The Troika (A Story of Three Families, Friendship, and the Cold War)

How Cold War geopolitics challenged the bonds of lifelong friends

This now-legendary memoir written by a leader of East Germany’s notorious Stasi secret police follows three expatriate families whose boys create childhood bonds in Moscow—only to find the events of the 20th century casting them in different directions and testing not only their ties but their political beliefs.

Author Markus Wolf, known in the West as “the man without a face,” was a notorious shadow figure who had loomed large in the East German intelligence service. The Troika was published in 1989, after his retirement. And with East Germany on the verge of revolution and collapse, it became a sensation. The Troika is now published in English for the first time.

The titular trio —two Germans and one American, their families drawn to the Soviet Union by the promise of Communism—grow up and become friends in Moscow’s colorful Arbat neighborhood in the 1930s, experiencing childhood steeped in one of the most potent ideologies of the era. In the turbulent decades following the Russian Revolution, the city faced economic turmoil and political violence, culminating in Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s.

With the arrival of World War II, the trio are pulled into the fray on different fronts: one with the Red Army, one among the Americans, and one on the side of the Third Reich. The conflagration brings them to different corners of the geopolitical map as they mature, survive the chaos of war, and struggle to reinforce or abandon the principles instilled in them as young men. They miraculously remain connected through the thorny contradictions of the Cold War—until the pressure of the times drives one of them to a tragic end.

The Troika is a sober testament to the 20th century’s divisive doctrines and a paean to the power of familial and friendship ties during the most trying episodes of European history. It is also a humanizing peek behind the curtain at a man who ultimately found it too hard to remain invisible as his country endured the seismic shocks of perestroika and, ultimately, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Rooted in a wealth of rarely seen photographs and documentary materials, Markus Wolf’s autobiographical tale deftly weaves various threads of a fraught century into a magnificent tapestry.