Meanwhile, on a personal note, my own grandfather was born in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century to a British father and a Russian mother. At the outbreak of revolution in 1917, he fled across Scandinavia to England and never returned. As I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, it seemed impossible to me that Deo had grown up in Russia, speaking Russian as well as English, summering at his grandfather’s dacha near the Finnish border. Of course, I never talked to him much about it, which I now deeply regret, but he and my grandmother had the foresight to write down their recollections in memoirs for the family. The fictional flight from Russia in Our Woman in Moscow might just owe its inspiration to Deo’s flight a hundred years earlier.

For those readers interested in learning more about the Cambridge spy ring, I can enthusiastically recommend the exhaustively researched Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies, and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines, as well as Ben Macintyre’s thorough and intensely readable narrative of the Kim Philby case, A Spy Among Friends. For a gripping account of Donald Maclean’s life and espionage career, reach for A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps, which meticulously captures the complex psychology of Maclean and his tortured marriage.

A final technical note: the Soviet intelligence services combined, split apart, and recombined in dozens of different incarnations over the first few decades of Soviet history, each time with a different name. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to the pre–Second World War agency as the NKVD and the postwar agency as the KGB familiar to Cold Warriors, although it didn’t actually take on this final form until 1954. My apologies to the historical sticklers for this narrative convenience.

I wrote much of Our Woman in Moscow during the intense stress of the coronavirus shutdown in the spring of 2020, while juggling the physical and emotional needs of my large family all gathered together for weeks on end. For her patience and understanding (and timely care packages of artisan chocolate) I can’t thank my editor, Rachel Kahan, enough. In fact, the entire team at William Morrow came through like heroes during this abrupt change of plan and working conditions—Tavia Kowalchuk, Brittani Hilles, Alivia Lopez, and all my other champions in sales and marketing and production, you are so deeply appreciated! Special gratitude is due to my eagle-eyed copyeditor, Laurie McGee, who kept my timelines straight and my hyphenation in order. My warmest thanks as well to my superstar agent, Alexandra Machinist, and her assistant Lindsey Sanderson, for handling the business side of things so ably while I tangled myself in knots of Cold War history.