As a Soviet undercover operative, Bystrolyotov worked in Western Europe between World War I and II, recruiting and controlling several agents in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.
In his memoirs, Bystrolyotov identifies his father as a vice-governor of Saint Petersburg and governor of Vitebsk, Count Alexander Nikolaevich Tolstoy, a brother of Aleksei Tolstoi.
[2] Raised in an impoverished foster family of aristocrats in Saint Petersburg,[3] with the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, Bystrolyotov was first drafted into the White Army but after its defeat, he was recruited as a "sleeper" by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police.
He also stole British secrets for the Soviets years before Kim Philby and made Stalin privy to the contents of French, Italian, Swiss, and American diplomatic cables.
Bystrolyotov also procured Hitler's four-year plan for the rearmament of Germany for the Soviets and he helped identify the Nazis' fifth column in pre-World War II France.
His wife and his mother committed suicide after they were ostracized and deprived of food because they were relatives of an “enemy of the people.” Still in the camps, he overcame his poor health and the risk of severe punishment, to begin writing his eyewitness account of Stalin’s Gulag.
In 1974, the journal Our Contemporary (Russian: Наш Современник) published his short novel Para Bellum, a thinly-disguised account of one of his pre-World War II foreign operations.
“His skill at adopting the identity of an aristocrat came useful during his years as an illegal.” Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev in Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of KGB Archives.