When the issue with the captain had already been resolved, he suddenly announced that if the ship would call at foreign ports, a visa would be required, and in this case he was simply powerless, this was the patronage of a completely different department, the KGB. When my father-in-law said that he had no acquaintances there, I thought I had misheard. In the few days that I spent in my new family, I realized that if my father-in-law does not have an acquaintance anywhere, it is only possible in space, and even then only temporarily. Amazing!
“Do you have anyone there?” our captain, Evgeniy Mikhailovich, asked.
The captain admitted that there is even a friend, he supervises the ship's radio stations, in other words, he listens to what the crews of the ships and their radio operators are chatting about among themselves.
So what's the matter? Pick up the phone, call and try to persuade him to join our party.
The captain obeyed and a few minutes later Natasha and I were taxiing in my father’s seven, like the most sober in this company, with the dozing captain in the back seat. As soon as we arrived at the desired house in the city center, we saw a tall man with a military bearing clearly waiting for us. After saying hello, he climbed into the car and we drove back.
Indeed, in order to go to sea on a ship that has called at a foreign port, every sailor on the ship must have an open visa in the sailor’s passport, and to open the visa itself, you must spend at least half a year at sea. But the captain immediately reassured me that as long as our ship was fishing in our waters, a visa was not needed yet. I was already going crazy from the prospects - foreign countries, even northern ones, like Norway, Finland..., imported clothes, cars..., this was the life that was opening up for me! Today, when schoolchildren go on vacation in the summer to Bali, the Canary Islands, or wherever else their parents take it into their heads, you can hardly find a domestic car in the city, and you can simply order clothes on the Internet, it seems incredible, but then few could even dream about it.
And opportunities alone were not enough; it was necessary to go through the sieve of the omnipresent KGB. But our new acquaintance swore that in just half a year, which was exactly what was required for the initial survey, I would not have any problems with obtaining a visa, and he promised to personally oversee this. For which he was immediately rewarded with an offer to go to one of the furniture factories tomorrow and buy a Finnish kitchen, which the wife of a stern man from the KGB had dreamed of for so long. And he was no longer so harsh. Natasha and I were invited to visit him.
When we visited the security officer the next day, he showed us a computer he had constructed himself. Of course, by that time we had already heard about them, read about them, even saw them on TV, but we didn’t dare look at this miracle of human thought with our own eyes. The machine consisted of a small Soviet television, a cassette recorder, a typewriter and an endless number of wires. There might be something else, but that’s what I saw for sure. Some programs were recorded on a cassette player, and we saw the text on the screen.
Especially for us, he conducted a test for compatibility and calculation of our characters - we answered many, sometimes completely stupid questions, and at the end the machine summed up the results. But what struck us most of all was not even this; he had an apartment that was unique by the standards of that time. Imagine a huge dome of a building and it all belonged to him alone. This was the second floor of his apartment, his office, where he could play football. There was also a real telescope with which he looked at the night sky every evening.
This is how another very smart friend appeared in our family.
The third book of the unique publication about the KGB tells about the events that took place in our country in 1995-1996. The author, a former professional security officer who served in the authorities for twenty years, traces with documentary, chronological precision the path of systematic reform of the security agencies, and in essence, their destruction.
Anatomy of Betrayal: CIA “Super Mole” in… A. Sokolov
The book for the first time provides an analysis of a number of undercover cases that later became world famous, to which the author was directly involved during his operational work in the Washington KGB station. A psychological study of the phenomenon of “betrayal” is carried out using the example of the former senior Soviet intelligence officer O. Kalugin, whom the author knew well from working together. The author puts forward a version of his recruitment by American intelligence services in 1958 in New York. New facts about his espionage and work for US intelligence agencies are presented...
Farewell, KGB Arkady Yarovoy
This book was written by a man who served in state security agencies for many years. The defeat of the KGB, the collapse of the USSR, two Chechen wars, terrorism and banditry - all this is the author’s personal pain. The authoritarian rule of Boris Yeltsin, humiliating foreign loans and the creation of the shamelessly luxurious Kremlin empire of the “Family”, the unlimited power of oligarchs, high-ranking officials and the complete lack of rights of the ordinary population - this, according to Arkady Yarovoy, is the true tragedy of our long-suffering Motherland. The book contains the names of famous...
History of the KGB Alexander Sever
What did the Fifth Directorate of the KGB and its regional divisions actually do? Who, where and how listened to the American presidents and why were the employees of the electronic intelligence posts of the Sixteenth Directorate of the KGB of the USSR awarded military orders? How did domestic scientific and technical intelligence help create new types of Soviet military equipment? What did the “F” line employees do in foreign residencies? For whom did they put weapons and radio stations in “caches” and hiding places in Western Europe? What was supposed to happen...
KGB - CIA - Secret springs of perestroika Vyacheslav Shironin
Major General Vyacheslav Shironin worked for thirty-three years in the state security agencies of the USSR, and in recent years - in Russia. He headed one of the KGB analytical centers (Department "A"), was the deputy head of Soviet counterintelligence, and subsequently the chief consultant to such heads of the department, like Fedorchuk, Chebrikov, Bakatin, Barannikov, Stepashin. He visited all the “hot” spots, including Afghanistan, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, as well as during the period of perestroika in such a “warm” spot as the Baltic states in 1990–1991. About everyone...
Lubyanka, Cheka-OGPU-KVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB 1917-1960,... N. Petrov
The reference book is dedicated to the history of the Central Office of the Internal Affairs and State Security Bodies of the USSR in 1917–1960. For the first time, information is provided on the structure of the Cheka - OGPU - NKVD - NKGB - MGB - MVD - KGB, the most important orders that determined the activities of these departments, as well as biographical information about the People's Commissars (Ministers) of Internal Affairs of the USSR and their deputies.
Jews in the KGB Vadim Abramov
Among the numerous myths of Soviet history, one of the most persistent and widespread is the myth about the role of Jews in the “organs”, and it exists in two mutually exclusive versions. On the one hand, there is an opinion about “Jewish dominance” in the Soviet intelligence services. On the other hand, about the “anti-Semitic policy” of the KGB. “Patriots” publish endless lists of security officers with “dubious” names, denouncing their “sinister role” in Russian history. “Liberals” curse the “KGB-Judophobes” who persecute innocent fellow citizens on the “fifth point.” What is in these accusations...
KGB against the USSR. 17 moments of betrayal Alexander Shevyakin
A sensational investigation into the greatest crime of the 20th century - the murder of the USSR. Exposing the main secret of the KGB. The whole truth about “17 Moments of Betrayal”. Irrefutable evidence of the existence of a KGB conspiracy aimed at the collapse and liquidation of the Soviet Union - it was the State Security Committee that was the main puppeteer of the damned “perestroika”, playing a decisive role in this tragedy; It was from the Lubyanka that they orchestrated mass riots and controlled the Kremlin puppets, “outdated” (in Stalin’s words) the great...
KGB SRSR. Spagadi opera Undefined Undefined
In twenty years of Ukrainian independence we have never read such books. I am no longer talking about the future 73 fates of communist despotism. Of course, most of us, I hope you are a good people, have read the books of Viktor Suvorov (Volodymyr Rizun), known as “Aquarium”. Although this book is removed from our everyday reality, it highlights special events in the GRU. This place is far away... Volodymyr Ushenko, a longtime KGB officer who broke with this organization in 1991, two years before the so-called “putsch”, depicts in his works the everyday life of a regional KGB officer...
Diary of a KGB officer Alexander Nikiforov
Kandahar, 1985. The most difficult period for the limited contingent of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, marked by bloody battles and serious losses on our part. The KGB major serves as an adviser to the Afghan Ministry of State Security. In fact, he works in a circle of unreliable and cunning people from whom he can get a knife in the back at any moment. Despite the mortal danger, at the cost of colossal nervous tension, the major manages to maintain order in the city and piece by piece obtain information about gangster groups...
Valentina Maltseva
KGB in a tuxedo-2: Woman from the Marriott Hotel... Valentina Maltseva
...a fascinating continuation of “The KGB in a Tuxedo” by Valentina Maltseva, a book that has become a bestseller in our country. The reader will again meet the unchanged main character - a professional journalist recruited by the KGB, and will learn with interest many stunning - albeit fictitious by the author - details about the events of the recent past.
KGB vs MI6. Spy Hunters Rem Krasilnikov
Former employee of the Second Main Directorate of the KGB, General Rem Krasilnikov, writes in his book about the confrontation between British intelligence and Russian (Soviet) counterintelligence. It was England that inspired the Entente campaigns against the Soviet Republic in 1918-20. From that time on, the confrontation between the two intelligence services began, which continues to this day. British intelligence “succeeded” in recruiting KGB officers, but almost all of them were exposed by Soviet counterintelligence. About these and many other actions of British intelligence against Russia...
KGB Oleg Gordievsky
The book by K. Andrew and O. Gordievsky provides a broad retrospective of Soviet foreign intelligence operations from its founding in 1917 until the collapse of the USSR. The book is based on extensive factual and historical material obtained by the authors and testimonies of eyewitnesses and participants in these operations. And the personal experience of Oleg Gordievsky, who served for 23 years in the KGB’s foreign intelligence service, and the knowledge of Professor Christopher Andrew, a leading researcher of intelligence history in the West, gives this book even greater significance. The Russian edition has been supplemented...
Probably, no other country in the world had as many secrets as the USSR kept. The Iron Curtain hid everything that was not compatible with the “beautiful Soviet life.”
The whole world learned about the terrible nuclear accident that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1957 only thirty years later. The tragedy happened in the south of Russia near the city of Kyshtym. The accident occurred due to an explosion in a container in which radioactive waste was stored; this container had the shape of a stainless steel cylinder and was covered with concrete. Moreover, it was designed in such a way that in case of repair it was impossible to get close to it, probably because the developers had no doubts about the strength of the structure.
At the end of September, the cooling systems failed, no one bothered to repair it, and it was simply turned off; a few days later there was an explosion in a storage facility with 80 m3 of nuclear waste. The force of the explosion lifted some of the radioactive debris one and a half kilometers, resulting in the formation of a cloud. Just twelve hours later, radioactive fallout fell within a radius of three hundred and fifty kilometers; it covered the territories of the Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, and Tyumen regions; in total, more than twenty thousand square kilometers were affected. As a result of the disaster, the homes of more than ten thousand people were destroyed, and about three hundred thousand people suffered from radiation. For the first time, the US intelligence services became aware of the tragedy in the 60s, but fearing a negative attitude towards nuclear tests, the world kept silent about it, and in 1976 a Soviet emigrant announced it in the press. The USSR confirmed information about the disaster only several years after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
The Cold War between the USSR and the West dictated the condition of primacy in all sectors of life. The same position was in the field of astronautics, where the USSR and the USA competed to see who would be the first to launch a man into space. The Soviet Union strictly classified all data on ongoing research, and many of the names of the pilots - cosmonauts, who had been preparing for flights for thirty long years, were classified. This happened with Valentinov Bondarenko, a fighter pilot who was a member of the first space detachment of the USSR.
In 1960, he was selected to participate in space flight training and was fourth on a list of 29 pilots preparing for the first space flight. Unfortunately, he never managed to fly.
The pilot underwent the necessary training for space flight; one of the training sessions was a ten-day stay in a hyperbaric chamber at NII-7. The test involved being alone and quiet. However, fate played a cruel joke on him. During one of his medical studies, he made a mistake. After removing the sensors from the body, he wiped the places on the body where they were attached with alcohol and threw away the cotton swab. The tampon hit the hot coil of the electric stove and burst into flames. Since almost all the air inside the pressure chamber consisted of pure oxygen, the fire instantly spread to the entire chamber and the pilot’s woolen suit instantly caught fire...
Unfortunately, the rescuers were unable to open the pressure chamber quickly, since there was a large pressure difference between it and the surrounding space. When Bondarenko was taken out of the pressure chamber, he was still alive, although he received burns over 98% of his body, his eyes, hair and skin were completely burned, blood vessels could only be found on the soles of his feet. Being in pain shock, the pilot whispered that he was in great pain. He was urgently transported to the Botkin hospital, where, despite the efforts of the doctors, he died sixteen hours later from burn shock. Nineteen days later Yuri Gagarin flew into space...
A year later, in 1961, Valentin Bondarenko was awarded the Order of the Red Star (posthumously); he was survived by his wife and young son. The state did not help the family, they only received a pension until the child came of age, and they tried to forget about the family. Valentin was buried in Kharkov, the inscription “from friends - pilots” was carved on the obelisk, and only in the 80s it was attributed to “cosmonauts of the USSR”.
All information about the incident with Valentin Bondarenko was classified until 1986, when the story of his death was described in the Izvestia newspaper.
For a very long time, all data about the famine of 1932-1933 in some regions of the USSR was kept silent, they tried to forget about it and erase it from history, as something that actually did not happen.
The policy of collectivization, surplus appropriation and grain procurements carried out by the Soviet regime led to the fact that terrible famine broke out in a number of territories of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Recently, theories have arisen that the famine in Ukraine was caused deliberately, to eradicate the rebellious people, but this cannot be confirmed one hundred percent. On purpose or not, such a policy took the lives of millions of people.
What is also scary is that the terrible famine was hidden from foreign countries; they knew nothing about it, or they knew, but did not want to strain relations with Stalin. In order to hide all the horrors happening in the USSR, the top leadership staged real “performances” in front of foreign tourists and correspondents: store shelves were filled with all kinds of products, but it was impossible for ordinary citizens to go there - any attempts ended in arrest. Sometimes such ideas reached the point of absurdity - the streets were washed away, and responsible party workers dressed up as peasants. It was not for nothing that such performances were staged; the French Prime Minister, who visited Ukraine, said that he found himself in a real “blooming garden.”
There is still no exact number of people who died from hunger, but some researchers put the figure at up to seven million people; it’s not for nothing that the census that the USSR conducted in 1937 was classified. Unfortunately, only in recent years has a truthful assessment of the events of the nightmares of 1932-33 been given in the Union.
For a long time, the tragedy that occurred in the Katyn Forest was kept secret, and the world community pretended that it knew nothing about these events. The USSR hid the horrors of mass executions with the help of Great Britain and the USA.
Relations between Poland and the USSR have always been very difficult. In 1939, the fourth partition of Poland took place, more than half a million Poles were captured by the Soviets, the majority of the Soviet authorities handed over to German troops, and about forty thousand ended up in Soviet camps.
In 1940, Beria told Stalin that many former Polish officers, members of reconnaissance units and nationalists were being held in camps on the territory of Poland and the Union. Thus, more than 25,000 Polish citizens were branded, whose past did not please the USSR authorities. It was customary to examine their personal affairs with special care and shoot them. In April, those sentenced in groups of 350-400 people were taken to the Katyn Forest to be shot, an especially dangerous overcoat was thrown over their heads and they were shot in the back of the head near the ditch, while German-made pistols were used; later the USSR used this fact at the Nuremberg tribunal, trying to prove that the murders were committed Germans during the occupation of the USSR. The USSR adhered to this opinion until 1990, categorically denying its guilt.
However, Great Britain and the United States knew about the guilt of the Soviet Union. So Churchill, in informal conversations, confirmed that this was the work of the Bolsheviks, but at the same time censored the English press in this matter. Roosevelt also did not want to openly blame Stalin; evidence that the government knew about the Union’s guilt surfaced in the United States only in 1952.
The arms race that began immediately after the end of the war gave a sharp impetus to the engineering developments of the Soviet Union. One of these new products was the Ekranoplan.
In the mid-60s, an American spy satellite managed to take pictures of an unfinished Soviet seaplane. The Americans were amazed by the enormous size of the flying vessel - there was nothing like it in the USA. Moreover, American experts said that such a huge wing span would not even allow the plane to take off. Size was not the only oddity of the aircraft. Its engines were located too close to the nose of the vehicle than to its wings. However, the Americans failed to unravel the secrets of the flying object, until the collapse of the USSR.
The classified object turned out to be the Caspian Sea Monster - an ekranoplane, a kind of device that combined an airplane and a ship that could fly just a few meters from the surface of the water.
The developments were top secret; even the name of the device could not be mentioned. Huge amounts of money were allocated for the project, as the developers hoped that such ecoplanes would be very useful in the future. It was assumed that such “Monsters” would be able to transport hundreds of soldiers and tanks at a speed of about five hundred kilometers per hour, while they would be completely invisible to radar. The total weight of the ekranoplan with cargo could reach five hundred tons. The device was supposed to be equipped with fuel-efficient engines that would consume less fuel than many cargo planes. During development, the designers managed to build only one such ecronoplane, the length of which was two and a half times greater than the Boeing, it was equipped with eight jet engines and six warheads with a nuclear charge.
During the first flight of the ekranoplan, which was built at the Nizhny Novgorod plant and the Aircraft Building named after S. Ordzhonikidze, the giant's designer Rostislav Alekseev himself was at the helm. The tests lasted fifteen years, and in 1980, during an accident, the ekranoplan was destroyed.
Unfortunately, the Soviet people were very often characterized by negligence and a disregard for their work, which very often led to accidents and disasters. One of these large-scale disasters was the Nedelin disaster. It occurred during preparations for the first launch of the R-16 intercontinental missile.
Half an hour before the expected launch of the rocket, one of the engines started, as a result, the fuel tanks were destroyed, and the rocket fuel began to ignite. During the investigation, it was revealed that the day before there had been a breakthrough in the membrane of one of the tanks, and the fuel was not drained in violation of instructions. To speed up preparations for the launch, an external ampoule battery was installed on board the rocket, an hour before the launch, which led to the appearance of voltage in the electrical circuits of the rocket, which led to the contacts closing and an explosion.
By all rights, the rocket should have been sent for rechecking, and this would have dragged on for several months. The missile launch was commanded by the Commander-in-Chief of the Missile Forces, Mitrofan Nedelin, who reacted rather superficially to the breakdown in the missile that occurred the day before, especially since he had an order to launch the missile on the Day of the Great October Revolution. The explosion that occurred was of a terrifying scale - all the people on the launch site died, the temperature was so enormous that the surface of the site was melted, which is why no one was able to escape - everyone was burned alive. More than eighty people died in the disaster, and about fifty were injured.
All information about the disaster was carefully classified; no official statements were made. It was announced that the commander of the missile forces, M. Nedelin, died in a plane crash. All the relatives of the victims were told that their relatives had died as a result of an accident. However, the information and tragedies still found their way into the foreign media, and already at the end of 1960, the Italians reported a disaster in which one hundred people died, and five years later in England, one of the exposed Soviet intelligence officers confirmed the data on the disaster. The USSR first announced the disaster only in 1989 in the magazine Ogonyok, where an essay was published.
At the end of the forties, the Soviet Union created a top-secret laboratory on one of the islands of the Aral Sea, which was developing the latest biological weapons. The main developments were carried out with the bubonic plague and anthrax viruses. Later, smallpox joined these strains.
It is believed that in 1971 they managed to develop a vaccine-resistant smallpox virus, which in 1990 may have been sold to Iraq as a bacteriological weapon. It was in 1971 that the developed virus was tested outdoors, leading to a severe outbreak of smallpox. Ten people were infected. Quarantine was urgently introduced for several hundred people, and more than fifty thousand local residents of the Aral Sea region were vaccinated. All data about the smallpox outbreak was classified; they learned about it only at the beginning of the 21st century, since the Russian authorities also did not recognize what had happened.
In Soviet times, there were cities that were not marked on more than one map; only those who lived there knew about their existence. Such cities received their status due to the location of secret objects of national importance in them. It was impossible for an ordinary person to get there due to the strict access system and the secrecy of the city's location. As a rule, they were given the name of the regional center with the addition of a number, for example Penza - 19. Such secrecy often helped to hide the disasters that happened here, as in the case of the radioactive disaster in Chelyabinsk - 65. However, these cities also had advantages - they were well supplied, goods were always in short supply here, and the crime rate was almost zero. It was very difficult to get a job in such a city - they checked relatives almost up to the 5th generation.
Each of these cities had its own secret specifics. Thus, in Zagorsk-6 there was a Virological Institute, Arzamas-16 was engaged in nuclear weapons, in Sverdlovsk-45 they were engaged in uranium enrichment. Later, relatives of residents were allowed to come to some cities, but for this they underwent strict verification by special authorities. In total, according to available data, there were forty-two closed cities in the Union, but fifteen of them are closed now.
Laurel Hamilton Stories from the collection "Strange Candy" Translation of the magazine Translation Laurell`s works http://harlequin-book.livejournal.com/ Welcome to that part of my world that is most often poured out on paper. Some people see in my stories the premises of a more serious work. The final story, “The Girl Who Loved Death,” was selected by my editor for a collection of stories by mystery authors. So any of my readers could familiarize themselves with it along with the stories of other authors in the anthology. As for the rest of the stories in the collection, they were written...
Brass Moon: Stories by Asar Eppel
Asar Eppel gained fame as a master of short prose back in the nineties, publishing first abroad and then in Russia two books of stories, “Grass Street” and “The Champignon of My Life,” which were translated in many European countries. This was followed by “Crushed Satan”, “Sweet Air and Other Stories” and high awards for literary work, which Asar Eppel - a brilliant translator of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bruno Schulz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Brecht, Kipling - received before: the officer's cross of the Polish Order of Merit , medal “For Merit...
Phantom Taxi (collection of stories) Dmitry Suslin
In the spring of 1999, I came to the editorial office of the SCH-Stolitsa newspaper and brought the story “The Death of the White King.” After the newspaper was published, the public liked the story so much that I began to write further, trying to make each story look like a real report from the life of the city. And people believed that everything that was written actually happened, and alarmed citizens called the editorial office all day long. People passed newspaper sheets to each other, and they passed from hand to hand, and their fame spread far beyond the borders of Cheboksary. “He’s not Stephen King yet, but reading his stories...
Stories by William Faulkner
These Thirteen (1930) Victory Ad Astra They're All Dead Those Old Pilots Cleft Red Leaves A Rose for Emily Justice Hair When Night Falls Dry September Mistral Divorce in Naples Carcassonne Dr. Martineau (1934) Smoke Full Turn Around Wash Come Down, Moses (1942) Was Fire and Hearth Black Harlequinade Old Men Autumn in the Delta Horse's Move (1949) Hand Outstretched on the Waters Error in the Chemical Formula Seven Stories (1950) Arsonist Tall People Bear Hunt Mule in the Yard...
Requiems (Stories) Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
The cycle of stories “Requiems” initiates the reader into the problem of death as a separate, independent subject of artistic depiction. At the same time, the concept of death is considered by L. Petrushevskaya in a variety of manifestations. This is the death of marital love (“I love you”), and the collapse of the bright hopes of youth, the loss of optimism in life (“Jewish Verochka”), and the dying of the soul, spiritual degradation (“The Lady with the Dogs”), and the loss of compassion for someone else’s misfortune (“ Who will answer?"
The Sorcerer in October (collection of stories) Mikhail Babkin
The collection “The Sorcerer in October” includes 12 short stories by Mikhail Babkin. They are all about how magic bursts into our everyday lives without asking and what comes out of it. Accordingly, fairies, demons, sorcerers, Santa Claus, the serpent Ermungand and even V.I. Lenin himself suddenly appear among the characters - the most ordinary people.
Scary tales about Shgar. Story five: “about... Rustam Niyazov
Despite the fact that in this story about the glorious city of Shgar, we will talk about a completely different city, no less glorious, the terrible story will not become more gratifying, and the thought of how strong is the habit in us of judging loved ones, not giving them the opportunity to defend themselves from our court - this thought is depressing, without any doubt...
Stories of the Hedgehog Victor Dan
This book is about the adventures of the Hedgehog. In his stories, the Hedgehog will share life observations and conclusions from meetings with the inhabitants of the garden and its surroundings: the Mistress, the Worm, the Snake, the Magpie and many others. For children of preschool and primary school age, as well as for adults who will read the book to their children and grandchildren.
Stories, feuilletons, pamphlets Jaroslav Hasek
The first volume of the Works of the Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek (1883-1923) includes stories, feuilletons, and pamphlets written in 1901-1908. Translation from Czech Compilation and notes by S. V. Nikolsky The text is printed according to the edition: Hasek Yaroslav. Collected works in six volumes. T1.– M.: Fiction, 1983.
The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer
“The Canterbury Tales” by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340? – 1400) is one of the first literary monuments in a single common English language. The book clearly demonstrated the remarkable qualities of Chaucerian humanism: optimistic life-affirmation, interest in a specific person, a sense of social justice, nationality and democracy. The Canterbury Tales is a framed collection of short stories. Taking as a basis the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury, Chaucer painted a broad canvas of English reality...
White and Black (Stories) Leonid Sergeev
The writer's new book contains stories about animals. Some of them are cheerful, they contain the joy of communicating with living beings. Others are sad because we are talking about people who treat animals cruelly. But all the stories are united by the author’s concern for the fate of “our little brothers.” CONTENTS: Buran, Polkan and others Grass near our house At the forester Gray Trickster Anchar A fairy tale for Alyonka White and Black Ryzhik My hedgehog friends Menagerie in my apartment
The lives of remarkable people: Tales and stories Vyacheslav Pietsukh
Everyone enjoys communicating with a wonderful person, even if he (or she) is no longer in this world. You can talk mentally, or even write a letter... So to speak, into space and eternity. But, most importantly, you should remember that wonderful people sometimes meet in completely unexpected places. For example, in the next apartment. And the fact that every village in our country has its own wonderful thing is a verified fact. Want to make sure? Read the stories that Vyacheslav Pietsukh wrote down for you - also, by the way, absolutely wonderful! The collection includes the following...
Secrets of Lubyanka: a view from Britain
Oleg Gordievsky is a spy. Or, to put it more elegantly, an agent of foreign intelligence. In this case, the English one, which he served faithfully for more than a decade.
Gordievsky is not the first KGB officer to commit an act of treason against his homeland: in Kryukov’s KGB, at least half a dozen security officers were caught red-handed while conducting espionage operations for other states. He managed to escape the networks of counterintelligence and is now enjoying the fruits of freedom with his family somewhere in a well-fed English province.
No matter how we judge the actions of our compatriots who changed the geography of their place of residence, fled or emigrated from the country of developed socialism, the attitude towards spies is always unambiguous. And not only here. Kim Philby, John Walker, Heinz Felfe, hundreds of other people who in the past connected their lives with Soviet intelligence and sometimes worked for it with the most noble motives, are criminals in the eyes of the people they betrayed. They will remain so in the history of different peoples, no matter what clothes they dressed themselves in during their lifetime.
What has been said does not mean at all that spies are inveterate scoundrels and untalented creatures who cannot or do not want to earn their daily bread in a righteous way. Rather, on the contrary: living a double life for many years, constantly walking on the edge of a knife, wearing the guise of a loyal citizen and a respectable family man, carefully following the instructions of one superior and then secretly running with a report to another is not an easy task, requiring not only good mental health, but also extraordinary acting abilities, the gift of transformation, in which masterly deception crowns all the player’s efforts.
Oleg Gordievsky probably belonged to this category of spies. He can easily be put on the same level as Penkovsky, a colonel of Soviet military intelligence who collaborated with the British in the 60s. Unlike Penkovsky, who ended his life on death row, Gordievsky was lucky: he not only escaped a well-deserved punishment, but also wrote a book in collaboration with Christopher Andrew: “KGB. The history of foreign policy operations from Lenin to Gorbachev." This book was published for the first time in England in 1990 and is now becoming available to the Russian public.
Without mincing words, I will say: a more thorough and reliable study about Soviet intelligence has not yet been published by anyone or anywhere.
Of course, even before 1990, the Western book market offered the reader in abundance memoirs of former KGB and GRU employees (Orlov, Deryabin, Khokhlov, Golitsyn, Levchenko, Suvorov), works of numerous Sovietologists devoted to the activities of the Soviet state security agencies (Conquest, Dallin, Epstein, Hanson , Hingley, etc.) But perhaps the most noisy success was the book about the KGB by John Barron, published in several editions after the scandal with Soviet “diplomats” in London in 1971. Unfortunately, this bestseller contains a lot of fabrications, gossip, distortions and inaccuracies. It can rather be classified as a fascinating read than as a detailed and verified story about the all-powerful Soviet department.
Gordievsky's book compares favorably with all previous publications on this topic with a full-fledged retrospective analysis of the formation and development of intelligence structures in Russia and the USSR. It contains rich material previously inaccessible to the average citizen and the press, and clearly reveals the mechanism of functioning of the most closed system of a totalitarian state. Giving credit to Gordievsky himself as the author, I cannot help but say that a significant part of the book came from the pen of Christopher Andrew. This concerns, first of all, episodes from the activities of Soviet intelligence, which Gordievsky, due to his official position, could not have known about. Thus, the case of the murder of the Bulgarian writer, emigrant G. Markov was known to a very limited circle of people, and Gordievsky did not have access to it. Many of the pages devoted to the work of Soviet intelligence in the United States were apparently written by Christopher Andrew based on materials from American intelligence agencies and the testimony of defectors from among the former KGB officers. However, this is the advantage of the book: it covers broad layers and gives a global vision of problems.
The reader will probably want to gallop through the first hundred pages, which describes the history of the emergence of the Russian political police and its direct successor, the Cheka, and plunge into modern times with its twisted plots and many familiar names. Don't rush. To understand the roots and origins of our present-day troubles, it is necessary to know how and where it all began. But to know not from the “Short Course” and textbooks of the Ministry of Education, not from slick and sterile historical monographs, but from unbiased, objective sources, which this book can serve as. The role of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky in organizing mass terror, the “Lockhart conspiracy” and the figure of the British spy Sidney Reilly, the activities of the Comintern and the “successes” of the Cheka-GPU on the domestic front will be seen in a new way. An entire chapter is devoted to Stalin and his relationship with law enforcement agencies. The history of the preparation for the murder of Trotsky is described in detail. Sorge, Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt - names that once filled the headlines of all newspapers in the world, except Soviet ones, now, thanks to this book, are depicted in portraits and, undoubtedly, will become closer and more understandable to those for whom they made enormous sacrifices .
The activities of Soviet agents in the United States during World War II are clearly presented. Stalin's state security, taking advantage of the friendly disposition of the Roosevelt administration towards its ally in the East, managed to weave a very effective spy network in Washington. However, Gordievsky is in vain throwing shade at the president's closest adviser, Harry Hopkins. In those years, sympathy for the warring Russia was so strong in American society that any official could be classified as an agent by unscrupulous security officers only because of his willingness to share information and treat favorably the requests of Soviet representatives.
