I'm reading a book called Leftist Terrorism by Viktor Vitiuk. I tried to find information on the author. The most detailed line I found was a citation to his book in Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates & the Use of Force edited by Michael A. Innes. The citation reads:
Note that Vitiuk was one of the more sophisticated and intelligent of the Soviet propagandists who wrote on the subject of terrorism.
My curiosity became worse, because that note/warning about his book seems to praise him. It also makes me wonder if he wrote other things. But searches for him turn up either the book he wrote, which I'm reading, or citations of the book. Was this all he wrote? Was he a well-known author or figure, or is that citation I found overly emphasizing him?
I have not heard of him; but I am extremely intrigued by the book (as you can imagine if you see my flair). Is the book new? What are your initial thoughts on it?
EDIT: wow; just realized you had a link there. I am definitely going to have to track that down via inter-library loan. For no other reason than to see the official soviet "take" on left-wing terrorism circa 1985, since it was revealed four years later that East Germany had been secretly housing eleven members of the West German terrorist group "the Red Army Faction." Though I have not found definitive proof, many have alleged that the Soviet Union was aware of this; as well as aware of their training of other Red Army Faction terrorists and their supplying them weapons (most recently in Masha Geeson's biography of Vladamir Putin; she alleges that when he was a KGB station chief in Dresden (might have been Leipzig) he met secretly with RAF members and helped supply them. (I think generally Masha Geeson is credible but I have very strong issues with this particular allegation; too much of it strikes me as fantastical)...
But at the time, American and Soviet propagandists were waging a fairly public war trying to convince the world to their way of thinking. On the American side you had Claire Sterling, a Rome-based journalist with heavy CIA ties, who wrote "the Terror Network" based on the "off the record" comments of various CIA spies. Essentially the book was alleging a global network of terrorism sponsored and controlled by the soviets.
There really wasn't any such network; at least not in the big picture way Sterling was alleging. But William Casey; Reagan's head of the CIA sure believed there way. Casey was the driving force behind getting the book produced (I am on the road and will provide sources later) and when the book came out, he would share it with anyone listening, explaining essentially "See, I told you of the vast soviet terrorist conspiracy" (but never mentioning his role in getting the book made in the first place).
However, time has show that there WAS some soviet sponsored, or at least tangentially connected terrorism; just not the vast global network that was presumed by so many on the right in the west. Like so many of the controversies of the cold war, the facts, when revealed, have ended up somewhere in the middle.