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Stalin's Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative, by Emil Draitser
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Sailor, painter, doctor, lawyer, polyglot, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov
(1901–75) led a life that might seem far-fetched for a spy novel, yet here
the truth is stranger than fiction. The result of a thirty-five-year journey
that started with a private meeting between the author and Bystrolyotov
in 1973 Moscow and continued through the author’s subsequent
research in international archives, Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable
Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative pieces together a life lived
in the shadows of the twentieth century’s biggest events.
One of the “Great Illegals,” a team of outstanding Soviet spies operating
in Western countries between the world wars, Bystrolyotov was
the response to Sidney Reilly, the British prototype for James Bond.
A dashing man, his modus operandi was the seduction of women—
among them a French embassy employee, a German countess, the wife
of a British official, and a Gestapo officer—which enabled Stalin to look
into diplomatic pouches of many European countries. Risking his life,
Bystrolyotov also stole military secrets from Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy. A man of extraordinary physical courage, he twice crossed the
Sahara Desert and the jungles of Congo.
But his success as a spy didn’t save him from Stalin’s purges, at the
height of which he was arrested and tortured until he falsely confessed
to selling out to the enemy. Sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in
the Gulag, Bystrolyotov risked more severe punishment by documenting
the regime’s crimes against humanity in unpublished and suppressed
memoirs that rival those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The first full-length biography in any language, at once a real-life
spy thriller, a drama of desire, and a prison memoir, Stalin’s Romeo Spy
is the true account of a flawed yet extraordinary man.
- Sales Rank: #1787685 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Northwestern University Press
- Published on: 2010-03-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.30" w x 6.00" l, 1.65 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 456 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
There is no doubt ... that Bystrolyotov was a remarkable spy even by the standards of an era when much of the world was crawling with intelligence agents.
--The Wall Street Journal
“The life story of the inventor of the modern 'honey trap.'... The bastard son of the aristocratic Tolstoy family (or so he claimed)... [who ] embarked on a career seducing secretaries, countesses, and diplomat's wives. At one point he married his own wife off to a French intelligence officer in the hopes of obtaining even more information.”
--The New York Review of Books
This book is [the author's] effort to show a daring professional at work and to counter Russian efforts to whitewash their history.... The details of espionage work and of Soviet life are fascinating. --The Library Journal
"A major contribution to intelligence history... [A] critical biography of the spy, a difficult but ultimately successful effort, adding depth to previous accounts... Draitser is able to expose the myth of the Soviet hero-agent... The biography is valuable for readers interested in intelligence affairs and accounts of life in the gulag." - Slavic Review
“A rare, humanized image of both the Soviet intelligence services and the purges.... Draitser’s account of life in the gulag is worth the price of this book, although the general reader will be equally intrigued by Bystrolyotov’s spy adventures. Overall, this is a highly readable story that also contributes to our understanding of the often inefficient Stalinist state.”
- Russian Review
Bystrolyotov, a spy for Stalin's foreign intelligence service in the 1920s and 30s, by all accounts, a larger-than-life figure... An ideal "poster boy" to inspire coming generations of Russian spies. --The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“Riveting .... Not Jewish himself, Bystrolyotov’s life dovetails with Jewish experiences and personalities, thus making this book a worthwhile read for those who have interest in the causes of Soviet Jewry as well as general Jewish history.” --The Jewish Star
This extraordinary biography of one of Soviet Russia's most flamboyant and successful illegals ... is gripping, entertaining and immensely informative.... Thoroughly engrossing espionage tale worthy of a Hollywood epic....
--Russian Life Magazine
Bystrolyotov, as Draitser tells it, is one of the most sensational in the pantheon of desperate lives lived by Stalin's illegals. By turns routine, thrilling, conventional, extraordinary, disquieting, disgusting, pathetic, and inspiring, [the spy's life story] stirs emotions of both revulsion and respect, even as it adds a new and instructive chapter to a bleak and terrifying period of history. In this case, the hero chose his biographer well: no one but Draitser could have written this book. ----Gary Kern, author of A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror and The Kravchenko Case: One Man's War on Stalin, from the foreword
An amazing true-life saga . . . Books on intelligence rarely allow the reader the breadth and depth that this biography has, and even more rarely do we get a look into the motivation and thinking behind the acts as we do here. Bystrolyotov's life is extraordinary, literally another world from the one we inhabit and a fascinating read. ----Suzi Weissman, author of Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope
Fascinating . . . Illuminates the inner workings of the Soviet spy network in Europe and the United States in the 1930s. Adventurers who lived for the thrill and excitement of spying, they believed that they worked for the glorious future of the whole of mankind, while in fact serving a criminal country with a Mafia-like oligarchy that included Stalin and his close associates. No wonder that eventually they were betrayed by the very regime they worked for . . . The book is extremely timely now when in Russia, ruled by a small group of former security service officers, Bystrolyotov is proclaimed one of the greatest heroes of the country's foreign intelligence. ----Vadim J. Birstein, author of The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science
About the Author
Originally a journalist in the Soviet Union, Emil Draitser was blacklisted for a satirical
article and, in 1974, immigrated to the United States, where he is now a professor of
Russian at Hunter College in New York City. His most recent book is Shush! Growing
Up Jewish Under Stalin: A Memoir.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
THE RISE AND FALL OF A RUSSIAN SPY
By Paul Gelman
Dmitri Bystrolyotov was a sailor,doctor,lawyer,writer and he was fluent in many languages.When reading what king of life he led,one might come to the conclusion that many things written about him are taken from the realm of fiction.Yet,everything written here happened and is well-documented.Dmitri was an "illegal" and this book covers some eighteen years until his arrest during the Stalin purges.He belonged to the first generation of Soviet spies who operated underground throughout Europe.He was a "Romeo spy",handsome and dashing,with dark hair and a moustache,who seduced secretaries and other women under many aliases;sometimes he was a Greek merchant;sometimes he posed as a Hungarian baron.These seduced secretaries often were convinced they were working for Japanese or German interests,when actually they were aiding Russia.Dmitri destroyed people's careers families and lives wherever he went.He worked mainly in Europe,but also went to America and Africa.He was first recruited by the Cheka,the first incarnation of the Soviet police during the beginning of the twenties.Later,he was sent on missions to England,France,Germany,Spain,Switzerland and many other places.His specialty was the recruitment of agents who had access to diplomatic codes and ciphers,and in this process was successful in seducing a French diplomat,once a German countess,another a Gestapo officer-all women.He then commenced to carry out a similar task involving the British Foreign Office.In the thirties,Stalin was more than certain that a plot to attack Russia was in the works.He was frustrated about the lack of reliable information that would confirm his expectations.Codes and ciphers of correspondence between high-level officials of major Europen powers became the most coveted target of world intelligence services.
The author of this fascinating tale,Emil Draitsev ,who met Bystrolyotov personally in 1973(whence the whole idea of the book started)demonstrates more than once to what extent the lax security in the British Foreign Office continued to contribute to the leaking of state secrets.But it was not only codes that were of the spy's concern.He also stole many military German military secrets for his superiors at a time when Hitler was just beginning to build his Nazi evil empire.
Another mission of his was to cross twice "the hell of the Sahara and the jungles of the French and Belgian Congos".In 1935,he was expedited to Africa to check whether French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou,who sympathized with Russia,could deliver on his promise,in the event of a German invasion,to bring over several hundred thousand African mercenaries.His last operation which has archival support took place in midsummer 1936,and this time this Romeo seduced a Romanian high society lady by the name of Florica Titulescu who was related to the Romanian minister of foreign affairs and she also happened to be the lover of the Romanian Chief of Staff.She,therefore,had access to highly valuable Romanian political and military information, and in addition, this lady was also working for the French intelligence services, to which,via its agents in Switzerland,she passed Romanian diplomatic and military secrets.The most valuable of these documents were those which reflected the political intentions of Romania toward Russia.
And then,at the height of Stalin's purges(and his paranoia),when he returned to Moscow he was arrested on trumped-up charges;he was one of many spies whose careers was terminated and they were either sent to the Gulag or were executed.Dmitri was sentenced to twenty-five years,after suffering tremendous torture and and served almost all of them.His arrest and conviction ruined his family and health.
Draitsev is very good when describing the political atmosphere during the years when his subject was active and he also describes in detail Dmitri the man,who was an illegitimate son of a former cold mother,who left her son to grow up in loneliness.We also get a very interesting and gripping description about Dmitri's pathological relationship with his first wife-a woman who managed to temporaritly conceal her own sexual proclivities.Draitser also explains the Stalinistic purges,the omnipresence of the Secret Police,the cult of the leader and Dmitri's efforts to publish his books.
The author of this book faced an enormous task.As he says,he had to "clear away the propaganda" that the Soviet Union was trying to build around the image of Dmitri,because in the end,his hero was exonerated through a series of new books,articles and films,which were trying to cut out basic facts from dmitri's biography.
If you want to read about an important part of history,the role that Russian intelligence played during the twenties and thirties,and in adition,if you want to get acquainted with a spy who was both humane and repulsive,a genius,a seducer but also a great patriot,read this excellent and fascinating book.You will cherish each and every moment of it!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Masterly written life-story of a cosmopolitan Bolshevik secret agent playboy
By Leon Zadov
This biography of the Bolshevik secret police spy, who pioneered famous “honey (sex) traps,” reads like an excellent spy thriller book with the only exception - it is a true story. I finished Romeo Spy a year ago, but, being a humanities scholar, needed time to process the book and evaluate it against other similar texts in the field. For the past months, I read Poretsky’s memoirs Our Own People (about Ignace Reiss), Kern’s Death in Washington (about Walter Krivitsky), Weismann’s article about Zborowski, and , most recently, Volodarsky’s 800-page volume Stalin Agent (2015) (Alexander Orlov’s biography). I do not want to diminish the mentioned texts, but, compared to existing stories about so-called great illegals, Draitser’s book is superb read not only because his topic is so sexy (in a literal and metaphorical sense), but primarily because the volume skillfully blends excellent history research and mastery style. The explanation is very simple: the author, a writer by profession (who earlier wrote fiction and who currently teaches literature), mined and critically assessed tons of primary documents from personal and governmental archives. The result is a breath-taking history tale about a semi-orphan misfit commoner, who was raised as an aristocrat and who, as such, became a good human material for Bolshevik “Jesuits” searching to penetrate secrets of Western elites. Like for majority of his 1930s’ colleagues, Bystrolevetov’s reward from his mother country was predictable: the cosmopolitan playboy was fed to the GULAG machine of Stalin’s National Bolshevism.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Superb narration of an age and its product
By Prabhakar S. Kamath
In skillfully portraying the life of Dmitri Bystrolyotov, Emil Draister does a superb job of weaving a tenacious web of intrigue, anecdotes, historical facts, man's humanity and inhumanity to man, and human frailties in his beautifully written book Stalin's Romeo Spy. The details are thoroughly researched and narration is richly textured. Draister does an outstanding job of bringing a shadowy, chameleon-like Russian character out into the light of the modern day as a very human, often misunderstood and terribly wronged individual who is tossed around like driftwood in the tumultuous ocean of history. In tracing the origins of his protagonist Draister succeeds in bringing alive life during the turbulent decades of early twentieth century Russia. Draister's style is intimate, sensitive and sympathetic. Stalin's Romeo Spy is a masterfully written book with many dimensions. It is highly readable, and difficult to put down once you start reading it. Draister has an incredible eye for details. This book would make every library richer by its addition.
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