Youth Behind Bars

Dmitry Alexandrovich Bystrolёtov was a lawyer, a doctor, an artist, a writer, a polyglot who knew 19 languages, and an illegal intelligence agent who gave 13 years of his life to Soviet intelligence and spent 18 years in Stalin’s camps. He left us his memoirs, testimony, and thoughts in a cycle of books under the general title “Feast of the Immortals.”

As an illegal agent, the author of “Feast of the Immortals” had to visit the USA, Italy, Austria, Spain, Greece, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland under cover as a Dutch artist Hans Gelleni and a Hungarian count Perel’i de Karalghaz, and also as the American gangster Joe Perriell, a Brazilian businessman, an English lord. In our time, in the espionage museum in the USA, there is an exhibition dedicated to him—where they call him nothing other than SUPER-SPY. Some pages of his illegal work have not been declassified even to this day.