The Soviet Spy Thriller

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. These works represented a break with the ‘Red Pinkerton’ tradition of the 1920s: the genre was being reinvented along new lines, with a new seriousness, and documentary pretensions.
The building of a new kind of spy thriller also required a new enemy. Between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, the Soviet spy thriller reflects the shift from an obsession with class to a new preoccupation with nationality, as the Soviet Union constructed a new identity for itself in a rapidly changing world. The same identity discourse underwent another transformation in the post-Stalin years, when the Soviet agent, underground in the enemy camp, became a metaphor for double life of the ‘Soviet man’.
A landmark new survey of a genre little known in the West, The Soviet Spy Thriller shines new light on cultural politics in the Soviet Union, and offers a fascinating counterpoint to the Western spy thrillers that will be so familiar to most readers.