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As new condition black boards with a white cloth spine and red spine lettering contained in an as new condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Emil Draitser; Author Dedication; Preliminary Page Quotes; Foreword by Gary Kern; Acknowledgments; Notes on Sources, Transliterations, and Translation; Abbreviations and Terms; Prologue; Afterword; Notes; Selected Bibliography; Index and About the Author. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographs. "Dmitri Bystrolyotov (1901-1975) led a life that might seem far-fetched, even for a spy novel, yet here the truth is stranger than fiction. In Stalin's Romeo Spy, a private meeting in Moscow in 1973 eventually prompts Emil Draitser into years of meticulous research, piercing together a tumultuous career played out in the shadows of the twentieth century. A sailor, artist, doctor, lawyer, and writer, fluent in many languages, Bystrolyotov was the Russian equivalent of the British "Ace of Spies." Sydney Reilly. One of the "Great Illegals," a team of outstanding Soviet spies operating in Western countries between the world wars, Bystrolyotov was a dashing man whose modus operandi was the seduction of women - among them a French Embassy employee, the wife of a British official, and a disfigured Gestapo officer. He stole military secrets from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and enabled Stalin to look into the diplomatic pouches of many European countries. Idealistically committed to his Motherland, he showed extraordinary courage and physical prowess - twice crossing the Sahara Desert and the jungles of Congo. But in 1938, Draitser's story turns itself inside out. At the height of Stalin's purges, after his return to the Soviet Union, Bystrolyotov was arrested and tortured. Sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag, he risked more severe punishment by documenting the regime's crimes against humanity. With amazing stamina, he survived the repression and came to realize the true nature of the ideology he once had served unquestioningly. Bystrolyotov's first book-length biography in any language, Stalin's Romeo Spy comes at a time when the FSB, the current successor to the KGB, claims Bystrolyotov as its hero while suppressing the truth about his life." - from the inner front jacket flap. "Bystrolyotov, as Draitser tells it, is one of the most sensational in the pantheon of desperate lives live by Stalin's illegals. By turns routine, thrilling, conventional, extraordinary, disquieting, disgusting, pathetic, and inspiring, [the spy's life story] stirs emotions of both revulsion and respect, even as it adds a new and instructive chapter to a bleak and terrifying period of history. In this case, the hero chose his biographer well: no one but Draitser could have written this book." - Gary Kern, author. "An amazing true-life saga. Books on intelligence rarely allow the reader the breadth and depth that this biography has, and even more rarely do we get a look into the motivation and thinking behind the acts as we do here. Bystrolyotov's life is extraordinary, literally another world from the one we inhabit, and a fascinating read." - Suzi Weissman, author. "Fascinating. Illuminates the inner workings of the Soviet spy network in Europe and the United States in the 1930s. Adventurers who lived for the thrill and excitement of spying, they believed that they worked for the glorious future of the whole of mankind, while in fact serving a criminal country with a Mafia-like oligarchy that included Stalin and his close associates. No wonder that eventually they were betrayed by the very regime they worked for.The book is extremely timely now when in Russia, ruled by a small group of former security service officers, Bystrolyotov is proclaimed one of the greatest heroes of the country's foreign intelligence." - Vadim J. Birstein, author.
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