The Face of Terror

Faces of Terror Trilogy #3

by Emanuel Litvinoff

Peter is still a senior intelligence officer in the Cheka, now renamed the NKVD, and had just been awarded the Order of Lenin for his years of successful service. He still believes that the execution of former comrades for their Trotskyist connections is justified. Lydia, though still a communist, is sickened by all the killing, by the lies and by the stifling atmosphere of Stalinism. After having worked for the Cheka in the previous volume, she has resigned from intelligence work, for which she had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner. She is now working in Glavlit, the state censorship office (there is some improbability here, I think) and is temperamentally more indulgent and less rigorous in that role than her colleagues. And she is too sensitive in her understanding of literature to pass a grotesque Soviet interpretation of Macbeth. The Party, having liquidated its external enemies in the Soviet Union, is now combing through its own members, however exalted, to detect - or invent - the slightest sign of deviation. It is the time of the great purges after the murder of Kirov. Peter and Lydia have a malevolent enemy in the party, Boris Spichalsky, who had felt slighted by them in the previous volume, and he is relishes it when he is told to keep them under observation. Peter, on one of his missions to Germany, found himself under a chance arrest by the Gestapo who suspected he was spying for the Swiss. They had just started to torture him when a Soviet plant in the SS secured his release, and he returned to Moscow. But there he was now under suspicion of what he might have given away during his interrogation.

Genres: Fiction

284 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 22, 1979

Reviews

[CQM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bleak... Bleak...
I always feel a bit sad coming to the end of an epic like this(as part three of a trilogy). You come to know the characters so well that it's like saying goodbye to old friends and acquaintances.
These are friends I've followed from London in 1910 up to the USSR of the late 1930s and by god they've seen some tough times.
The Face of Terror deals with the disillusionment of the main characters and Stalin's Great Purge.
This book gives a tiny peek into Stalin's oppressive regime and even that tiny peek is terrifying. The fear that any word out of place, any action not in line with current thinking can lead to imprisonment and worse makes for some scary reading.

Incidentally one of the real-life characters who plays an important role in the first book and returns in a smaller role in the other two books is Jacob (or Yakov) Peters. Peters was involved in the siege of Sidney Street and later became head of the Cheka. Doing a little reading up on the subject, having just finished the book, I noticed that Peters was executed in the purge 81 years ago tomorrow (25th of April 1938).
This book comes recommended but with the advice to read all three parts in order.