Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe

By: Valentina Glajar - Edited by, Alison Lewis - Edited by, Corina L. Petrescu - Edited by

Narrated by: James Anderson Foster, Christa Lewis

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate forgotten spy stories for the first time. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

©2019 the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska (P)2019 Tantor

Not stories. It's an academic book ABOUT stories.

The cover and title lead you to think it a collection of stories. It's an academic book about stories of cold War spies during the cold War.

A Fresh Look at the Cold War

These studies of official files, biographical information, and popular culture reveal new perspectives on the human side of the Cold War.

How is this not interesting???

I don’t understand why this book wasn’t interesting. I deeply enjoy true spy stories! OSS, CIA, Stasi, KGB, it’s all great stuff! But this book was just bland. It was so procedural, lacking of any real hook, it was as if they wanted to prepare the stories simply by listing off facts without any semblance of novelization.