STALIN'S APOSTLES

Reviled in the West—and honored by Putin.

Members of an elite, hyperintellectual Cambridge movement that flourished during the 1930s and read their Marx with reverence, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Kim Philby, and Guy Burgess were a soft touch for Soviet recruiters. That the USSR was dysfunctional and doomed is old news, but no one knew it at the time, and the story of five Britons who betrayed their nation continues to produce squirm-inducing accounts. Journalist Senior does an outstanding job here, with insights such as “Liberal democracies tend to inspire the soft loyalty owed to broad churches, whereas utopianism inspires fanatics.” Scholars since then (and a few contemporaries) discovered character flaws among the “Cambridge Five,” but their brilliance and membership in Britain’s select “chapocracy” meant that they were trusted and promoted. Senior reveals that the five spies delivered an avalanche of documents that regularly swamped bureaucrats in Moscow. During the war and for almost two decades following, Stalin was reading the personal correspondence between the U.S. president and the British prime minister, and when MI6 decided to pay closer attention to Soviet espionage late in the war, Philby was given the job. Perhaps their most significant accomplishment occurred just before and after the Nazi defeat. Stalin never objected to the Allies’ proclamation that they were fighting for freedom but worried that they were serious. Obsessed with keeping Poland and the Baltic states, which he had acquired in the 1939 pact with Hitler—and the Eastern European nations occupied by the Red Army—he was reassured by the spies that they would never force him out. More than most scholars, Senior emphasizes that these were loathsome men who worshiped a monster and caused suffering and death, not only to other spies but to masses of innocent civilians.

A darkly fascinating account of an infamous spy ring.