From insights into the Russian spy agency Sergei Skripal worked for, to a candid account from Stalin’s assassinations director – these books take you inside the closed world of espionage

A man’s agonising scream is filmed. He is tied to a metal stretcher and is fed, alive, into the crematorium of the GRU, Russia’s military spy agency. His crime? Betrayal of the motherland. The victim? A colonel who “deceived us”. The video – shown to new recruits – features in the opening chapter of Aquarium, a novel by the Russian writer Viktor Suvorov.

Suvorov was himself a GRU operative. He defected in the 1970s and lives in the UK. Another GRU officer was Sergei Skripal, who was poisoned last week with his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury. Aquarium is a classic of spy literature, part bildingsroman and part insider account of an organisation famed for its brutishness and fanatical secrecy.

None of Putin’s spy chiefs have written memoirs. One imagines it will be several decades before they do. In the meantime there is Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin’s assassinations director, who gives a candid account of his profession in Special Tasks, published in 1994. Sudoplatov explains how he organised the murder of the state’s enemies, including a Ukrainian nationalist (done personally with exploding chocolates) and Trotsky (killed with that ice-pick).

Timeline Poisoned umbrellas and polonium: Russian-linked UK deaths Show Hide Georgi Markov In one of the most chilling episodes of the cold war, the Bulgarian dissident was poisoned with a specially adapted umbrella on Waterloo Bridge. As he waited for a bus, Markov felt a sharp prick in his leg. The opposition activist, who was an irritant to the communist government of Bulgaria, died three days later. A deadly pellet containing ricin was found in his skin. His unknown assassin is thought to have been from the secret services in Bulgaria. Alexander Litvinenko The fatal poisoning of the former FSB officer sparked an international incident. Litvinenko fell ill after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium. He met his killers in a bar of the Millennium hotel in Mayfair. The pair were Andrei Lugovoi – a former KGB officer turned businessman, who is now a deputy in Russia’s state Duma – and Dmitry Kovtun, a childhood friend of Lugovoi’s from a Soviet military family. Putin denied all involvement and refused to extradite either of the killers. German Gorbuntsov The exiled Russian banker survived an attempt on his life as he got out of a cab in east London. He was shot four times with a silenced pistol. He had been involved in a bitter dispute with two former business partners. Alexander Perepilichnyy The businessman collapsed while running near his home in Surrey. Traces of a chemical that can be found in the poisonous plant gelsemium were later found in his stomach. Before his death, Perepilichnyy was helping a specialist investment firm uncover a $230m Russian money-laundering operation, a pre-inquest hearing was told. Hermitage Capital Management claimed that Perepilichnyy could have been deliberately killed for helping it uncover the scam involving Russian officials. He may have eaten a popular Russian dish containing the herb sorrel on the day of his death, which could have been poisoned. Boris Berezovsky The exiled billionaire was found hanged in an apparent suicide after he had spent more than decade waging a high-profile media battle against his one-time protege Putin. A coroner recorded an open verdict after hearing conflicting expert evidence about the way he died. A pathologist who conducted a postmortem examination on the businessman’s body said he could not rule out murder. Scot Young An associate of Berezovsky whom he helped to launder money, he was found impaled on railings after he fell from a fourth-floor flat in central London. A coroner ruled that there was insufficient evidence of suicide. But Young, who was sent to prison in January 2013 for repeatedly refusing to reveal his finances during a divorce row, told his partner he was going to jump out of the window moments before he was found.

Skripal poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were were found unconscious on a bench in the Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury after 'suspected exposure to an unknown substance' which was later identified as chemical weapon novichok. In the aftermath Theresa May blamed Vladimir Putin and expelled 23 Russian diplomats who were suspected of spying. Two Russian men using the identities Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov were named as suspects. They appeared on Russian TV to protest their innocence.

The Skripals survived. However a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after spraying novichok on her wrists from a fake Nina Ricci perfume bottle converted into a dispenser, which had been recovered from a skip by her partner Charlie Rowley.

Sudoplatov justified these exotic crimes on the grounds of Leninist ethics: morality was what served the party. Later he regretted that communism chewed up so many innocents, observing: “Victorious Russian rulers have always combined the qualities of statesmen and criminals.”

Putin spent the late 1980s in the GDR in Dresden. His more talented foreign intelligence co-worker, Yuri Shvets, was sent to the US. Shvets’s memoir, Washington Station, is a disillusioning account of his life as a KGB spy abroad and his attempts to recruit a US mole. His cover job as a correspondent for the Russian news agency Tass is more enjoyable than his espionage work. Meanwhile, his bosses back home are gerontocratic fools. Recalled to Moscow, Shvets visits the KGB’s legendary poisons factory, from where novichok, the deadly nerve agent used on Skripal, may have come. Tellingly, the KGB plotters who tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 met in the secret lab.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anna Funder. Photograph: Karl Schwerdtfeger/Penguin Random House

When it came to surveillance, one friendly Warsaw Pact agency outdid even the KGB: the Stasi. The world of East Germany’s secret police is vividly evoked in Anna Funder’s Stasiland, written more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She meets elderly unrepentant former Stasi officers, and their victims. Why did so many in the GDR became informers? The answer, one Stasi man tells her, was because they enjoyed being “somebody”.

In The File, Timothy Garton Ash tracks down those who spied on him as a student in early 1980s East Berlin. It’s a meditation on the cold war, European history, unreliable memory and our mutable younger versus older selves. Garton Ash casts himself as a “spy for the reader”. Imagine his delight when he discovers his Stasi watchers gave him the code-name “Romeo”.

Somewhere in the KGB’s Lubyanka HQ are similar files compiled over decades on prominent western figures (such as Trump). Fodder for future memoirs, should the Putin regime ever go the way of the USSR.