Plenty of cold war fiction has been published over the years. Most of it, however, is written from the point of view of someone from the Western side of the Iron Curtain. However, French author Grehl Ira (who died of Lieukemia in 1993) gave a twist to the genre by writing from a Russian perspective. His hero Ivan Petrovitch (“the Bear”) is loyal to the Soviet, but tries to see the human side of his adversaries, and will sometimes lend them assistance if people on his own side have broken the unspoken rules of espionage.
Ira translated all his own novels into both English and Italian. Here is a typical ethical dilemma from the third Petrovich book, The Sunset Protocol.
came to the man’s assistance and they hit Ivan on the back with some instrument, though not painfully, traced some signs on the skin of his chest with the handle of a little hammer, hit him on the knees with more little hammers, making Ivan’s legs jerk, pricked his finger and drew blood from it, pricked his elbow joint, wrapped rubber bracelets round his arm…
Ivan could only smile bitterly to himself and ponder on the absurdity of it all. He had wanted to warn them all of the danger threatening them from the mysterious professor, and had tried to catch him, yet all he had achieved was to land up in this weird laboratory just to talk a lot of rubbish about his uncle Fyodor who had died of drink in Vologda.
