Recommendations from our site
“The author, Owen Matthews, deals with the biography of Sorge in ways others haven’t. He goes to the sources; he goes to the archives. It’s a contribution in that sense. But it’s also one of the first books—along with Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor—in the genre of serious research but popularly written biographies of Russian spies. The majority of what is written about them is written in Russia, and now with Putin in power for close to 20 years, this is a very popular genre. It presents the Soviet intelligence agents as heroes. Owen Matthews’s work is much more balanced. It has bigger questions, about the character of the person, about the political landscape, about the choices that he made, about the state using intelligence but ignoring the information that came from it. That’s the kind of approach you don’t find in 99.9% of the books about the Soviet spies. In that sense, it’s an important book.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize
Serhii Plokhy, Historian
