Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

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, 33employed 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. 36Lenin’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. 37Lenin 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.” 40Lenin 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. 42At 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;