President Vladimir Putin has spent years trying to turn the Soviet victory in World War II into the central fact of Russian history. As a result, it is no surprise that Russian writers, with the encouragement of the Russian security services, have launched a variety of programs to celebrate the successes of Soviet intelligence services against both Nazi Germany and, after the war, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The most frequently cited of these is Cambridge5.ru, an Internet portal devoted to the so-called “Cambridge Five,” agents of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) who penetrated British and U.S. intelligence in the 1940s, helping Moscow steal nuclear and other secrets and counter Western moves against the USSR (Cambridge5.ru, accessed May 7). And just as the Kremlin leader’s boosting of World War II is not about the past but designed to aid Mr. Putin’s current plans, so, too, the revelations reported on this portal are almost entirely about the present and future.