At the 18th party congress in March 1939, Stalin declared victory over the enemies of the people and an end to mass purges. The party had ‘blundered’ in not unmasking sooner top-level foreign intelligence agents like Trotsky and Bukharin, he admitted. This resulted from an underestimation of the dangers posed by the capitalist encirclement of the Soviet Union. He linked this deficiency to the Marxist theory of the withering away of the state under socialism, a doctrine that needed to be updated in the light of historical experience. A strong Soviet state was necessary to protect the socialist system from internal and external enemies.81
SPYMANIA
Stalin disdained spies, even the ones who spied for him. A spy, he once said, ‘should be full of poison and gall; he must not believe anyone’. Intensely suspicious, he didn’t even trust his own spies, fearful they might have been ‘turned’ by the enemy. Famously – and disastrously – he discounted numerous warnings from Soviet spies that the Germans would attack the USSR in summer 1941, thinking he had a better grasp of Hitler’s intentions than did they. On one report from a high-level informant in the German air force, Stalin told his intelligence chief that he should tell him ‘to go fuck his mother. This is a disinformer, not a “source”’ – a comment written in green rather than his usual red or blue.82
He had more time for intelligence officers, as opposed to spies, and valued mundane intelligence-gathering activities such as compiling press cuttings from bourgeois newspapers. At a reception for Winston Churchill in Moscow in August 1942, he proposed a toast to military intelligence officers: ‘They were the eyes and ears of their country . . . honourably and tirelessly serving their people . . . good people who selflessly served their state.’83
R. H. Bruce Lockhart, who served as vice-consul in Russia before the First World War, was the most famous British spy of the early twentieth century. He returned to Russia after the outbreak of war and was there in 1917 when the Tsar fell, remaining until just before the Bolshevik takeover. He went back to Russia again in January 1918, ostensibly as British consul-general, but his true mission was to organise a spy network. He became involved in a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik government but was arrested after a failed attempt to assassinate Lenin in August 1918. He evaded trial and a possible death sentence by being exchanged for Maxim Litvinov, the Bolshevik diplomatic representative in London, who had been arrested by the British.
Bruce Lockhart’s 1932 Memoirs of a British Agent was a huge hit across the world and his publishers, with an eye to the White émigré market, also had them translated into Russian, an edition that came into Stalin’s possession. He had no interest in Lockhart’s stories of derring-do but underlined his observation that ‘Trotsky was a great organiser and a man of immense physical courage. Morally, however, he was no more able to stand up to Lenin than a flea to an elephant.’84
In September 1937 Yezhov sent Stalin a translation of Major Charles Rossel’s Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. He may have been prompted to do so by Stalin’s great interest in a big Pravda article of May 1937 on the recruitment of spies by foreign intelligence agents.85 Stalin edited that article and contributed to it a story about how Japanese intelligence had recruited a Soviet citizen working in Japan by using an aristocratic Japanese woman as bait.86
Stalin’s copy of the Rossel book was no. 743 of a restricted-circulation print run of 750 aimed at Soviet intelligence officers. Rossel, an American, based the book on his lectures to military audiences in New York. Its Soviet editor was Nikolai Rubinstein, who headed a special NKVD unit dedicated to gathering information on the modus operandi of western intelligence agencies. Rossel’s book, wrote Rubinstein in his introduction, would inform Soviet readers about the structure of the US system of intelligence and counter-intelligence as well as provide a lot of useful practical advice on how to conduct such work.
The lectures focused on the experience of military intelligence during the First World War. Rossel noted how the Germans had infiltrated spies into other countries long before the war began. He identified three categories of spy: the permanent, the once-off and the accidental. His concluding advice to intelligence officers operating abroad was that they should stay away from women, read the local newspapers and talk to ordinary people.
Soviet fears of foreign intelligence operations were a constant but there were two really intense bouts of ‘spymania’: the ‘Yezhovshchina’ (the Yezhov thing) or Great Terror of 1937–8, and the ‘Zhdanovshchina’ (the Zhdanov thing) of the mid- to late 1940s. Named after Stalin’s ideology chief Andrei Zhdanov, the latter was a cultural campaign to reverse the penetration of Soviet society by western influences that occurred because of the USSR’s wartime coalition with Britain and the United States. It coincided with the outbreak of the cold war and heralded a return to the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and anxiety of the Great Terror years. In Leningrad, a purge of the party leadership involved accusations of spying and espionage. The Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded amid arrests of its members for being Zionists and Jewish nationalists. One arrestee was Molotov’s Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, who was expelled from the party and exiled to Kazakhstan. Molotov remained a member of the party leadership but was replaced as foreign minister by one of his deputies, none other than the former state prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky. A minor casualty was the left-wing journalist and long-time supporter of the Soviet Union Anna Louise Strong, who was deported from the USSR on the foot of allegations that she was an American spy.
The cultural cold war was as intense as the east–west political struggle and in 1949 the Soviets published a book called The Truth about American Diplomats. Its nominal author was Annabelle Bucar, an American citizen employed by the United States Information Service in the US embassy in Moscow until she left her post in February 1948, ostensibly because she had fallen in love with an opera star, Konstantin Lapshin, said by some to be the nearest Soviet equivalent to Frank Sinatra. Walter Bedell Smith, the US ambassador at that time, claimed in his memoirs that she defected because Soviet citizens were not allowed to marry foreigners.87
Concocted to counter western propaganda about Soviet spies, minister for state security Victor Abakumov sent Stalin a dummy of the Russian translation and asked permission to publish it with a big print run.88 Stalin made one or two minor factual corrections and wrote on the book’s front cover, ‘And will it be published in English, French and Spanish?’89
The book caused a sensation.90 The initial 10,000 copies of the Russian edition were snapped up, as were the 100,000 copies of a second printing. In March 1949 the Politburo decreed 200,000 more copies should be printed. It was also published in many other languages, including those requested by Stalin. A film based on the book, Proshchai, Amerika! (Farewell, America), was to be made by a well-known Soviet filmmaker, Alexander Dovzhenko, a Stalin favourite.91
Bucar’s book detailed how the American embassy in Moscow was a nest of spies: ‘The American diplomatic service is an intelligence organisation’, a sentence that Stalin underlined in his copy of the published book. Stalin’s reading and marking of the book as if it was a briefing document from his intelligence officials was not unreasonable, since they were the main source of its information and analyses, not Bucar, who had been a low-level member of the embassy’s staff. The chapter to which Stalin paid most attention was entitled ‘The Leadership of the Anti-Soviet Clique in the State Department’.