WHICH IS WHY IT WAS ANDROPOV WHO INITIATED REFORM:

Viktor Suvorov is a literary pen-name: he was born Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun in Soviet Ukraine; his father a military officer, his mother a nurse. (His Ukrainian roots are another reason the Kremlin might have it in for him, sources in Moscow tell me.) His father was a confirmed Bolshevik who believed the USSR could flourish were it not for the "bad guys at the top", and Suvorov grew up a "fanatical communist". He attended military school, joined the Red Army and took part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. An outstanding officer, he trained tactical reconnaissance sergeants and served in the intelligence division of the Volga military district headquarters - an experience Suvorov describes in Aquarium.

In 1970, he was recruited by the GRU. He was now part of an elite organisation that was a bitter rival of the KGB. His disillusionment with the Soviet system began only when he got to Geneva, he says, where he was attached to the UN mission. Suvorov says he was summoned to the airport one day to watch the arrival of an Ilyushin-76 transport plane from Moscow. When its ramp was lowered, gold bars were taken out of the cargo bay - to buy food from America. "We couldn't feed ourselves," he says.

Further disillusion came when he and his "wonderful spy wife" Tatiana went on holiday. They took the train from Basel and travelled across West Germany to east Berlin, passing the wall. "It was the same people, same history, same bloody Germans. [But] it's a Mercedes here and it's a Trabant there," he recalls with a laugh. He read George Orwell's Animal Farm. "At first I thought: 'These aren't Russian pigs, they're pigs from Berkshire.' Then I realised it was about the people in the Kremlin. They had banned the book inside the Soviet Union because they recognised themselves."

He read Nineteen Eighty-Four. "Orwell was never a communist, but was close to them. He understood the totalitarian state has to be like that. He never visited the USSR, but he realised everything better than anybody could imagine," Suvorov says. He says his wife - the daughter of an intelligence officer - agreed to defect with him. They have been married for 47 years. "It's an achievement," he says.

From his new home in the UK, Suvorov wrote one of the most influential books of the perestroika era, Icebreaker. When it was published in 1988, his argument was heretical: that Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler's Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin, he wrote, wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov's thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians.

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