Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
17
The Great Russian Spying Tradition
You've heard of the KGB, that ultimate of Cold War villains. Yet it represents just
one chapter in Russia's rich history of spying, snooping, informing, rooting out
conspiracies, and all-around paranoia. Most of this activity has been aimed not
at outsiders, but at Russians themselves. Ivan the Terrible (1533-84) was the
first Russian leader to establish a secret office to spy on his subjects, and his
successors kept up the tradition. Undercover agents and counterespionage
thrived amid the revolutionary activity of the late 19th century. When the Sovi-
ets took over, they formalized the secret police into a pillar of the government
that became notorious for torturing or murdering suspects or sending them to
prison based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence.
Soviet spy agencies were labeled with a succession of double-speak acro-
nyms. Felix Dzerzhinsky, considered the father of Soviet espionage, established
the Cheka, an abbreviation for the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle
against Counter-revolution, Speculation and Sabotage, in 1917. Later, the
NKVD (People's Committee for Internal Affairs) ruled over labor camps and
prisons for political enemies under Stalin. It then became the MGB (Ministry of
State Security), before morphing into the better-known KGB (Committee of
State Security). Its many departments snooped on every aspect of Russians'
lives, from workplace tardiness to personal correspondence. The system shrank
considerably after the Soviet collapse, but the
“gebeshniki,”
or “state security
guys,” enjoyed a bit of a comeback under Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB operative
who ran the post-Soviet intelligence agency, the FSB (Federal Security Service),
in the late 1990s before becoming president. While the FSB is in charge of
domestic snooping, foreign spies are tracked by the honestly named Foreign
Intelligence Service (SVR).
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combined with a drought, led to famine
that left 5 to 10 million dead. Stalin
crafted a dictatorship by gradually purging
his rivals, real and imagined. His repres-
sion reached a peak in the late 1930s and
decimated the party and military leader-
ship. Millions were executed or exiled to
prison camps across Siberia and the Arctic,
referred to by their Russian initials
GULAG, or State Agency for Labor
Camps.
Stalin tried to head off war with Ger-
many through a secret pact with Hitler,
known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
after the foreign ministers who signed it.
The pact promised Soviet food supplies to
the Nazis and set out a plan for dividing
peasants, emerged the victor. Nicholas, his
wife Alexandra, and their five children
were exiled to Siberia and then executed in
1918, as civil war engulfed the nation.
Years of chaos, famine, and bloodshed fol-
lowed, before the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was born.
SOVIET RUSSIA
After Lenin died in 1924, Josef Stalin, a
former seminary student from Georgia,
worked his way to the top of the Com-
munist Party leadership. Stalin reversed
Lenin's late attempts at liberalization,
instead ushering in a campaign to collec-
tivize all land into state hands—no small
task in a nation so vast. The brutal drive,
