Stalin's apostles The Cambridge Five and the making of the Soviet empire

In this labyrinthine history, journalist Senior (The Tyrant's Shadow) recaps the exploits of the Cambridge Five. Kim Philby, John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and Anthony Blun became ardent communists in the 1930s while studying at Cambridge and were recruited by Soviet agents to seek government positions with access to wartime secrets. The intelligence they produced was so voluminous that Moscow analysts had trouble reading it all, Senior writes, and included crucial information on Anglo-American war plans and the atomic bomb program. The author particularly highlights the spies' role in helping Stalin consolidate Soviet rule over Eastern Europe during the early Cold War, including providing intelligence that led to the execution of Western spies in Soviet territory. Senior's colorful narrative portrays spying as a decidedly shambolic enterprise: at the Bletchley Park cryptanalysis compound, Cairncross would scoop top secret documents off the floor and stuff them down his pants; on one occasion, a handler found an alcoholic Burgess "in the toilets, where all the precious Foreign Office documents had spilled out of his briefcase and onto the floor." Senior also makes it a semi-tragic story of idealism corrupted by ideology, facilitated by an establishment "chapocracy" that held well-bred Cambridge chaps to be incapable of such treachery--and then shielded them after they were exposed. Elegantly written and stocked with charismatic, spectacularly flawed characters, it's a captivating, psychologically probing spy saga. (May)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.