Jonas Takors
‘The Russians could no longer be the heavies’: From Russia with Love and the Cold War in the Bond Series
Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love reflects themes of the early Cold War. 1950s Britain was deeply concerned with communist defectors, and cases like the Burgess Maclean affair made it to the headlines. Not only are two of the novel’s central characters defectors, but their vitae and actions are used to contrast the political systems of Britain and the Soviet Union. The USSR functions as a distorting mirror to highlight the advantages of British society over the enemy. Yet only six years later, changes in the Cold War’s political climate led to significant alterations in the adaptation of From Russia with Love for film. Anti-communist sentiments are toned down, and international terrorism poses a bigger threat than Anglo-Soviet antagonism. Thus two varia- tions of the same plot illustrate the Bond series’ versatility in mirroring and anticipating societal concerns.
1. Introduction: Spy Scares in 1950’s Britain Ian Fleming was obsessed with spy stories in real life. As an officer at the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), he had gained insight into the workings of the British intelligence machinery during the Second World War. Further- more, he had initiated many new projects himself. Some of them, such as the 30 Assault Unit, were a success, while other rather eccentric ones were never implemented.1 After the war, as a civilian writer and journalist, Fleming consumed all news from the world of espionage with an acute interest. He frequently drew the inspiration for his Bond novels from real incidents.2 In his preface to the first edition of From Russia with Love (1952) Flem- ing wrote:
1 Cf. John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp.101-161 and Ben Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), pp.14, 18f. 2 The head of SMERSH in From Russia with Love is based on a Soviet official and Rosa Klebb’s fictional vita is connected to that of the Spanish Revolutionary Andrés Nin as well as other historical personae, cf. Macintyre pp.99 and 104f. The murder on the Orient Ex- press was not copied from Agatha Christie’s story of the same name but mirrored the inci- dent of a defecting Romanian attaché called Eugene Karp, who was killed by Soviet counterintelligence in 1950, cf. Charlie Higson, ‘Introduction’, in From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming (London: Penguin, 2006), pp.v-viii (p.vii), also cf. Macintyre, p.106. At the very time of the publication of From Russia with Love, the Soviets broke into and publicly exposed the American tunnel built to intercept their cable traffic in Berlin, cf. Jeremy Black, The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p.28. This might be reflected in the tunnel which Ali Kerim Bey, in the novel, uses to observe the Russian consulate in Istanbul. 220 Jonas Takors
Not that it matters, but a great deal of the background to this story is accurate. SMERSH, a contraction of Smiert Spionam – Death to Spies – exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet3 government. At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikob was its chief. My description of his appearance is cor- rect. Today the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them - at No 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow. The Conference Room is faithfully described and the Intelligence chiefs who meet round the table are real officials who are frequently summoned to that room for purposes similar to those I have recounted.4 Unfortunately, these claims are wrong and have to be dismissed since the SMERSH agency had been disbanded as early as 1946. While Fleming’s misconception may in fact be attributed to the obscurity of Stalin’s secret state, this preface points at a larger issue:5 In the 1950s, both Great Britain and the United States were fascinated and shocked by the threat of Soviet moles spying on British society and the dangerous secrets which defecting individuals might carry to the other side of the Iron Curtain. The years between 1951 and 1956 when Fleming wrote the early Bond novels shook Britain’s self-confidence. The fear of a communist ‘fifth col- umn’ was on the rise.6 Most notably, the defection of the government offi- cials Burgess and Maclean from Great Britain to the Soviet Union, which became known as the story of the Cambridge Five, shocked the British intel- ligence apparatus and ruined its reputation especially in the US. After the scandal, the US were even more reluctant than before to share atomic secrets, and any hopes to repeal the restrictive McMahon act of 1946 were aban- doned.7 The case of Burgess and Maclean resurfaced in September 1955 when a White Paper was published.8 The ensuing parliamentary debate made it to the
3 Most contemporary British newspapers and Fleming himself kept referring to all citizens of the Soviet Union as “Russians”. While the term Soviets or Soviet people is a political con- ception, I will stick to this more inclusive denomination for the sake of coherence. 4 Tony Bennett and Janet Woolacott, ‘The Moments of Bond’, in The James Bond Phenome- non: A Critical Reader, ed. by Christoph Lindner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp.13-31 (pp.18f.; cf. p.37). 5 Cf. Macintyre, p.112 and n.n. ‘Russia Unveils Stalin Spy Service’, BBC (19 April 2003)