Stalin’s Apostles
Published by: Hodder & Stoughton
The legacy of the Cambridge Five is not only in the graveyards of eastern Europe, but at the heart of Putin’s Kremlin.
Using recently declassified files, Stalin’s Apostles is an enthralling (and chilling) exploration of the treachery of Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, John Cairncross and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures Anthony Blunt, all radicalised while at Cambridge University in the 1930s. Thanks to Stalin’s Cambridge spies there was barely a secret, barely a decision made, that he did not know about, The Five became tools in Stalin’s imperial scheme, responsible directly and indirectly for the death of thousands of men and women fighting against Soviet domination.
As Stalin’s Apostles reveals, they were exposed as much by their own incompetence as by forensic investigation by the CIA, MI5 or MI6. And in time another dictator emerged as ruthless as Stalin, but with an even greater desire to establish a Russian Empire that would threaten Western democracy.
Read an extract from the book here.
Our judges said:
Stalin's Apostles is gripping and superbly written, evoking the times and places its characters inhabit as well as any spy novel. But despite the quality of the writing and the buffoonery of its subjects, Senior has written a serious work of history that takes the Cambridge Five, and their crimes, deeply seriously. She gives due prominence to their many victims, and shows just how important they were to the Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. This is a book that entirely rewrites a story that many people may think they know.
