Search Results

This chapter analyzes how the Soviet approach to foreign visitors crystallized during a particular conjuncture in the early 1920s. As the first significant influx of “bourgeois” foreigners, including the American Relief Association (ARA), arrived to provide aid during the famine of 1920–1922, Soviet missions became focused not only on external contacts and exports but on influencing visitors at home. The chapter explores the origins of Soviet organizations set up to shape the international image of the Soviet experiment. It considers the motivations and activities of the precursors to the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS), Soviet guides and translators, and the secret police (OGPU/NKVD). A new Soviet system emerged to predict visitors' judgments, evaluate and classify foreigners, and identify friends and enemies.

This chapter establishes how the writer Maxim Gorky's return to the Soviet Union from European exile in 1928 to become a chief architect of Stalinist culture was a watershed in the history of the Soviet reception of foreign visitors. Making a tour around the USSR modeled on those of foreign visitors, Gorky made a distinct contribution to the rise of Socialist Realism, both in the sense of the dominant aesthetic doctrine and as a key mode of Stalin-era ideology as a whole. With his visit to the Solovetskii Camp of Special Designation (SLON, or Solovki), the model camp of the nascent GULAG, it also established new norms for the depiction of forced labor as humane reeducation. The chapter probes a range of previously unknown links among Gorky's famous visit to Solovki, his patronage of the Stalin era's dominant pedagogue, Anton Makarenko, and his ties to the head of the secret police, Genrikh Iagoda. The chapter examines in detail how these links affected the history of some of the most internationally celebrated Soviet destinations for foreign visitors: the secret police-sponsored communes for creating “new people” out of juvenile delinquents, chief among them the OGPU/NKVD Children's Labor Commune at Bolshevo.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recalls the time she met and became friends with Miliza Korjus, her childhood idol, at the backstage of the Shriner Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1966. Miliza was not aware that Joseph Stalin liked The Great Waltz a lot and had it distributed on Soviet screens. Maya attended rehearsals at school for an important concert to be held at the club of the NKVD. She wondered why Russia's secret police had a desire to see the young ballet sprouts, the sixth- and seventh-class students of Elizaveta Pavlovna Gerdt. Maya and her classmates danced to piano accompaniment by their best school pianist, Ekaterina Shlikhting.

Chapter 6 covers the period 1931–1937. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria. This greatly increased Soviet fears of invasion and espionage being carried out in the Russian Far East. At the same time, Soviet Koreans were great in education and higher education. By the early 1930s, there were three institutes of higher education for Koreans and other institutes with Korean “sections” such as in Khabarovsk. In 1937, Raisa Nigai (who was interviewed) withdrew from the Nikolsk Ussuriisk Teacher’s College in anticipation of the deportation of Koreans. Nikolai Nigai, an NKVD officer began his work in the first phase of the deportation which consisted of arresting and sentencing some 2000 of the Soviet Korean elites and intellectuals. Afanasii A. Kim, the leader of the Soviet Koreans had been arrested earlier on January 1936. On 21 August 1937, the first resolution for the deportation of the Koreans was signed by Stalin and Molotov. Their deportation was part of the Great Terror.

This chapter examines the centrality of violence—military, police, interpersonal—in the creation of the Soviet administrative system in its formative years; it then traces the connections between these forms of violence and the mass repressions that shook Stalin's USSR in 1937 and 1938 (the ‘Great Terror’). It concentrates in particular on the propensity of state officials (local soviets, state commissars, and representatives of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs) to use violence to administer the nascent Soviet political system, but it also surveys existing literature on better-known forms of state violence in the era of revolution and civil war, including the Red Army, the party, and the secret police (Cheka/OGPU). It argues that violence pervaded the early Leninist state at all levels of administration, and that this pervasive administrative culture of violence made the Stalinist outcome in the 1930s likely, if not inevitable.

Soviet criminal policy of the mid-1930s shows that the Great Terror of 1937–8 was not a minutely planned operation. It was part of a penal strategy that oscillated between attempts to institute legal formalism and the recourse to mass repression. On the eve of the Terror, proponents of judicial formalism consolidated their positions. Still, they had no difficulty in switching over to the hard line. Soviet-type legalism was not incompatible with arbitrary policies and erratic use of force. After the Terror, legal formalism seemed to get the upper hand. But conflicts between the political police and the judiciary were won by the NKVD even though the purge was hardly a success. The practice of mass purges was nevertheless abandoned. A new understanding of threats to the system's stability gave new importance to the judiciary.

This chapter explores the poignant and disturbing fate of Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter at the hands of the Narodni Komitet Vnutriennykh Diel (National Committee for Internal Affairs: the Soviet secret police, NKVD). Erlich had been one of the most important representatives of the General Jewish Workers Union of Poland, known as the Polish Bund. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Bund, editor-in-chief of the Folkstsaytung, and, with Wiktor Alter, a delegate of the Bund to the Executive Committee of the Socialist International since 1930. He was arrested on October 6, 1939, and charged with anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary activities. The chapter then looks at Erlich's history of the Bund, which, because of the circumstances of its creation, is unique.

This chapter focuses on a report regarding the British deception schemes. The report aimed to give a brief description of the structure of the British deception agencies and their work based on the current war-based material obtained by the First Directorate of the NKVD. Accordingly, it was divided into three sections: (1) Organizational structure, staff, and functions of the British deception agencies, (2) Deception during the preparations for the Allies' invasion of Sicily, (3) Deception during the preparations for the opening of a Second Front. The report was based on intelligence material of the First Directorate of the NKVD for 1942–1944. It also discussed that there was good coverage of the work of the TWIST and TORY (deception-planning) Committees, but not very much on that of the XX Committee.

This chapter, which examines the characteristics of the ranks of the Soviet Union's People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) under the regime of Joseph Stalin, suggests that state security was a nested dictatorship in which subordinates dealt with their subordinates as their superiors dealt with them. It explains that NKVD heads Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria selected their own immediate subordinates in the same way that Stalin selected relatively uneducated and incriminated heads of state security. The analysis also reveals that NHVD members were drawn from ethnic minorities and managed using the political maximization model.

This chapter examines the evolution of the structure of state security agencies in the Soviet Union. These include the Emergency Commission, the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). It shows that the organizational structure of state security changed as frequently as the dictator sought an arrangement which fit his changing needs. The chapter also discusses how Joseph Stalin micromanaged state security, and highlights the fact that there was an extremely short agency chain between Stalin and the actual executors of repression.

This chapter examines the succession struggles and the role of state security following the death of Soviet Union dictators Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. It explains that although the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) and the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) played only a supportive role in the Lenin success, they played major roles in the success of Joseph Stalin's dictatorship. The chapter also discusses the reasons behind Lavrentiy Beria's attempt to duplicate Stalin's earlier winning strategy.

This chapter examines the decision making for the terror campaign in the Soviet Union during the period 1937–38, focusing on the role of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) head and regional leaders of the Communist Party. It explains that while Soviet leader Joseph Stalin oversaw the general campaign, local executors of repression were left with considerable discretion with respect to the number and the actual choice of victims. The chapter also mentions that there was a fine dividing line between repressor and victim, as illustrated by the cases of NKVD heads Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov.

The second group includes eight officers who were the first to violate the new rules regarding defection. Their revelations identify Soviet political intelligence priorities directed toward Great Britain, followed by Germany, while foreign science and technology collection cast a wider net, to include the United States. Most of the officers in this group had joined a Soviet intelligence or state security service at about the same time as the defectors in Chapter 1, but they persevered through most of the 1930s, sometimes participating in the very actions that led earlier officers to defect. The Great Purge, or what came to be known as the Yezhovshchina, prompted these officers and their families to defect. They left because they saw their own colleagues being arrested and executed, and they felt the need to save their own skins.

The third group broke with the Soviet system during World War II and immediately thereafter. In the months after Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941, German forces penetrated deep into Soviet territory, and it is likely that thousands of Soviet intelligence and state security personnel fell into German captivity during that time. Consequently, Germany was the clear intelligence priority early in the war. Of the 32 officers in this group, 18 were captured on the battlefield between 1941 and 1943, most of which defected once they were in captivity. However, Soviet intelligence widened its targeting beyond Germany to its wartime allies even before the war ended. A few others were abroad under diplomatic cover and approached a foreign power requesting asylum. This group extends beyond the formal end of World War II into 1946, because the environment for defectors did not change immediately after the war.

In this chapter, Jonathan Haslam demonstrates that in Stalin’s Russia, the vision of intelligence grew out of very recent revolutionary experience and operations against the counterrevolution. These circumstances created an atmosphere in which human intelligence (humint) was nearly always privileged over signals/communication intelligence (sigint/comint)—to the detriment of the Soviet Union’s security. Without an advanced deciphering apparatus in place, Haslam demonstrates how this prejudice for human intelligence emerged despite Stalin’s distrust of secret agents. Stalin’s skepticism of his human intel combined with a crippling deficiency in cryptanalysis at a time when cryptographic traffic was growing exponentially, became the Achilles’ heel of the régime.