The Soviet Union began to seem to him a “vast, sterile concentration camp … a form of hell.” And finally, in 1968, when Russian tanks rolled into Prague to crush Czechoslovakia’s attempts at liberalization, Gordievsky arrived at his “Kronstadt” moment - so-named for the crisis of faith that came to the Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1921 when the infant Bolshevik Army brutally suppressed a rebellion by sailors in the port of Kronstadt, and later, to the American journalist and Soviet sympathizer Louis Fischer in 1939, with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

The Wall was going up, and he was amazed to realize, as he later wrote, that “only a physical barrier, reinforced by armed guards in their watchtowers, could keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise.” A few years later he was assigned to Copenhagen, where the shock lay in the plenitude of the West, its material riches and cultural openness. So it happened that Gordievsky’s first cultural shock took place in East Berlin in 1961. and embarked on a career he had reason to hope would give him access to foreign places. By the early 1960s, he had been recruited by the K.G.B. In time, his father’s status and his own obvious intelligence ensured his admission to Moscow’s most prestigious university. agent and loyal party member, he led a privileged life - nice apartment, enough food, no members of his immediate family executed in the basement of the Lubyanka, or sent to a Siberian gulag. But Gordievsky actually had little to complain of. Gordievsky was born in Moscow in 1938, fraught times, even by Soviet standards.

The spy and the traitor ben macintyre