Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire

Using recently declassified files this book explores as never before the treachery of five British men who spied for the Soviet Union: Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, John Cairncross and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures Anthony Blunt, all radicalised while at Cambridge University in the 1930s. Their supply of British and US intelligence gave Stalin an inside track on US and British strategy at a critical period in history. For more than twenty years there was barely a secret, barely a decision made, that Stalin did not know about, thanks to his Cambridge spies. The Five became tools in Stalin’s imperial scheme, responsible directly and indirectly for the death of thousands of men and women fighting against Soviet domination.

Shielded for so long by the British Establishment, four of the five were never prosecuted for their crimes. And in time another dictator emerged as ruthless as Stalin, but with an even greater desire to establish a Russian Empire that would threaten Western democracy. The legacy of the Cambridge Five is not only in the graveyards of eastern Europe, but at the heart of Putin’s Kremlin.