Albats, Yevgenia. Tr., Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia -- Past Present, and Future. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. London: I.B. Tauris, 1995. Albats, Yevgenia. Tr., Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia -- Past Present, and Future. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. London: I.B. Tauris, 1995.
Gordievsky, I&NS 11.3, views Albats as "the best independent expert on the KGB in Russia," and calls this book "the best and most competent investigation about the KGB and its transformation over the last 4-5 years." Surveillant 3.6 comments that the author "claims that the KGB engineered perestroika and repositioned itself at the top." Mathers, I&NS 13.2, calls State Within a State "a powerful and emotive book"; it is "based primarily on the author's extensive interviews with KGB employees and their victims."
According to Warren, CIRA Newsletter 20.1, "Albats uses her access to the wealth of released documents following glasnost, interviews with newly accessible KGB officers and newly accessible victims of previous KGB actions, and solid reportorial techniques to document that the KGB has not only survived but prospered under democracy." Albats concludes that "the KGB still lives" and is "regaining its lost positions" and "reclaiming the role of behind-the-scenes orchestrator."
Valcourt, IJI&C 8.2, notes that "Albats warns of overoptimism" even as "the Western world continues to celebrate the fall of the Marxist empire.... She documents the continuance in power of former KGB officers and staff members often disguised as private entrepreneurs.... During the Gorbachev-Boris Yeltsin era, the KGB has grown, not shrunk.... The secret police continuance in power at the Moscow level is richly detailed by Albats.... [C]ontemporary events sustain Albats's ... persuasive argument that the KGB continues to be the 'State Within a State' and is likely to remain that way."
Andrew, Christopher,
and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations
from Lenin to Gorbachev. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. [pb] JN6529I6A53
Chambers calls this work "compendious and well written; the place to start." According to Cram, "the majority of reviewers, especially the professional experts, lauded the book not only as a good read but also as an invaluable reference work."
For Clive, Government and Opposition 26.2, this is the "most authoritative history of the KGB and its predecessors." On the other hand, Evans, IJI&C 5.1, says this is a "well-written history..., [but] there are too many errors for KGB to be recommended without qualification." Accepting the work's imperfections, Howard, WPNWE, 24-30 Dec. 1990, argues that Andrew and Gordievsky's picture of the KGB is "likely to be more valuable for its outline than for its details."
Surveillant 2.1 sees KGB as an "[o]utstanding, scholarly, comprehensive, well-written, authoritative, narrative treatment of the history of Russian state security and intelligence services." This is a "commendable piece of work by a competent, disciplined historian with limited experience in the subject matter, and a former Soviet intelligence officer with limited first-hand knowledge of the subject. It is far and away the best treatment of Soviet intelligence that has appeared to-date." However, "numerous minor errors of fact crept in the hardback edition"; but many of these "have been cleared up in th[e] paperback edition." In addition, the "simple attribution of so much material to 'Gordievsky' without qualification of his sources raises some questions." This latter point is also made by Robertson, I&NS 7.3, who wonders whether "anything that might be termed research was undertaken at all" in the chapter on the Gorbachev Era.
Knightley, Spectator, 3 Nov. 1990, believes that the book clearly shows the mark of both co-authors. Andrew's "diligent research and narrative skill" are evident, but so is Gordievsky's background as "an ideological defector." The latter leads to "a smear" of Harry Hopkins "which can only be described as shameful." Because Andrew is "a conscientious academic,... we could have expected him to have inserted a few caveats into Gordievsky's story."
In a lengthy review essay in Atlantic, Mar. 1991, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., takes the book and its authors to task for the accusation against Harry Hopkins. He concludes that the story as presented is weakly sourced (a lecture heard by Gordievsky when he was a trainee), full of textual contradictions, and probably related to the authors' reputed six-figure advances.
Powers, NYRB (11 May 2000) and Intelligence Wars (2004), 93, finds that Andrew has "seeded a comprehensive account of the KGB and its predecessors with nuggets of new material provided by Gordievsky." [fn. omitted]
Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin.
1. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1999. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Click for reviews.
2. The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Click for reviews.
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