INSIDE THE SOVIET SECRET POLICE
A History of Soviet Security & Soviet Espionage,
1917-present
CHSTU387-SUMMER2
4 credits: three class
meetings each week, plus five required films
"The
Chekist has two paths--promotion, or prison."
--Joseph Stalin, 1951
Instructor
Professor Jeffrey Burds
Office: 269 Holmes Hall
Telephone: (617) 373-2079
j.burds[at]neu.edu
Course Description
. . . violence
does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as
in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no
longer
recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their
own substance."
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
No theme has more powerfully captured the Cold War imagination than the virtual obsession with Soviet spies. Repressing their own citizens at home, the Bolsheviks craved world domination. They sent spies abroad to sabotage our progress, to infiltrate our governments, to penetrate into the hearts and souls of freedom-loving peoples everywhere. Or so the story went.
The collapse of
the former
Course Requirements
10 percent of the final grade: Each student is expected to complete all of the assigned readings (averaging about 225 pages weekly) and to attend lectures and discussions regularly. Regular attendance is required. I will deduct 2 points in the class for each unexcused absence. Any student with five or more unexcused absences will not pass this course. Students with perfect attendance records for the semester will be awarded bonus points [generally the equivalent of raising a B- to a B].
90 percent of the final grade: Students will be required to take two written in-class exams. The first is set for Thursday, July 24. The second is set for August 14. The two examinations together will account for 90 percent of the final grade for the course.
There are no required papers in this course.
Students with a B+ or above on the midterm exam and paper may elect to choose an alternative final: to write a 10-12 page final paper on a theme to be agreed on with Prof. Burds, and take an oral final exam instead of the standard bluebook.
For bibliographies and extra-credit projects, see the Resource Page.
Books
The following titles (marked with an asterisk) have been ordered at the University Book Store:
David Holloway, Stalin and the
Bomb: The
David C. Martin, Wilderness of
Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception and the Secrets that Destroyed Two
of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents (
Jerrold L. Schechter and Peter S. Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War (Washington: Brassey's, 1992). [out of print; a scan appears below]
Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1994-1995). Revised Edition. [out of print; a scan appears below]
Robert W. Stephan, Stalin's Secret
War: Soviet Counterintelligence Against the Nazis,
1941-1945 (
All readings in this course are available for download from
this
Week 1 Introduction: Inside A 'Wilderness of Mirrors'
Tuesday, July 1. Introduction to the History of
Soviet Espionage. Themes.
HANDOUT:
Lyrics of "The Chekists’ Song" (1937) [Listen
to MP3]
HANDOUT: The
Soviet/Russian Security Police, 1917-1996
Discussion: Espionage
and History
Andrew & Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story, pp. 1-64.
Other Resources
See the
Jonathan W. Daly,
Autocracy Under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in
Jonathan W. Daly, The
Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in
Frederic S. Zuckerman,
The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian
Society, 1880-1917 (New York: NYU Press, 1996).
Wednesday, July 2. Antecedents. From the Third Department to the Tsarist Okhrana
Powerpoint: Antecedents
Wednesday, July 3. The Origins of
the Soviet Secret Police. Red Terror and
the Cheka
Powerpoint: Regicide in the Russian Revolution
CASEBOOK 1: Introduction to Soviet International Operations,
1917-
1922
HANDOUT 1-2b:
Regicide in the Russian Revolution: The Murder of the Romanov Family [
[Discussion]
HANDOUT
Lenin's War Against the Russian Orthodox Church [Discussion]
John W. Long, “The Lockhart
Plot in Russia, 1918,” Europe-Asia Studies Volume 47, Number 7
(November 1995): 1225-1235; and Andrew Cook, Ace of Spies: The True Story of
Sidney Reilly (Glousteshire: Tempus Books, 2002),
pp. 168-170.
[Red Terror]: Andrew & Gordievsky, KGB:
The Inside Story, pp. 65-106.
Recommended
George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police: the All-Russian
Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage,
December 1917 to February 1922 (New York: Oxford, 1981).
Viktor Bortnevskii, White Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence
during the Russian Civil War No. 1108 in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies (University of Pittsburgh, 1995).
Feliks Dzerzxhinskii, Founder of
the Cheka
David S. Fogelsong,
A. J. Plotke, Imperial Spies Invade
Nigel West and Oleg
Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at
the Heart of the KGB Archives (London: HarperCollins, 1998).
Week 2 Against Foreign Interventionists in an Era of
Capitalist Encirclement
Tuesday, July 8. Soviet Espionage
in the 1920s. Soviet Industrial Espionage
CASEBOOK 2: Sidney
Reilly, Myth & Reality
Powerpoint: Soviet Foreign
Operations
Recommended
Stuart Finkel,
"An
Intensification of Vigilance: Recent Perspectives on the Institutional
History of the Soviet Security Apparatus in the 1920s," Kritika Volume 5, Number 2 (Spring 2004): 299-320.
Peter Holquist, "'Information
is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its
Pan-European Context," Journal of Modern History (September 1997):
415-450.
Vladlen Izmozik, "Voice from the
Twenties: Private Correspondence Intercepted by the OGPU," The
Russian Review 55 (1996): 287-308.
Harvey Klehr, et. al. "Clandestine Habits: The 1920s and the
Early 1930s" in The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 20-30, 40-41.
Wednesday, July 9. A Popular
Culture of Denunciation?
Powerpoint: Totalitarianism
and the Panoptic State
Gábor Rittersporn, "The Omnipresent
Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the
1930s," in Stalinism and Its Aftermath: Essays in Honour
of Moshe Lewin (M.E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 101-120.
Sheila Fitzpatrick
and Robert Gellately, "Introduction
to the Practices of Denunciation in Modern European History," The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec.,
1996): 747-767.
Sheila Fitzpatrick,
"Signals
from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s," The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec., 1996): 831-866.
Read Timothy Garton Ash's critical review of ACCUSATORY PRACTICES
[London Review of Books,
Documents of the
Stalin Terror
From the
Prisoner's Perspective: From the KGB
File of Italian Communist Edmondo Peluzo:
Fragments from His Unsuccessful Petition for Release (from the KGB Archive,
Resumé of a Stalinist Policeman: Soviet Secret Police Personnel Report on Service to
the International Section of the Communist Party in the 1930s (October 13,
1939), former Central Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
CASEBOOK 3: Soviet Secret Police & Stalin's Internal Enemies
Thursday,
July 10. Verbovka: Soviet
Recruitment Strategies
Powerpoint: The Cambridge
Five
Recommended
Aleksandr Orlov, Handbook of
Intelligence and Guerilla Warfare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1963).
John Costello and
Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy (Crown
Publishers, 1993). Part 1 Part 2
Yuri Druzhnikov, Informer
001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov
(New Brunswick: Transaction Pubs., 1997).
Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik,
The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (
Week 3 'The Enemies Within': Stalin and the Terror
Tuesday,
July 15. Stalin's
International Security Networks
Powerpoint: The Purge of
International Cadres
Handout:
Arrests for
Espionage in the Soviet Union
Handout:
The Purge
in the NKVD, 1933-1939
Andrew & Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story, pp. 107-232.
CASEBOOK 4a:
CASEBOOK 4b: Aleksandr Orlov's
Letter to Ezhov
Jeffrey Burds, “The Soviet
War against ‘Fifth Columnists:’ The Case of
Recommended
Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files: The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994). Part 1 Part 2
Wednesday,
July 16. Soviet
Interrogation
Powerpoint: Stalinist
Interrogation Process
Handout: Stalinist Interrogation Process
Thursday, July 17. Soviet
Intelligence on the Eve of Operation Barbarossa
Powerpoint: 1939-1941
Handout:
Stalin’s
Espionage Networks on the Eve of World War II
Handout:
Signals
from Moscow (July 1940)
Andrew & Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story, pp. 233-340.
Bernd Wegner,
"The
Tottering Giant: German Perceptions of Soviet Military and Economic
Strength in Preparation for 'Operation Blau'
(1942)," in Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes,
eds. Intelligence and International Relations, 1900-1945 (
Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks:
The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little,
Brown, & Co., 1994-1995). Revised Edition, pp. 126-171.
For further reading [optional]
Perry Biddiscombe, Perry Biddiscombe, "Unternehmen Zeppelin: The Deployment of SS
Saboteurs and Spies in the Soviet Union, 1942-1945," Europe-Asia
Studies Volume 52, Number 6 (2000): 1115-1142.
Perry Biddiscombe, "The problem
with glass houses The Soviet recruitment and deployment of SS men as spies and
saboteurs," Intelligence and National Security (
Kurt DeWitt, The
Role of the Partisans in Soviet Intelligence (Alabama: Maxwell Air Force
Base, 1954).
John Erickson,
"Threat Identification and Strategic Appraisal by the Soviet Union,
1930-1941," in Ernest R. May, ed. Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence
Assessments Before the Two World Wars (
David M. Glantz, The Role of Intelligence in Soviet Military
Strategy in World War II (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1990).
David M. Glantz, Soviet Military Intelligence in War (
Leonid D. Grenkevich, Soviet Partisan Movements: A Critical Historiographical Analysis (London: Frank Cass, 1999).
David Kahn, ["MAX:
Germany's Greatest Spy in the East,"] Hitler's Spies: German
Military Intelligence in World War II (New York; Collier Books, 1978), pp. 312-317,
367-369.
Bradley F. Smith, Sharing
Secrets with Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941-1945
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).
Colonel I. G. Starinov, Over the Abyss: My Life in Soviet Special
Operations (New York: Ivy Books [Ballantine
Books], 1995).
Bruce W. Menning, ed. At the
Threshold of War: The Soviet High Command in 1941 in Russian Studies
in History: A Journal of Translations Volume 36, Number 3 (Winter 1997-98),
pp. 2-93.
Barton Whaley, Codeword
Barbarossa (Harvard, 1973),
Related
Materials
Photo & Text
of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [23 August 1939]
Secret
Protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [23 August 1939]
Week 4 Operation Barbarossa & World War II
Tuesday, July 22. Soviet Espionage
in World War II
Powerpoint: World War
Two—Part One
Casebook 5. Documents from Soviet Espionage Operations in World War II
Wednesday, July 23. Razvedka: The Role
of Intelligence in the Soviet Victory
HANDOUT: Logistics
& Partisan Warfare
Powerpoint: World War
Two—Part Two
READ: Robert W. Stephan, Stalin's Secret War: Soviet
Counterintelligence Against the Nazis, 1941-1945, pp. 3-174.
Part
One, Part
Two
Thursday, July 24. Midterm Examination
Burds Tips for Exams and Papers
Week 5 Origins of the Cold War
Tuesday, July 29. Espionage in
Modern History
Powerpoint on Soviet Struggle against Banditry
John Gaddis, "Intelligence, Espionage
and Cold War Origins," Diplomatic History, 13, no. 2
(Spring 1989), pp. 191-212.
CASEBOOK 6: The
Origins of the Cold War in Soviet
Handout: Soviet Struggle
against Criminal Banditry
Powerpoint: The "Great Fear"
Handout: Deportations
of "Enemy Nationalities"
Recommended [Not
Required]
Andrew & Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story, pp. 341-366.
Kevin C. Ruffner, “Cold War
Allies: The Origins of the CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists,”
Fifty Years of the CIA (Langley, Virginia: Central Intelligence Agency,
1998): 19-43. [Declassified in 2004]
Wednesday,
July 30. The
Soviet Union vs. OPERATION ROLLBACK
Powerpoint: Blowback,
Ratlines, Operation Rollback
Powerpoint: Origins of the
Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine
Jeffrey Burds, "AGENTURA: Soviet
Informants' Networks & the Ukrainian Rebel Underground in
Christopher
Simpson, Blowback:
America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New
York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), pp. 3-11,
138-175, 264-290.
Photo: Soviet MVD
Special Tasks Unit near
Related Information
The Origins of Containment: George Kennan's
"Long Telegram" (Moscow-to-Washington) (February 22, 1946)
"The
Sinews of Peace": Audio and Transcript of Churchill's Speech at
The Novikov Telegram: Soviet Ambassador in
Andrei Zhdanov's
"Report on the International Situation" (September 1947)
NSC-68 -- The
Foundations of American Cold War Policy
Compendium of Documents & Readings on the History of the Cold War
Thursday, July 31. Case Study of
Soviet Sister Services: The East German Stasi
HANDOUT:
"Secret Voices from the Past:
Powerpoint: Soviet Sister
Services
Yuri Totrov, "Western
Intelligence Operations in Eastern Europe, 1945-1954," The Journal
of Intelligence History Volume 5, Number 1 (Summer 2005): 71-80.
Markus
Wolf, "Spying
for Love," Man Without a Face: The
Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster (New York: Random House,
1997), pp. 123-150.
Recommended [Not
Required]
Andrew & Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story, pp. 422-476.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, "The
Dialectics of Pain: The Interrogation Methods of the Communist Secret
Police in
Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A
Personal History (New York: Random House, 1997).
Gary Bruce, "The Prelude
to Nationwide Surveillance in East Germany: Stasi
Operations and Threat Perceptions, 1945-1953" Journal of Cold War
Studies Volume 5, Number 2 (Spring 2003): 3-31.
Robert Gellately, "Denunciations
in Twentieth-Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and
the German Democratic Republic," The Journal of Modern History,
Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec., 1996): 931-967.
Week 6 The Soviet Bomb and Soviet Nuclear Espionage
Tuesday, August 5. The Red Scare, Venona
Powerpoint: Venona
Handout: Venona Materials
Wednesday, August 6. The Soviet Nuclear Program
& Atomic Spies
Powerpoint: Soviet Nuclear Program
David Holloway, Stalin
and the Bomb: The
Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks:
The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little,
Brown, & Co., 1994-1995). Revised Edition, pp. 172-220. Review documents on
pp. 436-475.
Related Sites
National
Security Agency -- contains links to two key collections: the VENONA
archive of captured Soviets coded communications; and documents on the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
National Security Archive
Documents
Thursday, August 7. Red Defectors:
Soviet Defectors since the Second World War
Discussion: CASEBOOK 7: Soviet
Spies in
Powerpoint: Red Defectors,
Soviet Assassination
Recommended
Vladislav Krasnov, Soviet
Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1985).
Testimony of
Alexander Orlov, Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of
the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on
the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Seventh Congress. September 28,
1955. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962).
The Kremlin's
Espionage and Terror Organizations; testimony of Petr.
S. Deriabin, former officer of the USSR's Committee
of State Security (KGB). Hearing
Before the Committee of Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-sixth
Congress, First session. Released March 17, 1959.
Murder
International, Inc.: Murder and Kidnapping as an Instrument of Soviet Policy, Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the
Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of
the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Ninth Congress.
First Session. March 26, 1965. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1965).
Harry Truman, The
Truman Presidential Papers, Volume 7 The Ideological Foundations of the
Cold War -- the "Long Telegram," the Foreign Affairs X
Article, the Clifford Report, and
Week 7 The Cuban Missile Crisis
Tuesday, August 12. Context, Course
& Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis
(327 megs—high speed only)
Powerpoint: Cuban Missile
Crisis
Jerrold L. Schechter and Peter S. Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War, pp. 271-352.
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Intelligence and National Security Volume 13, Number 3 (Winter 1998): 64-87.
Documents
Summary of revelations: "Soviet Surprise in '62: US Didn't Know About 100 Warheads in Cuba" Chronology, Transcript & Audio of JFK's Meetings During the Cuban Missile Crisis, 18-29 October 1962
Possibly
useful: “Soviet
Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin
Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books,
1999), pp. 180-184.
Related
Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds. The Cuban Missile Crisis: A National Security Archives Documents Reader (New York: The New Press, 1992).
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Kennedy and Castro, 1958-1964 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998).
Oleg Penkovsky, The Penkovskiy Papers (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
Check out the National Security Agency's Cuban Missile Crisis Documents
Russian Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis [English translation from the Cold War International History Project]
Compendium of Documents & Readings on the U.S. Response in the Cuban Missile Crisis
Wednesday, August 13. Oswald in
Russia, Nosenko Affair
Powerpoint: Nosenko Affair
David
C. Martin, Wilderness
of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the
Cold War’s Most Important Agents (
Optional
Listen
to an interview with Tenant Bagley regarding Nosenko as a “False defector” (30 minutes)
Listen
to podcast of FBI (DavidMajor),
KGB (Oleg Kalunin), and
attacks against the
“false defector” thesis (17 minutes)
Listen
to Nosenko’s
1998 talk to the CIA (more than an hour)
More about Nosenko [from his
Recommended
"The Great Molehunt," in Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 286-292.
Cleveland
Cram, "Spy
Stories: Of Moles and Mole Hunters," in Studies
in Intelligence (The
Gordon Brook-Shephard, The Storm Birds. Soviet Post-War Defectors (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
Selections from
Norman Mailer, Oswald's Tale:
An American Mystery (New York, Ballantine Books,
1995), pp. 69-79, 221-233.
Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly
Games (
Part 2: Technology
Espionage
Powerpoint: The End of the
KGB
HANDOUT: Aleksandr Kabakov,
"Landscapes on Walls, "
CASEBOOK 8: The
Farewell Dossier
Recommended
Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Comrade Kryuchkov's Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-1985 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
Milt
Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside
Story of the
Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
Alexander
Kouzminov, Biological Espionage: Special Operations
of the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West (
Thomas
C. Reed, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War (
Optional
CASEBOOK 9: Misinformation,
Disinformation, or Incompetence? Evaluating C.I.A. Assessments of the Soviet
Economy
Related Sites
CIA Assessments of the Soviet Union: The Record versus the Charges
Thursday, August 14. Second Examination
Removing the Dzerzhinskii
statue from in front
of