Bond girls often come to a sticky end but Olga Kurylenko will be hoping that the Communists never get hold of her.

Kurylenko, the Ukrainian actress who plays Bond's sidekick in Quantum of Solace, has been condemned by the Communist Party of St Petersburg for aiding “the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies”. Apparently oblivious to Bond's fictional nature, it accused her of assisting “a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR”.

In an appeal to the actress on its website, the party said: “The Soviet Union educated you, cared for you and brought you up for free but no one suspected that you would commit this act of intellectual and moral betrayal.”

It is not the first time the Communists of St Petersburg — or Leningrad, as they would rather it be called — have taken aim at perfidious Western films. Earlier this year they claimed that the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set in the Cold War in 1957, was a vehicle for crude anti-Soviet propaganda and lambasted the antics of Harrison Ford and his ruthless Russian nemesis Cate Blanchett, calling them capitalist puppets.

The party declared that Ford had “no future in Russia any more” — a message that apparently failed to reach the country's cinemagoers, who flocked to see the film at a record 808 screens.

The Communists are, however, willing to rehabilitate Kurylenko — if she delivers her co-star, Daniel Craig, into the clutches of Russia's secret services for interrogation. “Let him tell what other plans are being written in the Pentagon and Hollywood to discredit Russia and drive a wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples,” it said.

Sergei Malinkovich, the leader of the city party, told The Times: “Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West.”

The Communist Party has withered since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but it remains the second-largest party in the Duma, the Russian parliament. The St Petersburg branch is a breakaway faction and a vocal opposition in Russia's second city.

Kurylenko, 28, was born in Berdyansk in what was then Soviet Ukraine. The port city is not far from the Crimea, where — if one were looking for such ominous geopolitical portents — tensions are rising over the future of Russia's Black Sea fleet. Ukraine's pro-Western President, Viktor Yushchenko, insists that the fleet must leave in 2017 at the end of a lease agreement but Russia wants to stay. Mr Yushchenko is also pushing to join Nato, a move vehemently opposed by the Kremlin and many pro-Russian Ukrainians.

Kurylenko was accused of collaborating with the enemy by starring alongside the British spy while the struggle against Nato was continuing. It told her: “How could you desert your homeland in its moment of need? Do you really want Crimean girls to be raped by cruel and stupid American marines? Where is your patriotism?”

Fears of ideological contamination apparently did not prevent Mr Malinkovich, 34, from claiming that he had already seen Quantum of Solace, even though it does not open in Russian cinemas until next week. “I watched a pirate DVD,” he explained.

Sleeping with the enemy

James Bond was the enemy of the Soviet Union but there were also several moments of detente:

— In The Spy Who Loved Me he teams up with Russian agent Anya Amasova to thwart a reclusive megalomaniac called Stromberg who plans to detroy the world and create a new civilisation under the sea. Amasova falls for Bond's charms and the two end up in bed

— Bond strikes a deal with former KGB agent Valentin Zukovsky in GoldenEye. Zukovsky arranges a meeting with Bond and Janus. In The World Is Not Enough, Zukovsky saves Bond's life

— In The Living Daylights Bond collaborates with the KGB chief General Pushkin, faking his assassination so that the real villains can reveal their scheme

— In From Russia with Love Bond is chased across Europe in the company of the beautiful Soviet spy Tatiana. They sail off together in a Venetian gondola

Sources: imdb.com; Times archives

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