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Farewell (2011)

by Sergei Kostin(Favorite Author)

3.36 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

AmazonCrossing

review 1: Fascinating story about a KGB mole I never knew anything about. Most of the book is very good, I found it to be a real page turner, then it slows down as it turns to speculation, which is only fair since stories of espionage on this scale will rarely have its numerous facts acknowledged or confirmed. Getting insight into the workings of the KGB and PGU in this period is told with quite a lot of detail, and I get a real sense of the place. That the DST could pull this off and how, makes for interesting reading too. Vetrov was an intriguing character and I think this is worthy reading for anyone interested in Cold War espionage.
review 2: Monsieur Kostin has managed to pull off the rare feat of making an interesting topic dead boring! Imagine a story of a carou... moresing, adulterous KGB agent with a knack for quoting old French poetry who decides to betray the Soviet Union's best kept secrets to the French. His handlers are amateurs who have no training stagecraft and oh by the way, it could be argued that his contributions (betrayal depending on your perspective) played the largest part in ending the cold war! To me that sounds rather interesting (in fact so interesting they made a movie loosely based on the book) but Kostin and his co-author take all the joy out of the story. This book would make even the most die hard civil war student want to gouge his/her eyes out from boredom. There is a lot of superfluous information and the flow of the book is not conducive to easy reading. I actually think the authors suffer from lack of ambition or focus because the book begins by making the assertion that Vladimir Vetrov may have been the most important cold war spy and then proceeds to spend a third of the book on his courtship with his wife. While this may have been important to understand his motivation and psyche, it leaves little room to support the thesis proposed in the beginning. The book should have been longer allowing for a greater analysis of his impact on the cold war, otherwise it's just a story about a guy who was convicted of murdering a witness and attempted murder of his mistress. less

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