Let's leave the monstrous title to the conscience of the publisher: in fact, the book of Tim Milne, an officer and a gentleman, is not a belated attempt to cash in on a half-century-old sensation, but a sincere, slightly sentimental and unusually charming recollection of forty years of real male friendship, which ended in the most offensive way. It’s hard to imagine a more disinterested book in general: intelligence officer Milne did not hope to see it printed (the British Mi-5 does not encourage public revelations of its former employees, especially on such painful topics) and wrote, as they say, “on the table” - with the aim not so much to become famous how much to speak. As a result, the book did not see the light of day until four years after the author's death (Milne lived an exceptionally long life and died at the age of 97 in 2010).
Tim Milne, Philby's close friend since childhood and recruited by him into MI6 to be his deputy, has left us a memoir that provides the final and most authoritative word on the enduring and fascinating story of Kim Philby the legendary Soviet master spy. It is a riveting read, with new detail on Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two other members of the Cambridge spy ring, and on Konstantin Volkov, the would-be KGB defector who was betrayed by Philby, one of several hundred people who died as a direct result of Philby's treachery.
However, it is difficult to understand why these memoirs frightened Her Majesty's Secret Service so much. For Milne, who was in crystal ignorance of what his friend was really doing, happy memories of a youth spent together were much more expensive than idle conjectures and baseless revelations. The nephew and pupil of the famous Alexander Alan Milne (the author of Winnie the Pooh), Tim Milne grew up in a bohemian, literary-centric family, so his book is primarily literature. It will remind the reader far more of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited or Lawrence Durrell's Greek notes (adjusted for the scale of his talent, of course) than, say, Ian Fleming's spy novels. And although the text has been severely damaged in translation, even in Russian, Milne's book has an old-fashioned charm that dates back more to the era between the two great wars, in which the author came of age, than to the time of the end of the Cold War, when it was written.
Philby was only six months older than Milne, however, due to the fact that he went to school a year earlier, it was Philby who in their pair was assigned the role of the elder, leader, ringleader. It was Philby who set up risky experiments with electricity in the school bedroom, one of which almost cost both researchers their lives. It was he who came up with dizzying routes for summer wanderings around Europe: penniless, with a backpack stuffed with books of Aristotle and Thucydides, in 1930 Philby and Milne walked around most of the Balkan Peninsula on foot, and a year earlier they traveled around France, Austria and Hungary on a collapsing motorcycle with a stroller. It was Philby who finally dragged Milne to work in the British counterintelligence service in 1940, and also settled a friend in his house so that he would not have to pay for a rented apartment. It was these years - intense, fun, gambling and careless work in counterintelligence (for a person from the outside, accustomed to believing in the omnipotence of the special services, it is hard to believe that such a delightful mess could reign in this department in wartime) - Milne will always remember as the best in his life.
After the war (the first time Kim Philby was under suspicion in 1951, and in the same year Milne was sent to work in Germany), their paths diverged, although Milne, as a true gentleman, remained faithful to Philby in any circumstances and invariably spoke out in his support. Therefore, Philby's flight to the USSR in 1963 was an especially heavy blow for Milne: he not only lost a friend, but also realized his many years of humiliating blindness. Moreover, a long-standing friendship with a KGB agent did not have the best effect on his own career: Milne managed to keep his position in intelligence, however, as he himself writes, made him "a much less desirable and valuable asset."
However, at no point does a personal offense become a reason for Milne to settle scores. His entire book is not an invective, but an honest attempt to understand how it happened that a careless young rebel, an intellectual and a cheerful cynic went all the way to a traitor, deceiver and provocateur. Why did a good guy, who sincerely believed in the ideals of communism, choose one of the thousands of honest paths - the darkest. It is unlikely that an exhaustive answer can be given to these questions, and Milne understands this no worse than others, therefore, refusing the final verdict, he prefers to speak of his lost friend as "an unusual person who was looking for and found an unusual situation for himself."
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