Love in a Cold War Climate

The memoirs of Aino Kuusinen was published in the US in 1975 under the title 'The Rings of Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezhnev.' The book, which was published posthumously, was immediately dismissed by American academics as the result of the vivid imagination of an adventuress. Such attacks on Kuusinen's credibility persisted and was reinforced by the preface to the book's American edition. As Aino was a Soviet spy and wife of Otto Kuusinen, an 'Old Bolshevik' who was crucial in the development of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, scholars have been denied an important source of knowledge on the beginnings of the fall of the Soviet Union.