The Russian house

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Das Rußlandhaus (also Das Russlandhaus , German first edition: Das Rußland-Haus , English original title: The Russia House ) is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1989. The German translation by Werner Schmitz was published in the same year. In 1990, the film version came The Russia House by Fred Schepisi with Sean Connery , Michelle Pfeiffer and Klaus Maria Brandauer in theaters.

content

At the Moscow Book Fair, the young Russian Katja Orlova slips her friend's manuscript to the British bookseller Niki Landau and urgently asks him to smuggle it out of the country in order to hand it over to the British small publisher Bartholomew, known as “Barley”, Scott Blair for publication. From the technical drawings of rockets in the notebooks, Landau deduces an espionage assignment. Nevertheless, he takes on the dangerous mission, because after the expulsion of his Polish-born father long ago, he still has an account with the British authorities. Only after several volts do the documents reach the so-called "Russian House", a department of the British foreign intelligence service that specializes in the Soviet Union .

Ned, the head of the Russian House, immediately recognizes the explosiveness of the documents, which must have come from a source with access to top secret Soviet data. He learns the background story from Barley: At the book fair last year, the British publisher met a young Russian author with the pseudonym "Goethe" at an artists' party. With his speeches about peace and international understanding, he made such a big impression on the young Russian that an agreement was reached in the end: If Goethe had the courage one day, Barley should prove himself to be a decent person. Now the young man seems to want to take the British publisher at his word and is hoping for the publication of his collected documents, which above all prove one thing: how ailing the military industry of the Soviet Union is, and that the Soviet weapon systems cannot be used at all.

Political circles represented by the sleazy careerist Clive suspect a trap of the KGB behind the documents . For example, the Russian house Barley is recruiting for an operation under the cover name "Bluebird" to contact the information source "Goethe". On his next visit to Moscow, Barley falls in love with Katja and meets a fanatical Goethe again, who is ready to sacrifice not only his life but also Katja's life in order to publish his data. Back in London, Barley falls into a crisis, goes into hiding and gets drunk. This turns him into a security risk, and the CIA , with the approval of British government circles, takes the case out of the hands of the Russian House, kidnaps Barley to a secret island and subjects him to intensive interrogation using a polygraph .

Only Russel Sheriton from the CIA headquarters in Langley reveals to Barley how explosive the documents of his informant, who is exposed as the Russian physicist Yakov Saveliev, really are: An inability of the Soviet Union to go to war would shake the ideology of the arms race and the economic interests of the arms industry also massively damage the political interests of the American “ hawks ”. The highest political circles are interested in exposing the entire Bluebird operation as Soviet propaganda and Barley himself as the KGB's mole . But the publisher stands firm and convinces the Americans to send him back to Moscow.

The operation is unfortunate. Instead of the prevented Yakov, an ominous middleman named Igor intervenes. But Clive and Sheriton ignore all of Barley's and Ned's warnings. After the operation has been approved by the highest authority, an abortion would mean considerable loss of face. Jakow manages to get Katja a warning that he has fallen into the hands of the KGB. Barley decides to at least save Katja and negotiates a deal with the Soviets: In exchange for Katja's freedom, he delivers them the catalog of questions to Jakow, which reveals critical information gaps and military weaknesses of the British and Americans.

Barley disappears in Soviet camps for a year, but his jailers keep their word and leave Katja out of the game, while official sources report the death of the famous physicist Yakov Saveliev. In Great Britain, efforts are being made to come to terms with the failed operation, while the CIA has long confidently reinterpreted it as a Soviet conspiracy that has only been dealt with in appearance. Ned is the only one who insists that it is not your source but you who are to blame for the fraud, but the disempowered boss of the Russian House has long since lost any influence. After a year, when all those involved have successfully suppressed Operation "Bluebird", Barley reappears in Lisbon. The Russian House legal advisor, Palfrey, offers him hush money, which Barley refuses. He lives for one hope: that one day Katja will be able to leave the country.

interpretation

For Hans-Peter Schwarz , le Carré's novel Das Russlandhaus captures the zeitgeist of the Gorbachev era and the hope for positive changes and a future marked by peace and understanding like no other literary work from this period. However, the sentimentality of the plot and Le Carré's own description of the novel as a “fairy tale” arouse doubts as to whether the author believed that the reform policy would have a positive outcome. The novel depicts a “rule of the apparatus”, and its “villains” are easily identified: the British secret service agents who deliver the utopian Goethe to the knife, and the CIA apparatchik who refuse to give up their Cold War game . The novel manifests an anti-Americanism that was already subliminally present in le Carré's works , which is only surpassed by the contempt for the government of the abdicated world power Great Britain, which submits itself completely to the Americans.

There are three heroes in the novel: a brilliant Russian scientist, a risk-taking Russian beauty and a slightly weird but likeable British publisher. For Schwarz, “Goethe”, the scientist, is “a pure soul” who awakens echoes of the holy Aljoscha from Dostojewski's Die Demonen. However, his doomed idealism, based on a false reliance on Great Britain, also evokes echoes of Don Quixote . The publication of its "truth" meets with too much resistance from interest groups on all sides. Neither creating a broad public nor changing people's consciousness is proving realistic. The only way out of the "rule of the apparatus" that the novel depicts is to withdraw into the private sphere, with which Barley removes himself and his lover from the access of the secret services, between whose fronts they have got caught.

background

For a long time, John le Carré was a bitter opponent of Soviet-style communism for humanistic reasons , which he held responsible for many human suffering. He openly called for "a determined fight against communism". The Russian weekly newspaper Literaturnaja Gazeta described him as a "Cold War provocateur". Under the impression of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika , his view changed. A trip to the Soviet Union in 1987 also led to a growing affinity with Russian intellectuals, whose classical education and longing for old Europe impressed him. At the same time, the visit showed him a complete chaos in everyday Russian life, in which nothing worked. This fueled his suspicion that the Soviet military apparatus was suffering from the same problems and was being demonized by the Western powers. In the West we need “a perestroika of our own imagination”.

In the novel The Russian House , le Carré distanced himself from the Cold War scenario that had dominated his earlier espionage novels, such as those about the agent George Smiley . This was partially resented by American criticism. The author was assumed to be credulous, naïve and an “ideological list”, and the friendly reception of the book in the Soviet Union, where a novel le Carrés was officially published for the first time. Le Carré countered that Gorbachev's reforms were "a unique historical moment that we must seize". The people would have to "lift themselves above that desolation of hopelessness [...] in which we have had to live far too long."

The ingenious Russian scientist "Goethe", who becomes a martyr in the novel, has his model in Oleg Penkowski , a Soviet spy for the British and American secret services. The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov , whom le Carré met, also plays a role in the character. In contrast to the British defector Kim Philby , whom he despised and whom he portrayed in the novel Dame, König, As, Spy , le Carré saw in Sakharov “the extraordinary example of a man who had the courage to take the path of open protest in an oppressed society to go ”. Despite all the political reforms and rapprochement of the great powers, le Carré was not worried about the future of the espionage thriller: "As long as statesmen lie, states compete and there is mutual distrust, there will be espionage."

expenditure

Audio book

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Peter Schwarz : Fantastic Reality. The 20th century as reflected in the political thriller . DVA, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-421-05875-X , pp. 173-176.
  2. ↑ Hans-Peter Schwarz: Fantastic Reality. The 20th century as reflected in the political thriller . DVA, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-421-05875-X , pp. 174-175.
  3. ↑ a b Christoph Peck and Fritz Rumler: “How would I be if I were him?” In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1989, pp. 143-148 ( online ).
  4. ↑ John le Carré: Why I came from the cold . In: Die Zeit of September 29, 1989.