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Emil Draitser's biography reconstructs the life of Dmitri Bystrolyotov, a Soviet "Great Illegal" who seduced embassy staff, countesses and a Gestapo officer to feed Stalin information from European diplomatic pouches. The book draws on a 1973 Moscow meeting with Bystrolyotov and decades of archival research, following him from espionage in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy through arrest, torture, a false confession and the Gulag. It suits readers of espionage and true-crime history who want the documented life behind the James Bond archetype rather than a thriller. Compared with standard spy biographies, its strength is the subject's own testimony; its trade-off is a dense, scholarly pace.
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Stalin's Romeo Spy is a biography of Dmitri Bystrolyotov (1901-75). He was a sailor, painter, doctor, lawyer, polyglot and writer. He was also one of the "Great Illegals," a team of Soviet spies who operated in Western countries between the world wars.
The book follows his work as a spy. He seduced women, among them a French embassy employee, a German countess, the wife of a British official and a Gestapo officer. This gave Stalin a look into the diplomatic pouches of many European countries. He also stole military secrets from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and twice crossed the Sahara Desert and the jungles of Congo.
Despite his success, Bystrolyotov was arrested during Stalin's purges. He was tortured until he falsely confessed to selling out to the enemy, then sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag. There he documented the regime's crimes in unpublished and suppressed memoirs. The book is the first full-length biography of him in any language. It draws on a private meeting between the author and Bystrolyotov in 1973 Moscow and on thirty-five years of research in international archives.
