SEKRET takes place in the 1960s, but much of that era was influenced by Russia’s and America’s actions in the 1940s during World War II, also known as the Great Patriotic War for Russians. Though Josef Stalin, the Soviet secretary at the time, allied with Hitler, Hitler betrayed the Russian people by invading in the winter of 1941 and blockading the port city of Leningrad (now called Saint Petersburg). Over a million Leningraders died of starvation and exposure until the Red Army was able to smuggle food and supplies into the city over the frozen riverbed. Helen Dunmore’s The Siege, while fictionalized, chronicles their extreme quest for survival.
Once the Allied forces routed the Nazis and retook Berlin, the United States and Russia divided the country of Germany between themselves, in effect sparking the Cold War. The years 1963–1964 were a major turning point in the Cold War. After America and the USSR came within minutes of igniting a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they adopted a more conciliatory tone on the surface, but waged a vicious espionage campaign against one another in secret. East and West Germany, and East and West Berlin, became a testing ground for the greater conflict and hosted countless spy struggles like those in SEKRET. Tunnels, cafés, dark alleyways, and abandoned factories witnessed an untold history of power shifts and lost lives—David Stafford’s Spies Beneath Berlin attempts to reconstruct some of it.
When Nikita Khruschev came to power, he tried to shed the doctrine of fear and cult of personality that characterized his predecessor, Josef Stalin, but his temper often got the better of him. Peter Carlson’s K Blows Top characterizes his mercurial approach to foreign policy and statecraft. For a snapshot of middle-era Soviet life, John Gunther’s Inside Russia Today from 1956 (unearthed for me at an estate sale by my intrepid bestie, Alison) can’t be beat.
In hindsight, we think of America as “winning” the space race, thanks to Apollo 11’s successful lunar landing in 1969. But in the early 1960s, the Soviets were still leading the race, which had come to symbolize a proxy war between the East and West. They launched the first satellite, the Sputnik-1, in 1957, which gave Russia the ability to transmit signals across the entire world; it was months before America was able to launch its own. The Soviets also launched the first lunar probe and sent the first man into orbit. While the Veter space program is a fictitious creation, many Soviet space programs were shrouded in secrecy, and we may never learn about every launch, both successful and failed. However, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony’s Starman, a biography of Yuri Gagarin, offered me an excellent glimpse of the Soviet program and its triumphs and tragedies.
Both the CIA and the KGB experimented with psychic abilities. The CIA’s most infamous program, MK ULTRA, involved dosing subjects with LSD for a variety of applications, including an attempt to awaken psychic potential. Stalin consulted with an alleged psychic during World War II, and rumors of Soviet extrasensory perception (ESP) programs prompted further remote viewing research from the CIA in the Stargate program of the 1970s. As far as I know, however, none of these projects produced lasting results.