The archives of Kim Philby, the British counterintelligence chief who defected to Moscow in 1963, will be auctioned at Sotheby's at the request of his Russian widow, Rufina, who is struggling to make ends meet on her KGB widow's pension.
"She needs money to live on. The pension she's got doesn't sustain her," said Giles Fern, press officer at Sotheby's, by telephone. He said that Sotheby's was expecting Rufina Philby at the sale.
If the 117 lots reach their reserve prices, the sale should net Rufina Philby several thousand pounds.
Philby's unfinished autobiography has been given the highest reserve price of the items up for bid: from ?5,000 to ?6,000 ($7,000 to $9,300). Still unpublished, the book tells the story of his life up until the 1930s, when he converted to communism at Cambridge University.
Philby was asked to give his first lecture to the KGB only in 1977, a full 14 years after he defected to Moscow. In a copy, which is also in the sale, he reminisces about his decision to become a Soviet spy: "It was quite literally in the last week of my Cambridge career that I made the final decision -- to devote my life to the cause of communism."
When Philby was finally given work by the KGB in Moscow he ran "Philby's England Course," a program for Soviet agents working in Great Britain. Letters from his pupils to "comrade professor Kim" express thanks for his efforts.
The items reveal a man who, despite being a Moscow-resident KGB colonel, remained a quintessential upper-class Englishman. They include his copies of Jane Austen, Thackeray and Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" as well as Wisden's Cricket Almanack for 1972.
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