The Soviet Comeback

About the author
Jamie Smith was born and raised in Birmingham, and studied history and journalism at the University of Wales, Bangor, before working as a journalist in Wales, Australia and Warwickshire. He then bounced around London and Brighton for several years and qualified as a therapeutic counsellor. Now living in Oxfordshire with wife, Anne, and daughter, Órla, when not working or parenting, he can be found playing and watching too much sport, pottering around at his allotment, travelling and cooking (with mixed results!).
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The soviet comeback
 


Jamie Smith
The soviet comeback
Vanguard Press


VANGUARD PAPERBACK
 
© Copyright 2021
Jamie Smith
The right of Jamie Smith to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All Rights Reserved
No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,
copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions
of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is
available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-80016-049-1
 
Vanguard Press is an imprint of
Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd.
www.pegasuspublishers.com
First Published in 2021
Vanguard Press
Sheraton House Castle Park
Cambridge England
Printed & Bound in Great Britain


Dedication
 
For Anne


Acknowledgements
This book took a decade to complete, and I am indebted to a lot of people who have helped me get to this point along the way. Not least the book has lived with me in Australia, Leamington Spa, Brockley, Brixton, Brighton, Islington, Bounds Green and Thame along with various solo writing trips at home and abroad, so it has been both a physical and emotional journey!
From its very humble beginnings as an idea while living in Brisbane, I thank Ariane Cohin for putting a roof over my head and encouraging me while I began to draw the concept together. Over the years a lot of people have been given eyes on various iterations as the story began to take shape, and I particularly thank Kirsty Smith for providing the hugely positive feedback just when I most needed it, and Ben Williams and Alex McDonald for their great insights.
I consulted hundreds of books, articles and websites while preparing this manuscript, far too many to cite here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t cite a couple of places that gave me extra help. I’m grateful to the staff at the Civil Rights Room in the Nashville Public Library for sharing their experience and wisdom, the owner of the KGB Museum in Prague for the incredible depth of knowledge, and the excellent feedback of Will Piovano. I’d also have been completely lost without the Greek translations of Harry Papadopoulos (s’ efharistó!) and the Russian translations of Vitaliy Drohomyretskyy, (spasibo!).
I thank everyone I have spoken to who has been able to give me, a white man, even the faintest understanding of what life was like as a black person in the 1980s. Some of it sits uncomfortably, but I am continually trying to educate myself and further my understanding. I felt it was a story I wanted to try and tell and have tried to write it as sensitively as possible, albeit in the vein of a spy thriller! Getting it completely right was impossible, and I can only hope I’m in the right ballpark and have told a good story.
My love of writing is a direct result of my parents, Baden Smith and Deborah Williams, who always encouraged creativity. Their editing and feedback, has been invaluable.
And finally, to my amazing wife, Anne, I am forever grateful to you for never doubting me, even when I doubted myself, and for all of the proof reading and positivity in the final few months, despite being heavily pregnant with our wonderful daughter. Simply put, I love you.


Author’s Note
The Soviet Comeback and the story of Nikita is a work of fiction from beginning to end. That said, it is set in a real period of history and works around some real events. However, it is essentially a rewriting of history, and real events have been moved around for the story.
Nikita’s family and his story, are a complete fiction, but the KGB was a real and ruthless organisation that existed until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. They invented and used a number of creative and gruesome weapons, including the Spetsnaz ballistic knife used in this story, and it is also fact that the nerve agent novichok, which has unfortunately reappeared in the news in recent years, was invented in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s. They really did manage to weed out almost all of the US spies on Soviet soil, and it is generally accepted they had their own spies embedded in various organisations in the US, including the CIA.
The Cold War took its toll on the Soviet Union, which by the 1980s was beginning to struggle. The USSR had been engaged in a long and expensive war in Afghanistan, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians were massacred. In turn, the Soviets suffered significant casualties themselves at the hands of the mujahideen who fought a guerrilla war in rugged mountain terrain, where battles were fought for control of the mountain caves.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) which underpins much of The Soviet Comeback was a real treaty signed, in a watershed moment of the Cold War, between the US and the USSR. It signified an important thawing in relations between the two superpowers. In 2019 the USA