The Cold War years

In a Netflix serial scripted against the Cold War backdrop, Russian KGB agents are embedded in American society. Like Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, they step out from their shadows and from the comfort of their American identity only when they get orders from their handlers to execute a project, like ‘bomb a place’ or ‘kill’ someone. At times these KGB agents are torn between the country of their origin and their love for the American way of life. Many Hollywood offerings build on this ideological conflict of the agents and how they jettison their commitment to Marxism and Leninism and the stability of the Soviet state in favour of the US or the countries of the West.

Save for some documentation of the famed double agent, Kim Philby, who belonged to the British external intelligence service, MI6; there has been no mention of many other intellectuals and western spies who switched from the decadent West to the revolutionary Soviet Union. All this was before the sprawling Union cracked up in 1991, and Russia and the rest of the breakaway countries became sold to the Washington consensus pursuing the same neo-liberal economic policies.