new seriousness, and documentary pretensions. The building of a new kind of spy thriller also required a new enemy. Between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, the Soviet spy thriller reflects the shift from an obsession with class to a new preoccupation with nationality, as the Soviet Union constructed a new identity for itself in a rapidly changing world. The same identity discourse underwent another transformation in the post-Stalin years, when the Soviet agent, underground in the enemy camp, became a metaphor for double life of the ¿Soviet man¿. A landmark new survey of a genre little known in the West, The Soviet Spy Thriller shines new light on cultural politics in the Soviet Union, and offers a fascinating counterpoint to the Western spy thrillers that will be so familiar to most readers.