Fleeing the MVD

...And the Petrovs were successful enough to be posted as espionage agents in the Soviet Embassies in Sweden and Australia— assignments given only to the most reliable Communists...

...It rescued them from poverty, misery and Tsarist oppression and gave them a place in the sun...

...After Hungary, Poland and Ni-kita Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin, it would seem that little could be added to the history of Soviet terrorism...

...For there is increasing evidence that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Petrovs in the satellites and the Soviet Union, and that, four decades after the Bolsheviks seized power, the "collective leaders" are beginning to learn that while fear can break man's spirit it will not stifle forever his longing for human decency and freedom...

...Empire of Fear is an unusually honest book whose primary interest depends less on what it reveals than on who does the revealing...

...It deserves to be widely read...

...It was ostensibly for their sake—the children of the oppressed workers and peasants—that Lenin and his fellow-conspirators overthrew Kerensky's democratic regime in 1917 and established the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat...

...Here is their answer: "What we have to describe is something far more dreadful than a country of general poverty and shortages...

...And Bolshevism, at least in its early idealistic period, was good to Vladimir and Evdokia and millions like them...

...Theirs, too...

...Burgess and MacLean...

...What made the Petrovs defect was not moral revulsion (since they themselves were among the masters) or collapse of ideological conviction but fear—the fear that, after the execution of their chief Lavrenti Beria, they too at long last faced liquidation or slave labor...

...It is a society which we see in clearer perspective since we left it—a regime of universal fear...

...author, "Trouble Zone" a position to disclose the ultimate fate of Rykov and Radek, the conspiracy to murder Leon Trotskv, and the careers of Britain's Oxford-bred traitors...

...is the only intimate and detailed account of the last days of the fabulous Alexandra kollontai, one of the few of Lenin's close collaborators who escaped Stalin's execution squads and apparently died in bed...

...Flesh of revolutionary flesh" is what Trotsky once called the generation of which the Petrovs are typical representatives...

...Both children of poor peasants, the authors of Empire of Fear were drawn by the opportunities for education and advancement that the Soviet regime offered...

...There is no doubt, as the publisher claims, that Empire of Fear is a earing revelation of life in the Soviet bureaucracy, a treatise on Soviet spying techniques, and a study in blunted moral sense and perverted ambition...

...What higher achievement can there be in a totalitarian police state than to become a trusted and well-paid member of the secret police...

...Yet, Empire of Fear, because it is essentially a human document— naive in many respects and even unconsciously apologetic—sheds new light on hitherto obscure facets of Stalin's and his successors' rule by fear and torture...

...What, then, drove them in 1954 to desert the Soviet secret police and apply for refuge in Australia...

...But it is not so much the authors' revelations that interest us as the human element, the personality of the Petrovs themselves...

...As former fairly high-ranking agents of the Soviet secret police, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov are in Revieived by Leon Dennen Foreign correspondent...