Secret Servant

"In Secret Servant, one of the most important Soviet defectors of recent years offers an engrossing firsthand portrait of his four decades in a superpower shrouded in secrecy. Disillusioned--but never a dissident--Ilya Dzhirkvelov lays bare the workings of the KGB, its command structure and operational techniques, the intrigues and corruption, during his 37 years of service to the Soviet Union. As he details his rise through the ranks under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, he unflinchingly recounts his undercover activities in Russia, Europe, and Africa--from bugging embassies and recruiting foreign journalists to eliminating Soviet enemies. As a KGB trainee he was privy to how Stalin outwitted Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta; as a TASS correspondent he specialized in disinformation campagins abroad; as a top bureaucrat he saw the decision-making process of the Communist Party Central Committee, and studied the Soviet social elite and the evolution of its attitudes. Today, wanted as a Soviet traitor, Dzhirkvelov insists that but for the personal injustice that prompted his dramatic 1980 escape, he would still be a "secret servant" of the regime he followed so long and so loyally." -- Back cover.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.