In 2005, Petrishchev was elected a member of the Highest Council of Officers or VOS.95 This eleven-member council represents the mostly retired ultra-nationalist high-ranking military, FSB, Foreign Intelligence Service, and MVD (Interior Affairs Ministry) officer community, as well as leaders of the Cossacks. Most probably, Petrishchev, a military counterintelligence professional, is not a genuine member of VOS but is just keeping an eye on its activities from the inside. He is also a member of the thinktank Fund for Development of Regions, which helps the government with economic and political decisions and the distribution of governmental funds.96
There is a representative of military counterintelligence in the Administration of the current Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev: Colonel General Vladimir Osipov, who made his career in various KGB military counterintelligence directorates, including the Moscow Military District.97 From 1991 till 1998, Osipov worked at the Federal Agency for Governmental Communication and Information (formerly part of the KGB), mostly as head of its Personnel Directorate. From 1998, Osipov headed the Personnel Directorate of the administrations of all three Russian presidents: Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and, finally, Dmitrii Medvedev. In other words, from 1998 onwards, the selection of administration staff members was controlled by the siloviki, a group of former high-level KGB officers currently in power in Russia, with Vladimir Putin at their forefront. In 2009, while restructuring his administration, President Medvedev appointed Osipov head of the Administration’s Directorate for Governmental Awards, which had previously been part of the Personnel Directorate.
In 2008, Russian President Medvedev appointed a new FSB Director: Army General Aleksandr Bortnikov, a former KGB man (from 2003 to 2004, he headed St. Petersburg’s FSB branch) who was closely connected to Putin. However, the new director did not make any serious changes in the FSB, and by 2011, Colonel General Aleksandr Bezverkhny still continued to head the Military Counterintelligence Department of the FSB, as the UKVR has been called since 2001. On May 25, 2005, Bezverkhny unveiled a monument entitled ‘The Glory of Military Counterintelligence’ in the yard of a mansion occupied by the Military Counterintelligence Directorate of the Moscow Military District, at 7 Prechistenka Street in central Moscow.98 There is also a small, private military counterintelligence history museum in this building. According to the press, most of its exhibition is devoted to SMERSH. Obviously, the Russian security services are proud to claim SMERSH and its brutal activities as part of their history.
Notes
1. General information in Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, translated from the Russian by Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit Books, 1986).
2. SNK Protocol (transcript) No. 21, dated December 20, 1917. Document No. 1, in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. Organy VCheKa–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003), 302–3 (in Russian).
3. Details in E. Rozin, Leninskaya mifologiya gosudarstva (Moscow: Yurist, 1996) (in Russian).
4. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
5. VCheKa Order, dated September 2, 1918. Document No. 2, in GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960, edited by A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov (Moscow: Materik, 2000), 14–15 (in Russian).
6. SNK Decree, dated September 5, 1918. Document No. 3 in ibid., 15; on the VCheKa history see, for instance, George Legett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operatrions from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990), 38–64; changes in the VCheKa structure in 1917–21 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 14–24.
7. Nicolas Werth, ‘The Red Terror in the Soviet Union,’ in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repressions, edited by Stepane Curtois et al., translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, 71–81 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
8. On Dzerzhinsky’s activity see, for instance, F. E. Dzerzhinsky—predsedatel’ VChK–OGPU 1917–1926, edited by A. A. Plekhanov and A. M. Plekhanov (Moscow: Materik, 2007) (in Russian).
9. On the creation of the Red Army, see Aleksandr Melenberg, ‘Krasnyi Podarok,’ Novaya Gazeta, No. 18, February 18, 2011 (in Russian), http://www.novgaz.ru/data/2011/018/19.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
10. Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 17. On the early period of the VO/OO see A. A. Zdanovich, ‘Kak L. D. Trotsky i Revvoensovet Respubliki ‘poteryali’ kontrrazvedku,’ Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (hereafter VIZh), no. 3 (1996): 65–73, no. 5 (1996), 75–82 (in Russian). A short overview of the OO history from 1918 to 1983 was given in Amy W. Knight, ‘The KGB’s Special Departments in the Soviet Armed Forces,’ ORBIS 28, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 257–80.
11. The first network of military counterintelligence was created in the czarist army in June 1915, during World War I. Each front (a group of armies), army, and military district had its KRO or Counterintelligence Department within the headquarters, and the network reported to the KRO within the Main Directorate of the General Staff. Details in A. A. Zdanovich, Otechestvennaya kontrrazvedka (1914–1920): Organizatsionnoe stroitel’stvo (Moscow: Kraft+, 2004), 19–62 (in Russian). On military counterintelligence (later military intelligence) abroad see B. A. Starkov, Okhotniki na shpionov. Kontrrazvedka Rossiiskoi imperii 1903–1914 (St. Petersburg: SiDiKom, 2006) (in Russian).
12. The czarist secret police consisted of three parts, details in Ch. A. Ruud and S. A. Stepanov, Fontanka, 16. Politicheskii sysk pri tsaryakh (Moscow: Mysl’, 1993), 81–172 (in Russian); Z. Peregudova, Politicheskii sysk v Rossii (1880–1917 gg.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000).
13. Joined order of Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and the Soviet government, dated February 3, 1919. Document No. 20, in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 330–1. In 1929, gubernii (administration regions) were renamed oblasti (provinces), and the regional OGPU branches became Provincial GPUs.
14. Instruction on the Special Departments of the VCheKa, dated February 8, 1919. Document No. 21, in ibid., 331–2.
15. Details in A. G. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty na sluzhbe Respublike Sovetov (Moscow: Nauka, 1988) (in Russian).
16. Figures from tables 69 and 70 in Rossiya i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil. Statistichesloe issledovanie, edited by G. F. Krivosheev (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2001) (in Russian).
17. On Stalin’s activity during the Civil War, see, for instance, Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, edited and translated from the Russian by Harold Shukman (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 38–52, and Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2004), 163-74.