Heroes of the KGB: the communist bloc's spy films

We're used to spy films in which the communists are the bad guys – but the eastern bloc had its own secret agent screen heroes, too
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S-a Furat O Bomba (A Bomb Was Stolen), made in Romania in 1961
S-a Furat O Bomba (A Bomb Was Stolen), made in Romania in 1961, follows a man who accidentally finds a stolen nuclear bomb. Photograph: National Film Archive of Romania

A secret agent is attending a party in an elegant apartment. Beautiful young people wear the latest fashions, sip martinis and canoodle in corners. The spy slips into a back room and starts breaking into a safe. It looks like a scene from a James Bond movie – except this is communist Hungary, and the heroes are what western policy makers in the cold war would have called "them", rather than "us". The film is Fotó Háber, an ultra-stylish spy drama made in Budapest in 1963, and, like many of the films emerging from behind what was the iron curtain, it blows apart the glum, grey image of the eastern bloc from the inside.

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That we have the chance to see Fotó Háber is thanks to a short season of European spy movies showing at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, to mark the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The western ones are worth a look, but the real interest lies in the much rarer films from Warsaw Pact countries, including Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany and the Soviet Union.

During the cold war, the spy movie genre became an obsession on both sides of the divide, with the same recurring themes either side of the iron curtain: the secrets and intrigue of the cold war, the futuristic new style of the space age, the exciting possibilities of high technology, and the even more exciting possibilities of the sexual revolution. Any preconceptions about the Soviet bloc being a dour place full of grumpy peasants in headscarves queuing all day for turnips may be left at the door. Instead, these films depict a world that is, like Bond's, wildly aspirational: these are films with fast cars, sharp suits, hard drinking, and a seemingly endless supply of bouffanted young women in heavy eyeliner taking their clothes off.

At the beginning of Smyk (Skid), a lavish and lyrical Czechoslovakian drama made in 1960, a Czech agent in glitzy west Berlin slaps the stripper from Prague with whom he has just left a bar. This is a blow, he explains, "in the name of thousands of your countrymen working for the freedom of their country while you are acting the prostitute!" He suggests she could make money another way. "There are all kinds of possibilities. For example, espionage." She fires back: "I think it's more honest to act the prostitute."

The 1960s, when most of these films were made, constituted a golden age for real as well as fictional espionage. The technology of war had moved on alarmingly fast, while the technology of communications lagged hopelessly behind. During the 1950s, both the Americans and the Soviets were pouring resources into the nuclear arms race. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev claimed – falsely – to be churning out intercontinental ballistic missiles like sausages from a machine. Horrified, the Americans churned them out for real. The very fact that Khrushchev was bluffing hints at how much the flow of information between east and west mattered, and how crucial it became for governments to control it. The further fact that American intelligence knew he was bluffing, and allowed the public and much of the government to go on believing in a "missile gap" anyway, confirms it.

This was a world in which a president could launch nuclear missiles against another superpower in 15 minutes, but could not telephone his counterpart first to tell him. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, messages between Khrushchev and John F Kennedy took 12 hours to arrive, during which both leaders' fingers were figuratively hovering over the big red button. There was then no telephone line between the White House and the Kremlin. Moreover, long-range intelligence gathering was sketchy. During the early 1960s, the best long-range surveillance of Soviet military sites came from American U-2 spy planes. These took photographs on negative film. The film had to be flown back to base, then on to the United States; there, it was developed into positive prints and painstakingly analysed by experts. Data from U-2 overflights could take days to reach the director of the CIA.

In a world so dangerous, in which information flowed so slowly, the spy on the ground assumed unprecedented importance – as did counter-intelligence agents charged with thwarting them. This spy-versus-spy theme is central to 1964 Polish thriller Spotkanie ze Szpiegiem (Rendezvous With a Spy). A mysterious western-allied agent, dressed exotically in a pin-striped suit, checked shirt and flat cap, parachutes into a Polish forest. His mission: to gather information about missile base locations around the Baltic. He is spotted immediately by the enormous, dazzlingly hi-tech Polish military intelligence service – it may be worth stating again that these movies paint an aspirational picture – and three handsome counter-intelligence agents are sent to hunt him down. There follows a fast-paced game of cat and mouse, with the counter-intelligence agents using all the most modern surveillance techniques to bust the spy and his network without revealing themselves. There is even an impressively staged finale with a car chase. If it doesn't quite live up to the adrenaline rush of Goldfinger, released the same year, perhaps that is because in place of Bond's Aston Martin, Rendezvous With a Spy has to use a Skoda. However, eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the car chase bears a distinct resemblance to Bond's first on-screen effort, 1962's Dr No.

Though many communist spy films qualify as propaganda movies – including Rendezvous With a Spy – they are far from the blatant flag-waving of second world war cinema. In the east, as in the west, the spy genre aimed to be a sophisticated form of entertainment. So, though viewers need be in little doubt that the three Polish agents are the heroes and the parachuted-in spy is the villain, the spy is a fully developed character. In one scene, he is checking out an apartment when a little girl and her grandmother return to it. He hides behind a curtain, barely daring to breathe. The tension is high, and you may find yourself rooting for the bad guy.

There is no such doubt in Skvorets i Lira (Starling and Lyre), a glossy 1974 melodrama from the Soviet Union made by Sergei Eisenstein's one-time co-director Grigori Aleksandrov. It depicts the USSR as a would-be peacemaker among nations, under siege by a secret cabal of western capitalists known as the Council of Gods. "Peace with communists is absurd," says one council member, decked out in the standard-issue western fat-cat uniform of white tie and tails. "To start a war, we need to create an anti-communist Europe." Laborious theorising about the military-industrial complex is occasionally relieved by a syrupy romance, but the message is stark: capitalist propaganda from the west is aiming to tear eastern Europe away from its natural ally, the Soviet Union.

Despite the high production values and the high profiles both of Aleksandrov and his wife and leading lady Lyubov Orlova (in her last role), Starling and Lyre was never widely released even inside the Soviet Union. One rumour said this was because the ageing Orlova was upset by how she looked in the film. Another suggestion is that the film was canned by the authorities because some elements resembled the real-life "Guillaume affair" of 1974, in which a personal assistant to the west German chancellor Willy Brandt was discovered to be a Stasi agent. In hindsight, the film seems too kitsch to constitute much of a threat to anything except good taste; but it is nonetheless an intriguing glimpse into how the Soviet Union saw itself, and the west.

Not all Soviet bloc films were so heavy going. The dialogue-free Romanian film from 1961, S-a Furat O Bomba (A Bomb Was Stolen), features a man who goes flower-picking and accidentally ends up in possession of a bag containing a stolen nuclear bomb. In the madcap farce that follows, he becomes the unwitting object of a struggle between devious gangsters and sinister soldiers – rendered slightly less sinister by their low-budget safety attire, consisting of buckets on their heads. There is formation dancing, cross-dressing, a romance with a pretty tram conductor and a custard pie to the face.

Communist or capitalist, a custard pie to the face is somehow universal. The difference between "them" and "us" was not quite so great as either side thought.

The Celluloid Curtain: Europe's Cold War in Film runs until Monday at Riverside Studios, London. Box office: 020-8237 1111. Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean is published by Simon & Schuster.

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