GOING abroad this summer? Don't forget to pack The KGB's True Guide to the Cities of the World. Unless you read Russian, you will need to take a sexy Slav translator with you as well, for the 300 page guide is short on maps and pictures and long on closely typed Cyrillic text.
The book, launched at a recent signing ceremony at the Moskva Bookshop, has to be one of the most bizarre publications of the season. It was written by seven retired spies, evidently trying to supplement their meagre KGB pensions.
For decades, KGB agents were among the very few Soviet citizens privileged enough to experience life beyond the Iron Curtain. Now the seven spies offer their kit on how to dress, where to eat and what to see to a new generation of Russians who are just starting to set foot abroad.
Obviously, their project had the blessing of the Lyubyanka, the headquarters of the security services now called the FSB. For they give away no State secrets in their memoirs of postings to Paris Rome London, Cairo, New York, Mexico City.
The book is nevertheless rather revealing about the kind of staff the KGB recruited. It tells you more about them and their stereotyped ideas of foreign life than it does about the cities they visit.
Mikhail Lyubimov, the man in London, for example, is a fusty old character who seems to think that little has changed in Britain since the days of T.S. Eliot, whom he is constantly quoting.
Expelled from Britain in the 1960s, he is allowed to return to gather material for the book and makes, straight for Harrods to replenish his wardrobe with flannel trousers and tweed jackets. Just what the fashion conscious Brit is wearing this season.
Then he goes to the Sherlock Holmes pub on Baker Street packed with average English blokes, as he no doubt thinks.
He reveals that in order to become a good spy, he spent many painful hours learning to drink whisky instead of vodka.
"It requires patience, like learning to appreciate Richard Strauss," he says, adding that if you stay the course you graduate from Johnny Walker to the best Scottish single malts. Evidently he never tried Irish.
Almost more English than the English - he brushes off annoying New Russians wanting to borrow money from him to pay their gambling debts by adopting an Oxford accent and pretending not to understand - Coli Lyubimov nevertheless gives himself away in his chapter on Fleet Street.
Entering the Cheshire Cheeses pub, frequented in the 18th century by Dr Samuel Johnson, he tells his readers: "Dr Johnson is revered by the English as a great Victorian."
The man in New York, Oleg Brykin, also makes mistakes about his adopted city. He recounts how he once arranged to meet an agent by the lions' cage at the Bronx Zoo, only to discover later that this was a wildlife park where the animals were allowed to roam free.
Brykin was evidently a junior, given all the worst jobs by his boss, the KGB "resident" in the big apple. His allowance was small and he complains that he had to take sandwiches with him whenever he travelled on spying missions.
Mikhail Brazhelonov, the man in Paris, lived more luxuriously. Indeed, he spent so much time eating moules in the best restaurants that, he confessed, he sometimes forgot to meet his agents.
Lev Bausin, a married man, as his biography makes clear, fell love with an Aeroflot stewardess during his posting to Cairo an waxes lyrical about how he too her to see the Pyramids in the moonlight.
The man in Rome, Leonid Kolosov, became so attached to the holy city that he was nearly in tears when he had to leave it. He tells how he threw a coin, according to tradition, into the Trevi fountain and prayed he would see Italy again as he set out for the airport to catch the plane back to grey, snowy Moscow.
The agents write with a light touch, trying to convince it's they bare sensitive and amusing, old gentlemen and completely glossing over their having served an organisation which, repressed, even murdered its own citizens.
The book costs only 19,500 roubles (about £2.50), but it is hard to see who will buy it.
For the mass of Russians are too poor to be able to afford foreign holidays, while the nouveau riche, many of whom have made their fortunes illegally, are much too worldly wise to be interested in these coy reminiscences.
The Moscow Times reported this week that for the New Russians, the south of France is now `passe' and they are looking for exotic holidays in such places as Indonesia and the Caribbean.