One of the occupational hazards of living and working in a capital city such as Ottawa is ‘the diplomatic lunch’. In 1978 I was invited by a Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy to join him for a meal at the ‘Auberge Cossack’, a nondescript and short-lived restaurant which served Russian food at French prices. After the borsch, I was asked the usual question of ‘what are you working on now?’ I responded that as a journal editor I had little time for anything else but I had recently published a short biography of Roman Malinovskii. ‘Malinovskii’, said my host, his eyes aglimmer, ‘a very fishy business’. Indeed it was. Whether he knew it or not, he was echoing words spoken by V. I. Lenin some sixty years earlier shortly after Malinovskii had been executed in Moscow for ‘injuring and discrediting the revolution and its leaders in the eyes of the working masses’.

It soon became apparent that my Soviet friend knew only the vague outline of Malinovskii's extraordinary career: that he had been a leading member of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party, a Social Democratic deputy to the Fourth State Duma, and concurrently an agent of the tsarist secret police. After I had filled in some of the details, he asked if he could borrow my book. Reluctantly, since I had but two copies, I agreed and he promised to return it in a couple of weeks.