The attempt on Lenin’s life, the killing of Uritsky and the announcement of the “liquidation” of “the envoys’ plot” were quickly followed by the declaration of the Red Terror. With the Bolsheviks engaged in a bitter civil war against their White enemies, the Cheka set out to terrorize the regime’s opponents. Lenin himself, only three weeks before the attempt on his own life, had written to the Bolsheviks in Penza, and probably elsewhere, urging them to organize public executions to make the people “tremble” “for hundreds of kilometers around.” While still recovering from his wounds, he instructed, “It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror.” 16 On October 15 Uritsky’s successor in Petrograd, Gleb Ivanovich Boky, proudly reported to Moscow that 800 alleged counterrevolutionaries had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Among those arrested, and probably executed, in Petrograd was the Cheka’s first foreign agent, Alexei Filippov. His liquidation was due, in all probability, not to the failure of his Finnish missions but to his “bourgeois” origins, which marked him down as an enemy of the people in the paranoid atmosphere of the Red Terror.17 Twenty years later Boky was himself to fall victim to the even greater paranoia of Stalin’s Terror.18
Berzin and Buikis, the Cheka agents provocateurs who had helped orchestrate the “envoys’ plot,” subsequently became victims of their own deception. Berzin’s career initially prospered. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his role as agent provocateur, joined the Cheka and later became head of a forced labor camp in the Kolyma goldfields which had one of the highest death rates in Stalin’s gulag. In 1937, however, he was arrested and shot as an enemy of the people.19 The exact charges leveled against Berzin are not known, but it is likely that they included accusations that he had actually collaborated with Western plotters in 1918. In the somewhat paranoid Stalinist interpretation of the “envoys’ plot,” his collaborator Buikis (alias “Shmidkhen”) was portrayed as a covert counter-revolutionary rather than a Cheka officer carrying out his orders. That remained the accepted interpretation even in classified KGB histories during Mitrokhin’s early career. Buikis survived the Terror only by concealing his identity. Not until the mid-1960s did research in the KGB archives reestablish “Shmidkhen’s” true identity and his real role in 1918.20
Throughout Mitrokhin’s career, KGB historians continued to interpret all plots and attacks against the young Soviet regime as “manifestations of a unified conspiracy” by its class enemies at home and the “imperialist powers” abroad.21 The reality was very different. Had there been “a unified conspiracy,” the regime would surely have lost the civil war. If two or three divisions of Western troops had landed in the Gulf of Finland in 1919, they could probably have forced their way to Moscow and overthrown the Bolsheviks. But in the aftermath of the First World War not even two or three divisions could be found. Those American, British, French and Japanese troops who intervened against the Red Army served mainly to discredit the White cause and thus actually to assist the Bolsheviks. They were too few to affect the military outcome of the civil war but quite sufficient to allow the Bolsheviks to brand their opponents as the tools of Western imperialism. Most Bolsheviks were, in any case, sincerely convinced that during the civil war they had faced a determined onslaught from the full might of Western capitalism. That illusion continued to color Soviet attitudes to the West throughout, and even beyond, the Stalin era.
THE CHEKA’S INTELLIGENCE operations both at home and abroad were profoundly influenced not merely by the legacy of the Okhrana but also by the Bolsheviks’ own pre-Revolutionary experience as a largely illegal clandestine underground. Many of the Bolshevik leadership had become so used to living under false identities before 1917 that they retained their aliases even after the Revolution: among them the Russian nobleman Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov,22 who kept the pseudonym Lenin, and the Georgian Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who continued to be known as Stalin. Both Lenin and Stalin retained many of the habits of mind developed during their underground existence. On highly sensitive matters Lenin would insist no copy be made of his instructions and that the original either be returned to him for destruction or destroyed by the recipient. Happily for the historian, his instructions were not always carried out.23
Stalin continued to doctor his own pre-Revolutionary record during the 1920s, changing even the day and year of his birth; the correct date (December 6, 1878) was not made public until 1996.24 During a visit to the secret section of the Moscow Main Archives Directorate (Glavarkhiv), Mitrokhin was once shown an Okhrana file on Dzhugashvili. The file cover and title followed standard Okhrana format, but, on looking inside, Mitrokhin discovered that the contents had been entirely removed. The probability is that the Okhrana had compromising materials on the young Dzhugashvili, and that at the first opportunity Stalin arranged for the file to be gutted. In typical Soviet bureaucratic fashion, however, the cover was preserved since the existence of the file was indelibly recorded in the secret registers. Mitrokhin suspects that whoever emptied the file, presumably on Stalin’s instructions, was later eliminated to preserve the dark secret of its missing contents.25 What Stalin was most anxious to destroy may well have been evidence that he had been an Okhrana informer. Though it falls well short of conclusive proof, a possible trace of that evidence still survives. According to reports from an Okhrana agent discovered in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Baku Bolsheviks before the First World War “confronted Dzhugashvili-Stalin with the accusation that he was a provocateur and an agent of the Security Police. And that he had embezzled Party funds.”26
From almost the beginning of the civil war in 1918, in keeping with the Bolshevik tradition of operating under false identities, the Cheka began sending officers and agents under various disguises and pseudonyms behind enemy lines to gather intelligence. By June 1919 the number of these “illegals” was sufficiently large to require the foundation of an illegals operations department (later to become Directorate S of the KGB First Chief Directorate).27 KGB classified histories note that henceforth “illegal” operations became “an inseparable part of foreign intelligence.” On December 20, 1920, the third anniversary of the Cheka’s foundation, a new foreign department (Innostranyi Otdel or INO) was set up to direct all operations beyond Soviet borders. During the early years of Soviet Russia, when the Communist regime remained an international pariah, it had few official missions abroad capable of providing official cover for “legal” intelligence stations (“residencies” in Cheka jargon) and thus relied chiefly on illegals. As diplomatic and trade missions were established in foreign capitals, each was given a “legal residency” headed by a “resident” whose identity was officially communicated only to the ambassador or head of the mission. Illegals, sometimes grouped in “illegal residencies,” operated without the benefit of diplomatic or official cover and reported directly to INO in Moscow.28
During the civil war of 1918-20, foreign intelligence collection was of minor importance by comparison with the Cheka’s role in assisting the victory of the Red Army over its White enemies. Like the KGB later, the Cheka liked to quantify its successes. In the autumn of 1919, probably the turning point in the civil war, it proudly claimed that during the first nineteen months of its existence it had discovered and neutralized “412 underground anti-Soviet organizations.”29 The Cheka’s most effective method of dealing with opposition was terror. Though its liking of quantification did not extend to calculating the number of its victims, it is clear that the Cheka enormously outstripped the Okhrana in both the scale and the ferocity of its onslaught on political opposition. In 1901, 4,113 Russians were in internal exile for political crimes, of whom only 180 were on hard labor. Executions for political crimes were limited to those involved in actual or attempted assassinations. During the civil war, by contrast, Cheka executions probably numbered as many as 250,000, and may well have exceeded the number of deaths in battle.30
At the time of the October Revolution, it had never occurred to Lenin that he
and the Bolshevik leadership would be responsible for the rebirth of the Okhrana in a new and far more terrible form. In The State and Revolution, which he had almost completed in the summer of 1917, he had claimed that there would be no need for a police force, let alone a political police, after the Revolution. Though it would be necessary to arrange for “the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of wage slaves of yesterday,” such suppression would be “comparatively easy.” The “proletarian dictatorship” which would preside over the rapid destruction of the bourgeois order would require a minimum of rules, regulation and bureaucracy. Lenin had never foreseen the possibility of mass opposition to a revolution carried out in the name of the people.31 But, once in power, he used whatever methods were necessary to retain it, claiming always that the Bolsheviks were defending “the people’s power” and refusing to accept the reality that he had made himself the infallible leader (Vozhd) of the world’s first one-party state.
APPROPRIATELY, THE MEMORIAL erected next to the Lubyanka in the closing years of the Soviet era to commemorate “the victims of totalitarian repression” consists of a large block of granite taken not from Stalin’s gulag but from a concentration camp established by Lenin on the shores of the White Sea in the autumn of 1918. Many Chekists regarded brutality against their class enemies as a revolutionary virtue. According to a report from the Cheka in Morshansk:
He who fights for a better future will be merciless towards his enemies. He who seeks to protect poor people will harden his heart against pity and will become cruel.32
Even at a time when the Soviet regime was fighting for its survival during the civil war, many of its own supporters were sickened by the scale of the Cheka’s brutality. A number of Cheka interrogators, some only in their teens,33 employed tortures of scarcely believable barbarity. In Kharkhov the skin was peeled off victims’ hands to produce “gloves” of human skin; in Voronezh naked prisoners were rolled around in barrels studded with nails; in Poltava priests were impaled; in Odessa, captured White officers were tied to planks and fed slowly into furnaces; in Kiev cages of rats were fixed to prisoners’ bodies and heated until the rats gnawed their way into the victims’ intestines.34
Though Lenin did not approve of such sadism, he was content to leave “excesses” to be corrected by Dzerzhinsky. Brushing aside complaints of Cheka brutality, he paid fulsome tribute to its role in helping to win the civil war. The Cheka, he claimed, had proved a “devastating weapon against countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet power by people who are infinitely stronger than us”:
Gentlemen capitalists of Russia and abroad! We know that it is not possible for you to love this establishment. Indeed, it is not! [The Cheka] has been able to counter your intrigues and your machinations as no one else could have done when you were smothering us, when you had surrounded us with invaders, and when you were organizing internal conspiracies and would stop at no crime in order to wreck our peaceful work.35
Some of the most secret documents in Dzerzhinsky’s archive carry a note that only ten copies were to be made: one for Lenin, the rest for Cheka department chiefs.36 Lenin’s absorption in the affairs of the Cheka extended even to operational detail. He sent Dzerzhinsky advice on how to carry out searches and conduct surveillance, and instructed him that arrests were best carried out at night.37 Lenin also took a somewhat naive interest in the application of new technology to the hunt for counterrevolutionaries, telling Dzerzhinsky to construct a large electromagnet capable of detecting hidden weapons in house-to-house searches. Though the experiment was tried and failed, Dzerzhinsky had some difficulty in persuading Lenin that, “Magnets are not much use in searches.”38
Far more important than Lenin’s sometimes eccentric interest in intelligence techniques and technology was his belief in the central importance of the Cheka to the defense of the Bolshevik one-party state against imperialism and counter-revolution. The extent of Lenin’s and Dzerzhinsky’s fear of imperialist subversion is well illustrated by their deep suspicion of the aid which they felt forced to accept in August 1921 from the American Relief Association (ARA) to feed millions of starving Soviet citizens. Lenin was convinced that the ARA was a front for United States intelligence, and ordered the closest surveillance of all its members. Once the ARA began work, he was equally convinced that it was using food as an instrument of subversion. He complained to Dzerzhinsky’s deputy, Iosif Stanislavovich Unshlikht, that foreign agents were “engaged in massive bribery of hungry and tattered Chekists [Lenin’s emphasis]. The danger here is extremely great.” Lenin insisted that urgent steps be taken to “feed and clothe the Chekists” in order to remove them from imperialist temptation.39
Though the United States still had no peacetime espionage agency, the Cheka reported that over 200 of the 300 ARA staff, who were devoting all their energies to dealing with one of the most terrible famines in modern European history, were in reality undercover intelligence officers who “could become first-class instructors for a counter-revolutionary uprising.” The Cheka also alleged that the ARA was building up a large food supply in Vienna so that “in the event of a coup [it] could provide immediate support to the White government.”40 Lenin was far more exercised by the ARA’s non-existent intelligence operations than by the approximately five million Russians and Ukrainians who starved to death. Without the massive aid program of the ARA, which in 1922 was feeding up to eleven million people a day, the famine would have been far worse. Even after the ARA had departed, however, Soviet intelligence remained convinced that it had been, first and foremost, an espionage rather than a humanitarian agency. A quarter of a century later, all surviving Russian employees of ARA were made to sign confessions that they had been American spies.41
The priorities of Soviet intelligence under Lenin, and still more under Stalin, continued to be shaped by greatly exaggerated beliefs in an unrelenting conspiracy by Western governments and their intelligence agencies. To understand Soviet intelligence operations between the wars, it is frequently necessary to enter a world of smoke and mirrors where the target is as much the product of Bolshevik delusions as of real counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The Soviet propensity to conspiracy theory derived both from the nature of the one-party state and from its Marxist-Leninist ideology. All authoritarian regimes, since they regard opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, tend to see their opponents as engaged in subversive conspiracy. Bolshevik ideology further dictated that capitalist regimes could not fail to be plotting the overthrow of the world’s first and only worker-peasant state. If they were not visibly preparing an armed invasion, then their intelligence agencies must necessarily be secretly conspiring to subvert Soviet Russia from within.
INO’S FIRST TWO heads served between them for a total of barely eighteen months. The first foreign intelligence chief to make his mark was Mikhail Abramovich Trilisser, appointed as head of INO in 1922—undoubtedly with Lenin’s personal approval. Trilisser was a Russian Jew who had become a professional revolutionary in 1901 at the age of only eighteen. Like Dzerzhinsky, he had spent much of his early career in exile or in Tsarist prisons. Before the First World War, he had specialized in tracking down police spies among Bolshevik émigrés. While serving with the Cheka in 1918, he was reputed to have been caught by “bandits” and hung from a tree, but to have been cut down just in time by Red forces who successfully revived him. Unlike any of his successors, Trilisser sometimes traveled abroad to meet INO agents.42 At least until Lenin was incapacitated by his third stroke in March 1923, he continued to take an active, though sometimes ill-informed, interest, in INO reports. He noted, for example, that somewhat inaccurate information received in 1922 from one of the Cheka’s few early British sources, the journalist Arthur Ransome (later famous as a children’s novelist), was “very important and, probably, fundamentally true.”43
The early priorities of INO foreign operations, approved by Lenin, were:
the identification, on the territory of each state
, of counter-revolutionary groups operating against the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic;
the thorough study of all organizations engaged in espionage against our country;
the elucidation of the political course of each state and its economic situation;
the acquisition of documentary material on all the above requirements.44
The “counter-revolutionary groups” which were of most immediate concern to Lenin and the Cheka after the civil war were the remnants of the defeated White armies and the Ukrainian nationalists. After the last White forces left Russian soil late in 1920, they stood no realistic chance of mounting another serious challenge to Bolshevik rule. That, however, was not Lenin’s view. “A beaten army,” he declared, “learns much.” He estimated that there were one and a half to two million anti-Bolshevik Russian émigrés:
We can observe them all working together irrespective of their former political parties… They are skillfully taking advantage of every opportunity in order, in one way or another, to attack Soviet Russia and smash her to pieces… These counter-revolutionary émigrés are very well informed, excellently organized and good strategists.45
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