Sekret (35 page)

In hindsight, we think of America as “winning” the space race, thanks to Apollo 11’s successful lunar landing in 1969. But in the early 1960s, the Soviets were still leading the race, which had come to symbolize a proxy war between the East and West. They launched the first satellite, the
Sputnik-1
, in 1957, which gave Russia the ability to transmit signals across the entire world; it was months before America was able to launch its own. The Soviets also launched the first lunar probe and sent the first man into orbit. While the
Veter
space program is a fictitious creation, many Soviet space programs were shrouded in secrecy, and we may never learn about every launch, both successful and failed. However, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony’s
Starman
, a biography of Yuri Gagarin, offered me an excellent glimpse of the Soviet program and its triumphs and tragedies.

Both the CIA and the KGB experimented with psychic abilities. The CIA’s most infamous program, MK ULTRA, involved dosing subjects with LSD for a variety of applications, including an attempt to awaken psychic potential. Stalin consulted with an alleged psychic during World War II, and rumors of Soviet extrasensory perception (ESP) programs prompted further remote viewing research from the CIA in the Stargate program of the 1970s. As far as I know, however, none of these projects produced lasting results.

Copyright © 2014 by Lindsay Smith

Published by Roaring Brook Press

Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing

Holdings Limited Partnership

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

macteenbooks.com

All rights reserved

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Smith, Lindsay, 1984–

   Sekret / Lindsay Smith. — First edition.

       pages cm

   Summary: In 1960s Soviet Russia, seventeen-year-old Yulia is captured by the KGB to work on a team of teen psychic spies.

   ISBN 978-1-59643-892-7 (hardback) —

   ISBN 978-1-59643-893-4 (ebook)

 [1.  Spies—Fiction.   2.  Psychic ability—Fiction.   3.  KGB—Fiction.   4.  Soviet Union—History—1953–1985—Fiction.]   I.  Title.

   PZ7.S65435Se 2014

   [Fic]—dc23

2013027913

eISBN 9781596438934

Lyrics from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

“Babi Yar” by Yevgenny Yevtushenko translated by Lindsay Smith

First hardcover edition, 2014

eBook edition, April 2014