A Splinter of Ice
originaltheatre.com

In the 1960s, Graham Greene announced that, in protest against the imprisonment of writers by the Soviet regime, he would stop visiting Russia, and donate his literary earnings there to human rights causes.

But, as the third volume of Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene (2004) recounts, the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev encouraged the author to return after an absence of a quarter of a century. Greene was invited to give the closing speech at a peace conference in the Kremlin in February 1987. The Soviet leader told the writer, “I’ve known you all my life.” What he meant was, he was a keen Greene reader.

During his return to Russia, Greene met Kim Philby, a former MI6 colleague living in exile in Moscow, for the first time since Philby had fled to the Soviet Union under threat of exposure as “the third man” in the Cambridge spy ring. The novelist had drinks and dinner with the exiled spy and his wife Rufina who, remarkably, had taught herself English by reading Greene’s novels with imported ­editions and Russian translations alongside.