Anatoly Kucherena

In June 2014, American film director Oliver Stone acquired rights to a screen adaptation of Kucherena's novel, Time of the Octopus, the story of fictional American whistleblower Joshua Kold. Threatened by his government and waiting for a decision on his request for Russian asylum, Cold spends three weeks in the transit area of the Moscow airport. Stone said, "Anatoly has written a 'grand inquisitor'-style Russian novel weighing the soul of his fictional whistleblower against the gravity of a 1984 tyranny that has achieved global proportions." The book, the first in a "psychological-political thriller trilogy," was released on 3 March 2015 in Russian and 29 January 2017 in English. The Moscow Times reported that Kucherena said Snowden had received a copy of the book and liked it. In April 2015, WikiLeaks revealed that Oliver Stone paid $1 million for the movie rights to Kucherena's novel.

Anatoly Grigorievich Kucherena (Russian: Анатолий Григорьевич Кучерена ; born 23 August 1960) is a Russian attorney, public figure, Doctor of Law, and professor. From mid-2013, Kucherena has represented former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's interests in the Russian Federation. Kucherena continues to represent Snowden, pro bono, on an occasional basis. In 2013, according to Izvestia, he was known as a person who spoke in favour of the banning of anonymizer software: advocating the prosecution of its development, distribution and usage by including it in the "malware" software category (a view which contradicts the terminology used in the industry).