In the 1930s, the Soviet Union's secret services, coordinated by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the ancestor of the famous KGB, began a campaign to recruit young scions of the British establishment to be used as spies. The project was centered on Cambridge University, where the Soviets could count on a fifth column, the Marxist-inspired economist Maurice Dobb, professor emeritus of Trinity College. Thanks to his advice, the NKVD quickly managed to recruit those who have gone down in history as the "Magnificent Five" or the "Cambridge Five": Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross , a group of five young students destined for important roles in English society and politics of the time. Thanks to their roles, the "Five" were able to pass on important military and industrial information to the Soviet Union for about twenty years . The Cambridge Five network began to be dismantled only in 1951, but by then it had caused much damage to Western governments and profound embarrassment to Her Britannic Majesty's counter-espionage.
The volume Le spie di Stalin (Neri Pozza, 2024, pp. 320, also e-book), written by the journalist Giorgio Ferrari , is dedicated to the adventurous but also dramatic story of the five infiltrators.
The book does not limit itself to telling the story of the Cambridge boys who tried to change history and in some cases succeeded. It offers us a faithful reconstruction of a period, from the early 1930s to the crucial moments of the Cold War , in which a large group of young European and American idealists - from Klaus Fuchs to Bruno Pontecorvo to the Rosenbergs - worked under the radar, infiltrating the most delicate nodes of power and national security on behalf of the Soviet Union with the aim of delivering the secrets of atomic energy to Moscow. Among them stood out precisely the quintet of noble Cambridge students, five young people belonging to the intellectual elite and the English upper class who betrayed the British Crown by embracing communist ideology and idealizing Joseph Stalin as the only leader capable of countering the advance of fascism and Nazism.
Their lives were certainly out of the ordinary, so much so that two of the Cambridge boys became literary and cinematic characters. Kim Philby (code name: Stanley), born in 1912, was certainly the most skilled of the "Magnificent Five" and the first to be enlisted. Philby was a master of double-crossing and such was the trust placed in him that he was also involved in the investigations launched by the CIA and the English secret services to discover those responsible for the leaks to the East. In short, he found himself investigating himself and his fellow spies for the USSR! In 1951 he thus managed to warn two of the "Cambridge Five" of an impending arrest before fleeing to the USSR in 1963, where he remained until his death in 1988. His character inspired the novels The Human Factor by Graham Greene, The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré. The youth of Guy Burgess (code name: Hicks) in Cambridge was instead told in the film Another Country (1984), in which the protagonist was played by Rupert Everett.
But beyond the fascination that the five have always transmitted, Giorgio Ferrari hints at a suspicion that is impossible to completely dispel: that guiding the epic barricade of that privileged youth emerging from Trinity College, Cambridge, was a certain aesthetic something , a sort of personal religion tailored to their own ego and narcissism. Behind the great betrayal that these young people (along with many other British spies, many of whom remain unknown to this day) had taken on as a moral duty, there was much more. There was an entire society, the post-Victorian one, that had emerged battered from the Great War, in search of an identity and that was trying to shake off an ancient hypocrisy by moving towards a glittering modernity. A portion of which seems to have poured into the ecstasy of betrayal practiced by the Cambridge Five, potential heroes, in reality simple caricatures of subversives.
Their fate, between alcoholism and a murky Soviet exile, has the bitter taste of the ending of an Elizabethan drama.