Icon by Frederick Forsyth: The Black Manifesto and a Coup Against Russia’s Future in 1999
Post-Soviet Russia is living through one of the most decisive moments of its history. A seemingly unstoppable candidate, Igor Komarov, is heading for the presidency, promising to end corruption and give the Russian people back their hope, until a secret document known as the Black Manifesto reveals what he really intends.
Author: Frederick Forsyth (1938–2025)
Title: Icon (1996)
Format: English Kindle edition, 546 pages
Scope: Political thriller
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B0051UTRA8 (ASIN B0051UTRA8)
Uncle Kolya
General Nikolai Nikolayev, a national hero and veteran of the Red Army, is growing old and can see where a corrupt system full of ignorant people is heading. When a British contact warns him about the Black Manifesto, the true programme supposedly written by Komarov, the old patriot realises the scale of the threat. He gives an interview that seals his fate, and he is later killed.
Monarchy and Church
According to the idol of the Russian people, the solution for Russia is to restore the monarchy and the Church. Little by little the idea spreads through the media, and Komarov’s popularity starts to fall.
New Year’s Eve 1999
With his presidency under threat, Komarov decides to stage a coup on New Year’s Eve 1999, backed by his most loyal followers. But thanks to the persistence of a foreign resistance and the warning of a possible coup, the Russian army is not taken by surprise, and the coup is crushed. The Orthodox Church grows stronger across the country.
Jason Monk
The hero is Jason Monk, a former CIA officer who ran some of the agency’s most valuable agents inside the Soviet Union until a traitor betrayed them. Bitter and retired, he is recruited by a small group of influential Westerners, led by the veteran British spymaster Sir Nigel Irvine, to go into Russia and stop Komarov. His mission, part investigation, part covert operation, gives the novel its pace and its many twists.
Echoes of Real History
The traitor in Monk’s past echoes the real case of Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer whose betrayal led to the arrest and execution of Western agents in the 1980s, and Forsyth’s portrait of 1990s Russia, with its economic chaos, organised crime and nationalist politics, draws on the headlines of the time. As always with Forsyth, fiction moves through a world built from careful research.
A Novel About the Future
Written in 1996, Icon imagines Russia a few years ahead, in 1999. That makes it an unusual kind of thriller: a guess about what might happen after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some of its fears look remarkably prescient, others less so, but reading it now is fascinating precisely because we know what really happened, including the coincidence that Boris Yeltsin resigned and handed power to Vladimir Putin on the last day of 1999.
On Screen
The novel was adapted as a television film in 2005, starring Patrick Swayze as Jason Monk.
Forsyth’s Craft
The book shows all of Forsyth’s trademarks: multiple storylines that gradually converge, an expert’s knowledge of intelligence work and weapons, and a cast that moves easily from Moscow back streets to the boardrooms and clubs of London and Washington. At over five hundred pages it is one of his longest novels, but the momentum rarely flags, and the final chapters, with the clock ticking towards the end of the century, are as tense as anything he wrote. It makes an interesting pair with The Fourth Protocol, his earlier Cold War thriller.
Why Read It
Forsyth at his most ambitious: a thriller that imagines the future of post-communist Russia, written with his trademark documentary detail. Read today, it is a striking portrait of fears about Russian nationalism.
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