Duccio Colombo (PhD, University of Milan) is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Palermo and author of Scrittori, in fabbrica! Una lettura del romanzo industriale sovietico (2008).
It is commonly held among scholars that there was no mass literature in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. What should we do, then, with Lev Ovalov’s Major Pronin or with the stories of Lev Sheinin, which began to appear in the mid-1930s? And what about Nikolai Shpanov’s post-war best-sellers? As The Soviet Spy Thriller demonstrates, the Soviet authorities did not like to admit that they published low-quality literature aimed at the uncultured masses, but they greatly valued its propaganda value.