techniques to sexual partners, and if you read too long, your head is likely to spin. For long stretches, the titular Orlov appears only as a peripheral character or vanishes completely, and his reappearance sometimes seems a distraction from the larger narrative. That, of course, only reinforces Volodarsky’s central argument that Orlov was mostly a bit player in these events, and by the time he is done it is impossible to believe otherwise. However, Stalin’s Agent is much more than a deconstruction of the odious and overblown Orlov. Volodarsky boasts that ‘the book seeks to set the record straight and present an accurate picture of Soviet military intelligence operations in Europe and America in the interwar period and during the Spanish Civil War’, and if he doesn’t illuminate everything, he definitely casts plenty of light (p. 462). The heart of Orlov’s career, and the heart of the book, is the Spanish Civil War. Here Volodarsky goes against the grain of much earlier scholarship by arguing that ‘the Second Spanish Republic was not Stalin’s Spain’, and that the Soviets never came close to nor even conceived of creating an Iberian satellite regime (p. 278). Finally, even as Volodarsky demolishes Orlov’s legacy, he reveals...