The flowering of James Bond’s cultural dominance at the height of the Cold War did much to make the work of Soviet propagandists easier. There was no need to slog away at inventing examples of Western decadence when, on the release of Dr No in 1962, British and American audiences had instantly taken to their hearts a borderline-sociopathic killer and serial rapist.
Throughout the 1960s, newspapers in the Soviet Bloc catalogued the moral failings of the Bond films – to a readership who had no opportunity of seeing them. “James Bond lives in a nightmarish world where laws are written at the point of a gun, where coercion and rape [are] considered valour and murder is a funny trick,” thundered Pravda in 1965. It’s a fair cop, one could argue, but some of Pravda’s other claims about how the films were “guilty of furthering the shameful aims of the Western capitalists” put it a bit high. “Although [Ian Fleming] is now dead, James Bond cannot be allowed to die because he teaches those sent to kill in Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic and many other places.” Did US soldiers in Vietnam really gee themselves up to kill by whispering: “Be more Bond”? Perhaps the lack of a similar character in the USSR accounts for the notorious soft-heartedness of the Red Army.
James Fleming, nephew of Ian, has produced a snappy survey-cum-anthology of attitudes to Bond in the Soviet Bloc. His argument is that Bond, with his repeated trouncings of Smersh and other Communist baddies, represented an affront to Soviet dignity that could not be ignored, particularly in the wake of the humiliating outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It helped that Bond leant himself to ridicule even more easily than to moral denunciation, and the Soviet press seized on the more absurd aspects of the films and of Ian Fleming’s novels. By a familiar process, however, the shrewd scheme of Bond-mockery for propaganda purposes deteriorated over the years into what seemed to be a rather desperate obsession.
The most pathetically funny episode in this book concerns the Bulgarian novelist Andrei Gulyashki, author of a hugely popular series of novels about a mild-mannered Sherlock Holmes-like detective called Avakoum Zakhov, who was ordered to write a book in which Zakhov defeats and kills Bond. The hapless Gulyashki was dispatched to London, with a minder to prevent his being “ideologically influenced” by the British, to drum up interest in the book, but spent much of his time locked in legal disputes with Fleming’s formidable widow Ann; in the end the novel was retitled Avakoum Zakhov vs 07, the other zero dropped for reasons of copyright.
