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Popular Culture Review
compared to his control, Rosa Klebb, Director of Otdyel II (Operations and
Executions) of SMERSH.
Turning inside out the device of his own recurrent father figure,
Fleming gives us a mother from beyond Hell. Throughout the 007 novels, a
goodly number of super villains—and, crucially, M. himself—serve to “dress
down” a naughty Bond (and his prurient admirers, we) from the inescapable
psychic lairs of Dad’s room, the Principal’s office, etc. Rosa Klebb, on the other
hand, is the nurturing mother, the warm bosom, the safe place wrought foulest
foul as only the Soviet Union (and Fleming) could.
How does one, much less a Russian woman in the 1950s, become Head
of Operations and Executions for the Soviet state organ of death? By being a
murderous Medea to the nicotine-yellowed teeth, Fleming replies. Colonel Rosa
Klebb employs a veritable Freudian buffet of maternal roles to conduct tortures
in the SMERSH dungeons. And, as if that weren’t hair-raising enough, Klebb is
also a physical horror. Although compared to the tricoteuses of the French
Revolution, her uniform “looked like a badly packed sandbag,” and her figure
within uproariously likened to a cello, the picture of Rosa Klebb is still
incomplete.
Both Rosa Klebb and From Russia with Love are catapulted into
immortality when, after “interviewing” the terrified young Romanov beauty
chosen by SMERSH to trap 007 (and squirmingly headed to seducing her),
Klebb appears in an orange crepe night-gown, satin knickers, pink feathered
slippers, and enough make-up to suffocate the walking dead: “She looked like
the oldest and ugliest whore in the world.”
It is this kind of flesh-and-blood prose, combined with the precision of
crack story-telling abilities and real world knowledge, that has given Ian
Fleming’s From Russia with Love the reputation it enjoys fifty years after its
well-regarded initial appearance. But the true impact of the novel remains
outside its sumptuously written pages.
In 1960, presidential aspirant John F. Kennedy named From Russia
with Love one of his 10 favorite books (the only fiction title on the Ɨ7B