“Ian Fleming’s Soviet Rival: Roman Kim and Soviet Spy Fiction during the Early Cold War”, 2022-04-20 ():
This article focuses on the life of Roman Kim (1899–68196757ya), an ethnic Korean Soviet counterintelligence officer, and highlights his contribution to the Soviet spy fiction genre during the Cold War.
Kim was born in Vladivostok and educated in Japan. He was recruited by the VChK in the early 1920s and was involved in a variety of Soviet counterintelligence operations directed against Japan. Arrested and tortured during the Great Purge, he was the only Soviet Japanese intelligence expert to survive. Kim was released after the end of WWII and reinvented himself as a writer of spy fiction, arguing that the Soviet Union must score victories against the West on the literary front.
The article examines Kim’s impact on the literary Cold War by analyzing his most important spy fiction works, none of which have been translated into English, and chronicles his influence on the later generation of Soviet spy fiction writers, such as Yulian Semyonov and Vasily Ardamatsky, much better known in Russia and in the West.
…he was drafted by the anti-Bolshevik White Army led by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak which held sway in the Russian Far East at that time. As a person fluent in Japanese, Kim was assigned to a local military intelligence unit. He avoided being sent to the frontline by claiming that he was a Japanese citizen. This claim would come to haunt him in the NKVD torture chambers 20 years later when he was accused of being a Japanese spy.
…The most dramatic downturn in Kim’s life took place less than a year after his highest career triumph marked by the Red Star decoration. On 2 April 1937, Kim was arrested by his NKVD colleagues and accused of treason and espionage on behalf of Japan.15 He was then brutally tortured to extract his confession.16 This led Kim to take a desperate, paradoxical step. He told his interrogators that he was not just an ordinary Japanese spy, but the Japanese station chief in the Soviet Union and an illegitimate son of the former Japanese foreign minister. Nothing could be further from the truth, and yet it was this outrageous lie that saved his life. He was set aside as a particularly valuable captive. By contrast, all the other counterintelligence officers from his unit, all of his superiors, and even the NKVD officer who had signed his arrest order, were shot.