The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire
Antonia Senior persuasively shifts focus onto the victims, revealing the human cost of Kim Philby and his fellow traitors' leaking of operations behind the Iron Curtain.
Consider a boy. His name is Vasilli Ivanovich Bardeish. He has a weak chin, and jug ears which stick out sideways from his head. In May 1951, he is 22 years old.
Vasilli has had the great misfortune to be born in Ukraine in 1929. To two vicious totalitarian dictators he is just a speck of clay, to be pummelled and trampled until he has become moulded into the stuff of their utopian visions. It is a miracle that he is alive in 1951. He has been through a famine, a dekulakisation, a Great Terror, a devastating war. He has been taken prisoner, languished in camps, laboured in fields far from home. He has been an unhappy exile.
