The Eurasianist leadership required convincing of Langovoy’s bona fides. But with Arapov’s patient championing, in January 1925 Langovoy was invited to speak to the organization at a meeting in a Berlin flat. ‘I lied mercilessly’, Langovoy reminisced later. ‘The worst horseshit passed for the plain-as-day truth. Things like “Eurasia is a synthesis of Slavic, European and Mongolian cultures. Its foundation is monarchistic.” That sort of stuff… The Eurasianists argued among themselves. The essence of the debate was whether capitalism is better than a planned economy.’22 In the end, Langovoy’s patience and effort paid off handsomely. He was invited to Prague for another meeting later that year. He ‘slipped across the border’ by way of Poland. In Prague, he had to deliver another speech, at the end of which the Eurasianists agreed unanimously to attempt to convert the entire Trust to their world view. Langovoy was appointed to the seven-man council of the Eurasianism Organization and named Head of the Eurasianist Party (EAP) in the Soviet Union. This gave him access to all the Eurasianists’ information on their associates in the USSR. All correspondence between the organization and its members passed through his hands. ‘If everything goes well, we will have a great result – the formation of an independent oil [i.e. Eurasianism] organization in Argentina [i.e. Russia]’, said Trubetskoy. ‘Denisov [code for Langovoy] creates a very favourable, sincere impression.’
Largely due to Arapov’s good-natured championing of the Trust, the Eurasianist movement was turned inside out, almost entirely in the service of the OGPU. Eurasianism was penetrated so pervasively that the only surviving veteran of the Trust, Boris Gudz, interviewed in 2004, described Eurasianists as a ‘fictitious left-wing tendency created by the Trust’.23 This version might well have been true: such was the penetration of the Eurasianist organization that from about 1925 it is increasingly unclear who was making the decisions for it – the original leaders or the OGPU. Vladimir Styrna, the deputy director of OGPU counterintelligence, reported to his superiors that penetration of the Eurasianist movement had been so successful that ‘our agents are being introduced into the leading organs of the movement, while certain participants in the movement are ready to fulfil almost anything we ask of them’.24
Not everyone believed the Trust. One interesting source of information is provided by the interrogation records of Lev Karsavin, a philosopher and member of the Eurasianist organization who moved to Vilnius in 1940 and was arrested by the NKVD in 1949. His testimony was uncovered after the fall of communism and was published in 1992. He told his captors of the inner workings of the Eurasianist organization, and specifically about the suspicions within it that Langovoy was an OGPU agent: ‘I understood that the ties to sympathizers in the USSR, sustained through Langovoy, were not serious and this was simply an operation by the organs of the Soviet Union.’25 He added that Suvchinsky had in fact shared his belief that Langovoy was an OGPU officer. However, they believed that he ‘sympathized’ with the Eurasianist goals, and allowed himself to be used for the purpose of contacting Eurasianists in the USSR.
The Trust became increasingly audacious in its attempts to gain credibility and swindle its opponents. In February 1927, Langovoy made arrangements for Savitsky to travel across the Polish border to attend a secret Eurasianist ‘congress’ in Moscow, which Yakushev would also be attending. Savitsky went, saying he was going in the capacity of a ‘warrior philosopher’ and using false papers giving him the cover identity of ‘Nikolay Petrov’ from the town of Vitebsk. He would later describe to Suvchinsky (‘writing with frostbitten hand’) daring manoeuvres to evade surveillance in the USSR, travelling 100 versts on horseback in the dead of winter. He did not provide a detailed written account of the meeting, only telling Suvchinsky that he would brief him orally at their next meeting. ‘Briefly,’ wrote Savitsky in a letter of 24 February 1927, ‘I have found oil [i.e. Eurasianism] which I was looking for, and which I hope will serve as support for all of us… They are relatively small (about 200 persons), but morally healthy oil.’26
The OGPU pulled out all the stops for the congress, fielding hundreds of agents, including Yakushev, who agreed to found a covert ‘Eurasianist Party’. The event was followed by a real church service, at which Savitsky took communion from a real church metropolitan, who had evidently been recruited for the affair. All the ‘Eurasianists’ Savitsky met in Moscow were very well versed in the basic tenets of the movement: this elaborate show was designed solely to convince Savitsky (and in turn the Eurasianist leadership, to whom he enthusiastically recounted all this on his return) that the Trust organization was genuine, and that the Eurasianist movement had a growing constituency inside the USSR.
But Savitsky’s victory was short-lived. In April 1927, only weeks after he returned from Moscow, a key OGPU operative, Eduard Uppelin (codenamed ‘Opperput’), fled to Finland, surrendered to the Finnish secret service and wrote an exposé of the Trust organization in Segodnya, a Riga newspaper. Following his trip, Savitsky had strenuously promoted the Trust’s bona fides to his sceptical fellow party members, and apparently could not credit that it had been a meticulously constructed fraud. He continued to believe that those he had met in Moscow were real Eurasianists, and he worried that he had compromised Yakushev.27 He felt personal responsibility when Yakushev was imprisoned in the late 1930s during the Stalinist purges, believing he had put the man’s life at risk. In the late 1960s, Savitsky’s sons actually debated whether or not to tell their father about the 1967 Soviet book Dead Ripple. This was based on Yakushev’s documents and told the full story of the Trust for the first time, with the aim of rehabilitating repressed OGPU officers like Artuzov and Langovoy. They decided against telling him, and he died a year later none the wiser.
Deceptions rely on one overwhelming human failing: the fact that people tend to believe what they want to believe. This is the notorious cognitive glitch known as ‘confirmation bias’. Any new evidence to the contrary is discounted or somehow manipulated by the mind to reinforce one’s existing point of view. It was this failing that kept the Trust in business. So powerful is this human tendency that even after the plot was unmasked, many refused to believe it. Arapov continued to champion the Trust, writing a note to the Eurasianist leadership that ‘Opperput’ was an OGPU provocateur, and that they should resume cooperation with the ‘healthy’ parts of the Trust which were not infiltrated. He continued to believe, for example, that while Langovoy was an OGPU agent, he was in reality a sympathizer of Eurasianism. In 1930 he returned to the USSR and never emerged again.28
The Trust was one of the most wildly successful operations in the history of intelligence, but very little is known about it even today. Indeed, had ‘Opperput’ not blown the whistle on the organization, it would likely never have become public knowledge. Artuzov, according to his biographer, received the only formal reprimand of his career over the bungled decommissioning of the Trust (though later he was executed). By the time the Trust was unmasked, however, the Soviets did not even need to infiltrate the Eurasianist organization. Little by little, several Eurasianists, led by Suvchinsky in Paris, had begun to display increasing sympathy towards the USSR. Suvchinsky had never been as utterly convinced as his comrades – ‘Eurasianism did not eat Suvchinsky’, said Vadim Kozovoy, a friend later in life (employing a phrase from Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, when the protagonist Stavrogin is ‘eaten’ by an idea). He also increasingly found emigration intolerably dull, said Kozovoy. But Suvchinsky was spellbound by Stalin, whose thesis, upon assuming power, was ‘socialism in one country’ and who aimed at promoting Russian nationalism. Suvchinsky believed this was the first step towards the eventual rejection of communism and an embrace of the Eurasianist ideals; according to Kozovoy, he had to be repeatedly talked out of returning to the USSR.29