Fiction review: Red to Black

FICTION
Missile-flaunting parades orchestrated by burly, expressionless Soviet leaders in Red Square might be distant memories. But Alex Dryden, a British journalist who reported from Russia during the collapse of communism there, wants us to know we're still not safe. Russia under the rule of Vladimir Putin is simply a continuation of the Soviet regime, no matter what the stories of Russian entrepreneurs might suggest.

And Dryden has written a superb spy novel to prove it.

Why write a novel instead of a hard-hitting piece of reportage? It comes down to survival, Dryden claims in the promotional material that accompanied review copies of "Red to Black."

"The Kremlin and its allies under Putin do not want uncomfortable truths to be published and they go to any lengths to prevent that happening," Dryden writes. "It would be a brave -- or foolish -- publisher who went up against these forces and the financial support of the Russian state that backs them." Fiction, he adds, is "the only way to convey the truth in publishable form."

Paranoid? Overstated? Maybe. (Dryden is a pseudonym, by the way.) But the warning bell that "Red to Black" sounds against Putin's Russia has a powerful ring, especially when it turns to the KGB.

The KGB (which now operates under the guise of renamed agencies) understood the Soviet Union's dire economic circumstances before Communist Party bosses did, Dryden writes in "Red to Black." The agency was thus well-positioned to claim overt leadership through Yuri Andropov, the first KGB leader to become the nation's president. Eighteen years later, at the start of the new millennium, Putin became the second.

Remember John McCain's line about Putin in last year's presidential campaign? "I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters: a K and a G and a B." Dryden tells us why he thinks the Republican presidential candidate was right, and why we should worry. In the post-Soviet years, Dryden writes in "Red to Black," the KGB and the Russian mafia -- "the first to benefit from perestroika" -- "were married in a devil's pact."

When it's not inducing anxiety attacks, "Red to Black" is an entertaining book, mixing espionage and romance in equal measure.

The year is 1999, and Anna, the KGB's youngest female colonel and the daughter of one of its leaders, has been assigned to spy on Finn, a British secret agent stationed in Moscow. Soon, though, she finds herself falling in love with him. He takes her into his confidence, warning her of a mysterious KGB plan, though without revealing details. Then, as MI6 prepares to move him back to England, he suggests she leave with him.

Despite misgivings, Anna decides to stay in Russia. But when her superiors order her to follow Finn and find out how he learned about their top-secret plan -- which, we learn, threatens Europe's autonomy -- she finds she's again forced to make tough decisions about her alliances. If she follows her heart and sides with Finn, do the two of them have the power to stand up against Putin's might?

With only a handful of action scenes, "Red to Black" has more in common with the elegantly paced books of John le Carré than it does with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. But readers who appreciate a healthy dose of real-world worries in their spy novels won't complain.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.