Chill in the East
Excerpted from “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West” by Calder Walton. Copyright (c) 2023. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
In October 1945, in the wake of the two atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to an end, the British author George Orwell wrote an essay about the fundamental geopolitical change that atomic weapons created. The changes underway, as Orwell pointed out, had begun over a dozen years before. Atomic bombs were new, devastating tools for a longer-term ideological conflict between East and West. As usual, Orwell was correct. Western powers were effectively engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union long before they knew it.
Vladimir Lenin’s grand strategy for the Soviet regime was anchored in his application of the writings of Karl Marx. Inevitable historical forces, both Marx and Lenin believed, would lead to a revolution of the proletariat, capitalism’s exploited working class, sweeping away bourgeois capitalist powers and replacing them with a unified “socialist” society. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and then the bloody Russian Civil War, history seemed to be on the side of Lenin’s revolutionaries. The age of the great European powers appeared over. World War I led to the collapse of four European empires. Royal families who were not bayoneted escaped into exile. The crumbling of the great empires in Central and Eastern Europe raised Bolshevik hopes to fever pitch to create a new world order. Russia was to be the tinderbox for a global conflagration.
Russia’s intelligence services today trace their origins to immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. Six weeks after seizing power in November 1917 (October in the traditional Russian calendar), Lenin established the Cheka, the predecessor to the KGB. The Cheka functioned as the vanguard of the Bolshevik Party, slaying its enemies and defending its people, domestic and foreign. Although the Cheka would be renamed with different acronyms before KGB — OGPU, NKVD — its functions remained the same. Intended to be temporary (“extraordinary”), in fact it became a permanent, central fixture of the Bolshevik regime for the next seven decades. Cheka officers served as frontline soldiers for Lenin, Stalin, and their successors in the Kremlin. Their overwhelming priority was domestic, protecting the regime against counterrevolutionary “enemies of the people.” Some were real. The Bolsheviks faced armed Western intervention to depose them. Many other enemies were phantoms. Lenin and the Cheka also feared, from their reading of Marx, an inevitable conspiracy by Western capitalist powers against them. The Cheka soon established a foreign intelligence branch to conduct espionage, subversion, and sabotage abroad.
Today, Russia’s intelligence services present carefully sanitized versions of their history, lionizing the early successes of Soviet foreign intelligence, and airbrushing away its murders, mass repressions and imprisonments, and gross violations of human rights. It serves the purposes of today’s Kremlin, under Vladimir Putin, to present the Cheka as a professional intelligence service whose officers, Chekisty, had “warm hearts, a cool head, and clean hands,” as they claimed. In reality, the hearts of Cheka officers were murderously cold, their heads warped hot by Lenin and Stalin’s conspiratorial worldviews, and their hands bloodied. The Cheka’s first head was Felix Dzerzhinsky. Born to a wealthy Polish family, he became a fanatically hard-line Bolshevik, one of Lenin’s closest advisers. A bespectacled, bookish-looking man in a party of many such types, Dzerzhinsky was the selfless Knight of the Revolution, in later retelling, who slew counterrevolutionary enemies. The Cheka did indeed conduct astonishing coups against the regime’s opponents at home and abroad, but this was only a small part of its work. Starting with Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka grew into the largest secret police in the twentieth century. Dzerzhinsky’s successors, men like Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrenti Beria, served as Joseph Stalin’s loyal hangmen, carrying out the Great Terror, the greatest repression in modern peacetime European history. Omitting the story of mass repression from the Cheka’s history, as Putin’s regime tries to do, is akin to describing Adolf Hitler as a failed Austrian painter.
Contrary to later Soviet depictions, the Bolsheviks did not come to power in a popular uprising. They seized power in a coup. Before Lenin returned to the country in 1917, he did not believe that Russia, where two thirds of the population was made up of poorly educated peasants, was ready for a workers’ revolution. Germany, with its industrialized society, was a more obvious birthing ground. Lenin hailed from Russian nobility; with his characteristic goatee, he was an urbane polyglot, more at home in the cafés and libraries of Munich, London, and Geneva than on Moscow’s streets. The fact that the Bolsheviks seized power, and then, against all odds, held on to it — largely due to the Cheka’s reign of terror — can blind us to how events seemed to contemporaries at the time. News of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power made little immediate impression in the Western press. The Times of London, for example, asserted confidently the week after the coup that the Bolsheviks would not be in power long.
Less than four months later, in March 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with imperial Germany, at Brest-Litovsk, that pulled Russia out of World War I. It was humiliating but necessary, in Lenin’s view, and controversial in Russia, splitting the ruling coalition between Bolsheviks and the leftist Socialist Revolutionary Party. The latter then targeted its former allies for assassination. To gain peace, one-quarter of Russia’s empire passed to imperial Germany. In the aftermath, the Bolsheviks became “communists” and relocated their base of operations from Petrograd (changed from the former name of St. Petersburg because “burg” sounded too German) to Moscow. This meant, for the newly styled communists, turning their back on Russia’s Europeanized and culturally rich city, the Venice of the North. The Cheka requisitioned a former Russian insurance building, the Lubyanka, as its headquarters in Moscow. The Lubyanka’s basement became infamous as the site of gruesome Cheka torture, akin to a chamber of horrors.
Bolshevik rule was born in a crucible of internal and foreign intrigue. The Red Army fought a civil war against a coalition of “White” anti- communist forces, white being a color traditionally associated with the Romanov tsars. They scythed down pro-monarchists (“former people”), as well as members of the bourgeoisie (“class enemies”), saboteurs (“fifth columnists”), “wreckers” (a loose term, effectively meaning all who opposed the Bolsheviks), and spies, some sponsored by Western powers—but not as many as Lenin believed. The ensuing Russian Civil War resulted in the deaths of approximately 3.3 million people. The war, and foreign subversion in it, would shape the thinking of successive Soviet leaders and their secret police. By 1922, the Red Army was victorious. The Russian Soviet Republic became the centerpiece of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), eventually a federation of sixteen republics carved out of the former tsarist empire, stretching from the Arctic north to subtropical southern areas in the Caucasus. The Bolsheviks would eventually rule over and terrorize six hundred million people.
Calder Walton is a historian of intelligence and global security at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
