The Private Life of Kim Philby Book

The name of Kim Philby--along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and George Blake--is synonymous with treachery: a spy, at the very heart of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), working for the Soviet Union. Plenty has been written about Philby, but very little about the years he spent in Moscow after he was unmasked and fled to his masters. This book redresses that balance. About half of the book is a very personal account by Rufina Philby, his Russian wife for the last 18 years of his life. This tells little about Philby the spy, but a great deal about Philby the man: an Englishman to the last, exiled from his native land, increasingly lonely, unwilling to leave their apartment, utterly devoted to and dependent on his wife, 20 years younger than him, who struggled throughout their marriage to keep him from the bottle. It is a picture of a tormented man, frustrated by the KGB's reluctance to give him serious work to do; and also a remarkable inside view on the everyday difficulties of life in the Soviet Union. Senior KGB operatives were a regular part of their life, even accompanying them on holiday. The book also contains two chapters of the unfinished second volume of Philby's autobiography, a lecture he gave to KGB officers, and an article entitled "Should Agents Confess?" In addition, there is a fascinating personal assessment of Philby by one of closest KGB colleagues. Finally, for readers confused by all the conflicting accounts of Philby's life and work, there is an extremely detailed and valuable critique of the many books, as well as a thoroughly annotated bibliography and chronology. So how did Philby appear in his Moscow days? "To the occasional old friend who saw him, he remained the happy, even helpful, congenial rogue with his seedy charm intact," says editor Hayden Peake. And to Philby's favourite KGB student Michael Bogdanov, who writes the foreword to Rufina Philby's memoir, Philby's hallmark was an essentially British integrity; aged 20 "Philby swore to be true to the ideals of Communism, an oath he never betrayed." --David V. BarrettRead More