The spy came out in the background – Newspaper Kommersant No. 53 (7498) dated 03/29/2023

Publishers, distributors, and online movie theaters are seeing a rise in Russian interest in spy literature, films, and series about intelligence officers, with sales of such content growing rapidly. Video services are already planning to release original products about spies. Experts observe a similar trend abroad and generally attribute it to “current geopolitical tensions”, noting that a similar situation was observed during the Cold War.

As Kommersant was told in the LitRes Group, sales of fiction and non-fiction books about spies grew in the first quarter compared to the same period last year by almost 200% in pieces.

The sharpest dynamics is in the novel “The Newest Testament” by Alexei Brusnitsyn (a detective fiction about a journalist who, due to his educational activities, finds himself in a life-threatening situation), says a representative of the service. The book accounts for 42% of sales in the category. In second place in popularity is Nikolay Svechin’s historical detective story Inquiry in Riga, and Liza Loseva’s retrodetective story “Right Bank of Yegor Lisitsa” closes the top 3.

Kommersant’s interlocutors in the book market confirm the growth in demand for such literature, but only by 30–50% year on year.

Bookmate (the company is recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation) and Lines did not respond to inquiries.

In the bookselling network “Chitai-Gorod” they said that now the most popular book in the segment is “Object of observation. KGB against Sakharov. “In the online store, the book was in the “News” section for four weeks, since March 6 it appeared in the “Best Selling” list in the “Society” section. In the retail network, the book did not hit the top, ”the representative of the network specified. The book “Intelligence and the Kremlin. Notes of an Unwanted Witness” by Pavel Sudoplatov, added in “Chitay-Gorod”. Compared to February 2022, its sales have tripled.

Now many publishers have series dedicated to intelligence officers and spies in their portfolio. Corpus (part of Eksmo-AST) has the Intelligence Corps series, which is dedicated to “the loudest spy scandals of the last century and the secret world of intelligence.” David Hoffman’s The Million Dollar Spy about engineer and designer Adolf Tolkachev, John Le Carré’s The Pigeon Tunnel (memoirs), Sergei Plokhikh’s The Man Who Shot Poison, a biography of KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky, are no longer on sale. “.

Online cinemas also note the “trend for spy mania”.

Wink emphasized that their category is not singled out in a separate position and is included in the general one – “detectives”: “There is a consistently high demand for detective films and series, including works that are at the intersection of genres.” But the service adds that in 2023 they are preparing several premieres of Wink Originals, in which spies are the main characters.

“In the TV series “Operation Neman” there is a search for a cunning German spy in Western Belarus in 1944. In the TV series “GDR” the action takes place during the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there are several spy lines at once, including in a tense battle for the assets of the Stasi. Cyber ​​spies act in the comedy series “In short, this is the plan”, where black hackers are forced, due to some circumstances, to go over to the side of good, ”explained representatives of the service. Start, Okko and Kinopoisk did not respond to a request.

The trend of Russians’ passion for espionage is also shown by the data of Yandex Wordstat, a service for searching information about user requests: in February, the number of requests for the word “spy” reached 1.4 million, an increase from 810 thousand over the same period last year.

“Now everyone is actively buying both memoirs and an artist about spies, watching films and TV shows about intelligence officers, of course, this can be associated with the current tension,” says Kommersant’s interlocutor in the industry. Another Kommersant source on the market notes that a similar trend could be observed before: “During the Cold War, people were also actively interested in spies. This is evidenced even by the popularity of “17 Moments of Spring”.

The growing popularity of the genre “can be observed in particular now in the foreign market,” says Olga Kiseleva, head of the MIF editorial team. “These topics have been filling foreign catalogs for more than a year, but yes, this year there are even more books in them, almost every major publishing house has them.”

Julia Yurasova