"Our Woman in Moscow," by Beatriz Williams

 As most are aware, Beatriz is my daughter-in-Law who writes historical fiction. She is a New York Time best-selling novelist. This is her 13^th novel. Additionally, she has co-authored three novels with Lauren Willig and Karen White. Having grown up on the West Coast, she now lives in Connecticut where, as she says, she “divides her time between laundry and writing.”  And, I add, raising with her husband, our son, four wonderful children.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“Our Woman in Moscow,” Beatriz Williams

May 10, 2021

 

“…the sisterhood is not divided neatly into adventurous Ruths and

retiring Irises…bravery is woven from all kinds of different fabric…”

                                                                                                                                Our Woman in Moscow

                                                                                                                                Beatriz Williams

 

The worldwide depression of the 1930s caused many naively idealistic, college-educated young people to join the Communist Party. They saw capitalism as a failed system and believed Soviet propaganda regarding the benefits of Marxism. They ignored the estimated one to two million who died in Soviet Gulag camps and the six to seven million who were deliberately starved in Ukraine. The fact that the Soviet Union was an ally during World War II, imposed a media silence on the horrific nature of Stalin. It was not until the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949 that the Cold War got underway. The Soviets were able to detonate the bomb because they had turned a few British and American agents and infiltrated U.S. and British intelligence services. That is the backdrop to Beatriz’s book.

 

She uses different time periods: 1940 (before the U.S. entered the War); 1948 (aftermath of the War); and 1952 (during the McCarthy hearings). She intermixes her characters with historical figures, including Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean who were part of the Cambridge Five, a British spy ring penetrated by Soviets, and which was active from the 1930s into the early 1950s. 

 

Five characters dominate the story: Ruth Macallister and her twin, Iris; Sasha Digby; Sumner Fox; and Lyudmila Ivanova. In 1940, Ruth and Iris are twenty-two. As a youth, Ruth was blond, “long limbed and just shapely enough.” She liked to take charge, a trait she still has. Once, she was accused of having a “God complex.” But she is also described by those who worked with her during the War as “fiercely intelligent, honorable, tough but fair and not above using [her] personal charisma.” Iris is quieter, with a fondness for sketching. As a young girl, she had “chubby limbs” and “frizzy curls, the color of dirt.” It is Iris that surprises. “…loyalty was the stuff of Iris’s bones.” Toward the end of the story, she reflects: “…part of her wants to explain…that she was never the little pumpkin of Ruth’s imagination, that the sisterhood is not divided neatly into adventuresome Ruths and retiring Irises, that bravery is woven from all kinds of different fabric…” True to character, she keeps those thoughts private.

 

Like Ruth and Iris, Sasha Digby grew up in New York. His real name, which he does not share, is Cornelius Alexander Digby. Iris meets him in the Galleria Borghese, while studying Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina. They had met, briefly, in New York, as his mother and the Macallister’s uncle Charles Schuyler had grown up together. Sasha is tall, blond, an “Apollo” who smokes too much and is secretive. He works in the American embassy in Rome. The other man is Sumner Fox: “…a large fellow, not exceptionally tall but built like an angus steer, all shoulders, square rawboned head on which a bare half inch of extremely pale hair bristles-up like a field of mowed hay.” Now working for a U.S. intelligence agency, he had been known for his football prowess at Yale. A fifth character has her own chapters: Lyudmila Ivanova who works in Moscow for Soviet Intelligence. She has an “avowed hatred of bourgeois capitalist society” and an “exceptionally ascetic lifestyle.”  She has two rules for survival – first, do not attract attention and second, trust nobody. Her office has responsibility for British defectors. She waits, “like a spider in the center of an exquisite web.”

 

The book’s title will remind the reader of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. Like Greene’s novel, this story takes place mostly during the Cold War, with democracy pitted against communism. But, while Greene’s story used satire to poke fun at Britain’s MI6, this is a story of the honor, defiance and courage of two women, especially of the one who becomes “our woman” in Moscow.