The Soviet Union was a land of shortages, but there was no shortage of acerbic sayings. One I heard while working as a journalist in Moscow in the early 1980s: “A pessimist is a well-informed optimist ...

In his enthralling “The Spy in the Archive,” Gordon Corera tells the story of an unlikely hero embedded within the heart of the agency. By Alexander Nazaryan Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics, ...