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Near and Distant Neighbors
A New History of Soviet Intelligence
By Jonathan Haslam Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Jonathan Haslam
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71040-8
CHAPTER 1
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
The beginnings of the Soviet secret services are inextricably identified with the Cheka, a name that soon struck fear into the hearts of most Russians.
The Cheka was rooted in the Bolshevik revolution. The collapse of the imperial autocracy in March 1917, after an unpopular war and food shortages, had rapidly led to widespread social disorder. Those in office but not in power had reason to fear revolution from below. The coup d'état that launched Lenin and the Bolsheviks and their allies into government on November 7 then gave birth on December 20 to an "Extraordinary Committee," or Cheka, for short, initially to combat counterrevolution and sabotage; soon it had unquestionably become the secret police of the revolution.
Yet it was only after Lenin transferred the government from cosmopolitan Petrograd to provincial Moscow in March 1918 (when the revolution was threatened with annihilation both from within the country and from without) that the Cheka truly became notorious. The Bolsheviks had just signed a peace treaty with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, but the capital remained vulnerable. Barely a week earlier, an advance party of British marines had landed in Arkhangelsk, on the White Sea. The connexions between internal unrest and external intervention were real and growing.
Signing a peace treaty with the Kaiser's Germany in the midst of the world war, on March 3, 1918, proved highly controversial — it split the ruling coalition between Bolsheviks and left Socialist Revolutionaries who targeted their former allies for assassination. It also came at a high price: territorial losses and financial indemnities for the Bolsheviks. More important perhaps, it alienated the British government. London rightly expected that the loss of the Eastern Front against Berlin would be catastrophic for the war effort on the Western Front. Bringing down the Bolsheviks was therefore seen as a sure way to restore the Eastern Front and ensure final victory over Germany.
The evacuation to Moscow thus rescued the régime from potential attack, on land and by sea. It also meant turning its back on Peter the Great's Palladian window on the world for the Byzantine grandeur of the Kremlin, secreted deep in the heart of old Russia. The move represented a bold leap into the unknown; it symbolised a decisive step backwards into a darker and more brutal past. Here in Moscow, the Cheka was established in former insurance offices at the Lubyanka, overlooking the main street, Tverskaya (later Gorky), not far from the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs at Kuznetsky Most and from the Kremlin itself, on Red Square.
The Cheka quickly established itself as a crucial instrument of power for those struggling to establish themselves as successors to Lenin. In the decade that followed its formation, this shield of the revolution was directed primarily against the counterrevolution from abroad — those who had fled the country in the wake of retreating Allied armies that had tried and failed in their attempt to conquer Bolshevik Russia. For the main enemy was less the foreign powers, alarmed by the spectre of socialist revolution, than the angry and impatient exiles, who dreamed of return yet had absolutely no idea how to secure it.
The end of the First World War saw two great myths. The new rulers of Russia were convinced that its revolution could go global and transform a states system dominated by great powers founded on free market capitalism into a world without borders, ruled by the working class. Thus normal interstate relations with capitalist governments were not paramount; instead, subverting the West through covert action was seen as essential to the survival of the new Soviet régime. This myth seemed all the more plausible because world war had dislocated relations between the great powers and undermined social and economic stability across the face of Europe.
The second myth, held by the leading Great Powers, most notably France, the British Empire, and, momentarily, the United States, was that the agreements negotiated to end the First World War — most notably the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919) — would forge a stable peace. This would be done by subjugating Germany for the indefinite future; an international outcast, it would be stripped of its ability to wage war and economically crippled through the payment of reparations. Yet this policy was bought at a high price by the victors. Persistent German resistance to subjugation meant that the West was not united in facing down the threat to the capitalist order from the Soviet Union. It enabled the Bolsheviks to find breathing room in a hostile world, first for survival and then eventually for expansion.
The KRO
Naturally, Moscow's first priority as it tried its hardest to incite an international uprising was to protect the revolution at home. Thus counterintelligence (run by the KRO, the krokisty), the shield of the revolution, was the Cheka's most vital function. The sword (intelligence abroad), wielded by the Cheka's foreign department (INO), was of lesser importance.
At the head of the krokisty was a unique figure, who made all the difference to the future of Soviet intelligence, Artur Artuzov. Born to an Italian Swiss father (Fraucci), Artuzov did not even have a Soviet passport. He was introduced to the Cheka by his uncle Misha, Dr. Mikhail Kedrov, Lenin's comrade-in-arms. Kedrov was the first head of the all-powerful Special Department, the shock troops who policed the emergent Red Army. Kedrov soon burned out as a Chekist, however, and eased himself back into the world of medicine.
Artuzov was made of stronger stuff: small but solid, with a large head and the body of a weightlifter, he was ill-fitted to evening dress but well suited to a military uniform and long boots. His face was distinctive: a large mouth bordered by a small goatee, lively dark grey eyes that narrowly bridged a solid, stubbed nose, sheltering under a shock of black hair that turned snow white within a decade.
A good tenor, a winter sportsman, and a man with varied cultural interests, Artuzov was also even-tempered, ruthless, ascetic, self-critical, and given to ironical observations. These qualities helped ensure his good rapport with and great respect for his immediate superior, Menzhinsky. Most important, he was brilliant at talent spotting. Artuzov also had great integrity. Yet, oddly for so accomplished an intelligence officer, he retained a touching innocence under his thick hide. Indeed, he could be trusting to the point of naïveté. He denounced the first Show Trial (of industrial specialists) in 1930, only to be roundly rebuked by his chief, Genrikh Yagoda, for sticking his nose in other people's business. As Artuzov discovered, not everyone was as committed to principle as he, and this would prove decisive in his eventual fate; Stalin preferred ruthlessness.
At home, the KRO faced a challenge to Soviet power as a result of Lenin's retreat, in March 1921, from war communism. This was known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The countryside, home to the overwhelming majority of the population, reverted to capitalism. The cities thereafter stood as isolated outposts of state socialism, leaving over 85 percent of the people effectively beyond range of the government's grasp.
The KRO's report for 1923–1924 highlighted the core alliance between the richer peasantry who owned some property (even just a horse) and the monarchist counterrevolutionaries headquartered abroad. This alliance had four important causes: first, "the re-establishment of the peasant economy near enough to a former, prerevolutionary state"; second, "the weakness of Soviet power (and Party apparatus) in the countryside," where "the murder of agricultural correspondents [volunteer Party reporters] ... testifies to desperate resistance" by the kulak to growing Soviet penetration; third, "the formation of massive groups of former people [i.e., those identified with the old régime], without the means to sustain themselves." Fourth, "the return of significant groups of emigrés from the impoverished White emigration, unable to adapt to Soviet conditions."
Immigration controls had broken down. It was estimated that eleven thousand people a month were crossing porous borders illegally. Soviet Russia was immense, sprawling across 8,176,000 square miles; it would take many years to seal itself off. Moreover, budget shortages meant that the growing number of former enemies returning to Russia were no longer processed in holding camps. The OGPU (so named in 1923) believed that those who wished to subvert Soviet power had some reason to vest their hopes in the Red Army. Artuzov's report added that "The New Economic Policy, the improvement in the material well-being of the intelligentsia, 'the rule of law,' and the possibility of 'legal' status, the blending in of former White officers amidst Russian society, have provided fertile soil for the renewal of counterrevolutionary activity."
Within, the spirit of revolt awaited its opportunity, inflamed rather than dampened by greedy entrepreneurs accumulating surpluses for profit. Capitalism had every expectation of thriving in rural Russia — after all, the masses there had been told to enrich themselves. At the same time, they felt oppressed by taxes and resented the fact that, under the Bolsheviks, few goods were available to buy from the cities. The very magnitude of peasant Russia and its overwhelming ignorance was a source of recurrent anxiety. Artuzov outlined one issue in especially stark terms: "There is every intention of using the strengthening of anti-semitism among the peasant masses to raise discontent against Soviet power by underscoring the connexion between communism and the Jews, and the influence of the latter on the USSR's politics" (italics in the original).
Foreign intelligence services, notably the British, evidently hoped that this economic drought would make enough tinder to spark a forest fire. "Between August 9 and 23, of the current year [1924]," Artuzov reported, "English intelligence in Reval [Tallinn] made an offer to a range of royalists to take up actively hostile work against the USSR, certain of which were offered quite hefty sums of up to £5,000 sterling to organise the blowing up of bridges on any [railway] lines, the fouling of the water supply, [sabotage] of electric lighting, trams, telephones, telegraphs etc." By October similar offers were being made in Helsinki, and with even greater persistence.
Abroad, Soviet representatives were never safe from counterrevolutionary terrorism. On the eve of the first postwar international economic conference, to be held at Genoa in April 1922, word came in that the notorious terrorist Boris Savinkov was preparing to assassinate Soviet delegates; as a result of this warning, the plot was foiled. Vatslav Vorovskii, the Soviet envoy to the Lausanne conference in Switzerland settling the status of the Dardanelles, the straits that separated Europe from Asia, was not so lucky. On May 10, 1923, to the horror of his fellow diners, including Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov, Vorovskii was gunned down by counterrevolutionary bullets in the restaurant of the Hotel Cecil. The attack was orchestrated by Arkadii Polunin and carried out by Maurice Conradi, whose family had been wiped out by the Bolsheviks.
On February 5, 1926, Teodor Nette, a diplomatic courier, was shot on the Moscow–Riga train. On June 7, 1927, Pyotr Voikov, the Soviet ambassador to Poland and a key player in the slaughter of the Russian royal family, was assassinated by an emigré, Boris Koverd, on the platform of Warsaw station. On September 2 another emigré, Traikovich, attempted to kill a Soviet diplomatic courier, Shlesser, but was killed by Shlesser's companion, Gusev. At the end of 1927, V. Ukolov, an INO member under cover at the Soviet consulate in Beijing, was murdered along with five others in Hangzhou. On May 4, 1928, another attempt was made, this time against trade representative A. S. Lizarev. For the rest of the decade, Soviet diplomatic personnel nervously asked themselves who would be next.
At this turbulent time, a dramatic contrast emerged between the KRO, which enjoyed some striking successes, and its less impressive counterpart, the INO. Initially, the krokisty were hamstrung by an instinctive reluctance to borrow from time-honoured tsarist practices, in particular the use of agents provocateurs secreted within counterrevolutionary structures. Yet pragmatism — and the KRO's successes in turning Polish intelligence officers through ideological persuasion — brought a change of heart. Thus in January 1921, Feliks Dzerzhinsky made conversion the norm rather than an exception. The ABC of Counterintelligence, which highlights the importance of the psychological approach, appeared as a working manual four years later, in 1925. The ABC was written by Artuzov, under whose inspired leadership the KRO launched a series of highly successful dummy counterrevolutionary organisations — most prominently the "Trust," which was operational between November 1922 and April 1927.
The Trust had its roots in advice that Vladimir Dzhunkovskii gave to secret police heads Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky personally. Dzhunkovskii had previously served as tsarist minister of the interior and commander of what amounted to the palace's own Praetorian Guard, a force 12,700 men strong known as the Special Police Corps. There, he learned about police penetration of the revolutionary movement, efforts that included the use of agents provocateurs such as Evgenii Azef, who rose, astonishingly, to head the Socialist Revolutionary Party's combat division, and was behind a number of high-profile assassinations. The other leading provocateur was Sergei Zubatov, who tried to develop anticapitalist trade unions loyal to the tsar. Dzhunkovskii believed these practices to be unconstitutional, and strongly disapproved of them; as a result, he was sacked by the tsar for being too principled. His principles, however, did not stop him from offering advice that later would prove very valuable to the Bolsheviks when they were in power.
The history of the Trust begins in November 1921, when Artuzov intercepted a fascinating letter from Yuri Artamonov to the Supreme Royal Council (VMS) in exile. Artamonov worked as an interpreter at the passport office (MI6 station) of the British legation in Reval, Estonia. The letter revealed a determination to establish a subversive presence within Soviet Russia with the help of a certain Aleksandr Yakushev. Yakushev, an aristocrat and civil servant under the tsar, later worked for the Foreign Trade Commissariat. He had been en route to Norway and Sweden when he encountered Artamonov in Reval; Artamonov had been Yakushev's pupil at the Imperial Alexandrovsk Lycée. Artamonov loathed the Bolsheviks and talked Yakushev into cooperation.
Artamonov proved to be a source of inspiration to Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky: "Yakushev is an outstanding professional. Intelligent. He knows everything and everyone. He thinks just as we do. He is exactly what we need. He asserts that his opinion is the opinion of the best people in Russia ... After the fall of the Bolsheviks the professionals will come to power. The government will be created not from emigrés but from those who are in Russia. Yakushev said that the best people in Russia not only get together, counterrevolutionary organisations exist and are active in the country." Yakushev was dismissive of the emigré community: "In the future," he wrote, "they are welcome in Russia, but to import a government from abroad is out of the question. The emigrés do not know Russia. They need to come and stay and adapt to the new conditions."
When Yakushev returned to Moscow, he was promptly arrested by the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky knew him personally; they had worked together in 1920, when Dzerzhinsky was commissar of transport. Yakushev quickly admitted everything, and Artuzov then spent many hours trying to convince him that his patriotic duty was to cooperate. Yakushev, eager to escape further incarceration, finally gave in. Together with Artuzov, he set up the Monarchist Organisation of Central Russia (MOTsR), which the Cheka nicknamed the Trust.
Artuzov summed up the purposes and procedures of the Trust: first, as a means of monitoring the royalists, "to create the appearance of an existing royalist organisation in the USSR, in order to concentrate the attention of all foreign royalists on this supposed organisation." Second, to keep up to date on which states were financing the royalists. Third, to find out which foreign embassies within Soviet Russia were in touch with the emigrés. Fourth, to provide disinformation specially compiled by the military to mislead the enemy about Soviet capabilities. Fifth, to convince emigrés "that they cannot take an active role in general: a change of régime as with any other revolution can take place only from within the country. The emigrés can return only after a change of régime."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Near and Distant Neighbors by Jonathan Haslam. Copyright © 2015 Jonathan Haslam. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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