Stalin’s Apostles

Stalin’s Apostles is Antonia Senior’s history of the Cambridge Five—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross—and the intelligence they supplied to the Soviet Union. Beginning with their radicalisation and recruitment in the 1930s, Senior follows their movement into positions of trust across British diplomacy and intelligence, where they gained access to wartime and post-war secrets that could be passed to Moscow.

The book places the spy ring within Stalin’s wider political and imperial strategy rather than treating it principally as a British establishment scandal. Senior emphasises the effects of compromised intelligence on anti-Soviet agents, eastern European resistance movements and the post-war settlement, while also examining the British institutions that failed to expose the network sooner. It is nonfiction based on archival and historical research.