KGB Archives Research Articles

LHRT: The Importance of Our History

LHRT: The Importance of Our History

БІЛОРУСИ ТА УКРАЇНЦІ В АНТИРАДЯНСЬКИХ ЛОКАЛЬНИХ ЗБРОЙНИХ КОНФЛІКТАХ НА ТЕРИТОРІЇ РАДЯНСЬКОЇ БІЛОРУСІ (1920-1930 РОКИ)

The article is devoted to the study of anti-Soviet resistance in Belarus in the 1920s and 1930s. For the last twenty years this topic has been silenced in the official scientific publications of the Republic of Belarus. Most documents on armed anti-Soviet resistance are kept in the KGB archives, to which a researcher in the Republic of Belarus has limited access. The author analyzes the participation of the Belarusian population in anti-Soviet local armed conflicts. The vast majority of actions of the Bolshevik government brutally violated the traditional way of life, which caused outrage among the Belarusian population, which grew into armed forms of protection of property and dignity. On the basis of archival materials the activity of insurgent detachments is revealed. In the period 1919–1923, 1925–26, 1930–1931. the actions of armed peasants and intellectuals in Soviet Belarus had a clear political context. For the purposes of the insurgent detachments, anti-Soviet units, which fought for the elimination of Soviet power, and Belarusian national units, which sought to create an independent Belarusian state, are nominated - these are the organizations “Biloruske bratstvo”, “Za Batkivshchynu”, “Zelenyy Dub”. They had a military structure, interacted with each other, enjoyed the broad support of the population. They were attended not only by Belarusians but also by Ukrainians, both of local origin and those who found themselves in Belarus. The article shows the fighting destiny of the insurgent leaders Mefodiy Karatkevich, Vasil Shevchenko, Mikhail Bakun, Fyodor Shatsko. On the part of the Soviet authorities, the main method of combating the insurgent movement was to use force. The author concludes that a fairly large part of the population of Belarus did not perceive the Soviet state as their own and interpreted the Bolshevik government as aggressive and not legitimate. The massive anti-Soviet armed resistance ended both under the influence of the transition to a new economic policy and the forced destruction of the most conscious and hardworking part of the Belarusian population.

PIOSENKA TRWAJĄCA WIECZNOŚĆ: SOWIECKI APARAT REPRESJI WOBEC UKRAIŃSKIEGO FOLKLORU POLITYCZNEGO

In the Soviet Ukraine, political folklore was a powerful channel of unofficial com-munication for a large part of that country’s population. Telling jokes and performing songs that ridiculed communist authorities as early as in the 1920s was a widespread way of expressing mass resistance against totalitarianism for many Ukrainians. In the 1930s-50s’, the Soviet apparatus of repression applied punishments of imprisonment lasting 3 to 10 years to those disseminating folkloric political satire along with confisca-tion of their property. Some people who were repressed for carrying out political folklore never returned from the GULAG. This article is based on folklore materials gleaned from criminal cases found in former NKVD and KGB archives, which were made available to researchers in 2015 in the Ukraine.

Локальная история геноцида в Галиции

Yuri Radchenko comments on Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York, 2018) from his vantage point as a Ukrainian historian of the Holocaust. He endorses the overall premise of the book but calls for a more nuanced approach to the analysis of its main collective protagonists, particularly the Ukrainians. Even among Ukrainian nationalists the differences between the main factions – the OUN(B) (Banderites) and OUN(M) (Melnykites) – were formidable and directly affected their stance vis-à-vis the Nazis, the Jews, and the Poles. Radchenko calls for historians following in Bartov’s footsteps to study more extensively in local archives, particularly the former KGB archives in Ukraine.

KHVEDIR VOVK’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ACTIVITY THROUGHOUT V. VELEDNYTSKYI’S SLANDER

The article consists of information about activity of the “Stara Hromada” in the 70s of the 19th century. It is found Khedir Vovk’s personal documents at the Scientifi c Archive of the Institute of Archaeology of Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, in particular, the document “Slander of the Kyivian traitor V. Velednytskyi”. This document shows how “Stara Hromada” members were dangerous for the Russian Imperia society. E. g., he wrote that Khvedir Vovk’s fl at was “radical”. Secret lectures about Marx’, Feuerbach’s, Fichte’s ideas were held at Vovk’s fl at. These lectures were dangerous because lectors raised the question of God’s absence. Besides, “Stara Hromada” members denied such important values for everyone in Russian Imperia as faith, family, and Homeland. This document is unique source for understanding collision between “Ukrainian/unoffi cial” and “Russian/ offi cial” Kyiv. In 70s of 19th century were edicts, which banned Ukrainian language as language of knowledge (according to the Valuev Circular (1863) and the Ems Ukaz (1876)). Likewise, this episode should be integrated to the history of relations between intellectuals (particularly, archaeologists) and authorities. It is examined the KGB archives in Ukraine. Thus, repressions issue in 30s years of the 20th century in the USSR is so popular among historians. “Intellectuals (historians, archaeologists, etc) and authority” relations were not established during Soviet times. V. Velednytskyi’s slander helps to understand that intellectual-authority relations started from Russian Imperia and continued to Soviet times.

Zmiana statusu i etniczna mobilizacja podczas wydarzeń marca 1956 roku w Gruzji

Status Shift and Ethnic Mobilisation in the March 1956 Events in Georgia The large-scale demonstrations that took place in Georgia in early March 1956 following Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress were the first significant expressions of public protest and civil disobedience in the Soviet Union for decades, and they also bore a clearly nationalistic character. Based primarily on materials from the Georgian KGB and Party archives and interviews with former Party officials and participants of the events, this article examines potential interpretations of these events derived from elite incorporation and ethnic mobilisation theories.

El calvario de los brigadistas húngaros

The elite of the Hungarian volunteers of the Spanish Civil War became victim of the Communist terror after World War II (1949-1950). The main role was played by the brigadist, László Rajk, who, before the trial, was the secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Minister of the Interior, and then Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was charged with spying for the “imperialists” and Tito as well as with high treason and anti-Semitism. In the show trial of “Rajk and his associates” 155 people were charged and convicted, 15 of them, including Rajk, were condemned to death. In the indictment Rajk was condemned for his activity during the Spanish Civil War: he was accused of being a fascist, and then an imperialist agent, as well as a “Trockyist”, just like the twenty other Hungarian Brigadists. The background of the trial has been thoroughly analysed in Hungarian historiography, but the accusation connected to the Spanish period has not been examined or criticized. The present study, based on new sources, such as the reports of the Hungarian Communist Secret Service, the papers of the KGB Archives in Moscow, and the Comintern, raises the issue emphasizing the negative role of Ernő Gerő (“Pedro”), who was the representative of the Comintern and the PCIA (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), in the process.

Spies: the rise and fall of the KGB in America

This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account. Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.

The Rosenberg Ring Revealed: Industrial-Scale Conventional and Nuclear Espionage

New evidence from the KGB's archives reveals that Julius Rosenberg's espionage ring was larger and caused more damage to U.S. security than has been previously understood. Rosenberg's prosecution centered on his recruitment of David Greenglass to spy on the Manhattan Project. Notes smuggled out of Moscow by Alexander Vassiliev show that Rosenberg also recruited Russell McNutt as a nuclear spy. The Rosenberg ring's primary contribution to the USSR, however, was a wealth of detailed information about non-nuclear weapons systems that were critical elements of the early Cold War Soviet arsenal.

Status Shift and Ethnic Mobilisation in the March 1956 Events in Georgia

The large-scale demonstrations that took place in Georgia in early March 1956 following Khrushchev's criticism of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress were the first significant expressions of public protest and civil disobedience in the Soviet Union for decades, and they also bore a clearly nationalistic character. Based primarily on materials from the Georgian KGB and Party archives and interviews with former Party officials and participants of the events, this article examines potential interpretations of these events derived from elite incorporation and ethnic mobilisation theories.

“The Great Terror” and the Clergy: Repressions in Soviet Tatarstan

Research of KGB and other archives into religious condemnation in Tatarstan. In 1937, in response to claims that religious groups in Tatarstan were intensifying their activities, the Bureau of the Tatar Oblast Committee of the VKP(b) stepped up its anti-religious propaganda. Local punitive organizations took measures to repress Christian and Muslim clerics, fabricating counter-revolutionary and subversive influences by these religious groups. In the “Kulak Operation,” 370 people were condemned, of whom 281 were shot and 89 imprisoned. Of the 1,890 mosques and 680 churches operating before the Revolution, only 681 mosques and 85 churches remained after 1 April 1939.

Protestantism as a Subject of Religious Studies

In the last 15 years, in the conditions of independent Ukraine, the study of Protestantism has taken on new qualitative dimensions. The scientific and objectivity of the study was ensured through the use of a source base (Protestant German and Polish-language literature of the 16th - 17th centuries), review and critical literature of the 19th - 20th centuries. (foreign and Ukrainian researchers of Protestantism), access to archival documentation (Russian, Polish, Soviet, including KGB archives, other state institutions on religious affairs). Over the same years, a new cohort of Ukrainian Protestantism scholars has been formed, which has had ample opportunity to use these benefits to unconventionally and truthfully treat Protestantism as a religious (not party ideologically or religiously biased) subject of study.

The KGB in Eastern Europe during the Cold War: On Agents and Confidential Contacts

Ben de Jong from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses the ways in which the KGB collected information about political developments in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and tries to shed some light on the question whether Soviet intelligence services recruited full-fledged agents to acquire the necessary information in the same way as they did in the West. De Jong concentrates on Poland but also tries to grasp the bigger picture and focusses on the distinction between fully-fledged agents and so-called confidential contacts. Records from the KGB archives on this topic are completely absent from the public domain but this article tries to elucidate this interesting question with the help of the writings of several former KGB officers and other materials.

"Malenkie liudi" i "bolshaia istoriia": Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh-1930-kh gg. (review)

Reviewed by: "Malenkie liudi" i "bol´shaia istoriia": Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh-1930-kh gg. Michael David-Fox Sergei Zhuravlev , "Malenkie liudi" i "bol´shaia istoriia": Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh-1930-kh gg. ["Little People" and "Big Events": Foreigners of Moscow's Electrical Factory in Soviet Society, 1920-30s]. Moscow: Rosspen, 2000. 351 pp. ISBN 5824301506. At the height of the Soviet industrialization drive in the early 1930s as many as 35,000 foreign workers, engineers, and specialists and their family members had migrated from the countries of the industrialized West to live and work in the Soviet Union, many for long periods of time (29-31). Elektrozavod (after 1932, Elektrokombinat), the Moscow electro-industrial giant welded together from many factories in late 1927 and existing as a single entity until 1938, was an enterprise with one of the most substantial foreign contingents. This center of "socialist construction," like other industrial sites where foreigners were concentrated, held great strategic and symbolic value simultaneously. The electrical industry was central in the earliest Soviet plans for industrial development (47). The "Il´ich lightbulb" and electrification were for many years touted as virtual synonyms for the October Revolution, and during and after the First Five-Year Plan Elektrozavod was a high-priority enterprise that for many became a literal "symbol of socialism" (143). In the Soviet Union as a whole, by far the greatest number of Western economic and political émigrés working in Soviet industry were German, while the second largest group was Americans (29-30). This held true at Elektrozavod, where foreigners meant first and foremost Germans (about 80 percent, many of them Communists and skilled workers from Berlin), followed by Americans (a diverse group including highly paid specialists and returning émigrés from the Russian empire) and a smattering of many other nationalities. While Elektrozavod's foreign colony was a drop in the bucket in terms of the factory as a whole—at its height in 1932, foreigners totaled about 180 employees, not including family members, while the number for the entire factory the next year reached 24,000 (144, 157)—it holds a significance well beyond its numerical size. The lives and experiences of these foreigners are important not only as a window into the broader import of Western expertise into Soviet industry, but because these were the outsiders whose contact with the emerging Soviet system can be counted as among the most sustained, intimate, and often, as it turned out, tragic. [End Page 611] In this thoroughly researched volume packed with revealing new material, Sergei Zhuravlev has written the history of foreigners at Elektrozavod. His task, as he defines it, is to describe the foreign colony as a social entity (sotsium, or, more rarely, mikro-sotsium,sotsial´naia obshchnost´, or obshchestvennyi organizm) within Soviet society. Another of his major goals is to place the experiences of "little people" at the center of the historical process, and to do this especially through the extensive reconstruction of individual biographies within their broader context. While this agenda leaves open certain angles of investigation into the topic that I discuss below, it also informs his work's achievements, which rest on two closely related features of the monograph, its source base and its architectural design. Of the approximately 50 Russian archival collections (fondy) listed in Zhuravlev's bibliography, the most important for the study were the factory archives in the Moscow municipal archive (TsMAM) and the factory party organizations in the former Moscow party archive (TsAODM). Zhuravlev uses the 144 extant personal collections (lichnye fondy) of foreigners in the Elektrozavod collection exhaustively, developing the practice of inserting a biographical sketch in italics directly into his text each time an important personage appears. In 1993, when the author began research for this study, he also gained access to about 40 transcripts of purge-era NKVD interrogations of Elektrozavod foreigners executed or sent to labor in the Gulag, including those of several German proletarian Communists whose life stories are at the heart of the book. These materials from the former KGB archives (FSB RF)—now, as a rule, no longer accessible—not only are prominent in...

Oleg Tsarev's Synthetic KGB Gems

The Crown Jewels, published in Great Britain in 1998 and the United States in 1999, is Oleg Tsarev's second book drawn from KGB archives and written in cooperation with a Western author in this case, Nigel West.1 This important, complex book has much to offer historians, especially those inclined toward archeology, for Tsarev has skillfully choreographed his version of history to dance around the facts of some very well known intelligence and espionage cases. Consequently, he deposits another dense layer of evidence to sift, sort, and evaluate. But an assessment of Tsarev's volume also leads to three major points. Admittedly, two are glimpses of the blindingly obvious,'' restated here because these fundamentals become buried under media hype. First, that new historical evidence requires careful interpretation. Second, the secrets spies gather should be evaluated within the context of national and institutional policy formulation and implementation. Third, the notion of damage'' from Soviet espionage, has been exaggerated and misunderstood, and it is now time to investigate the impact of Soviet espionage upon national and international politics. And, most relevantly, Tsarev, a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, also serves as a consultant to the Service's press department.

Arguing with the KGB Archives. Archival and Narrative Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia

This paper is a sequel to my earlier work on life histories in post-Soviet Latvia. The opening of the KGB archives in Riga created the possibility of comparing archival information with recorded personal narratives. The files and the highly charged emotional responses that they evoked raise questions about the uses of language as it moves along a continuum from rigid formalisation to free poetic constructions. Excessive formalisation and institutionalisation of language preclude dialogue and rather than pin down meaning end up by destroying it. Nevertheless, informants were keen to engage in retrospective dialogue with the files, contesting facts and meanings and in the process subverting the original enterprise and reasserting themselves as moral agents.

The sword and the shield: the Mitrokhin Archive and the secret history of the KGB

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and Secret History of KGB. New York: Basic Books, 1999. xix, 700 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.50 US, $47.50 CAD, cloth. Here it is, another history of Committee of State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti-KGB), Soviet secret police. This one, the secret is based on notes laboriously made over a twelve-year period from files process of being consigned to KGB archives. After collapse of Soviet Union, Vasili Mitrokhin's partly handwritten, partly typed archive was brought to Britain and now has had a narrative written around it by renowned Cambridge specialist on intelligence history, Christopher Andrew. Apparently no specific criteria were used to sift dross from 300,000-odd files seen by Mitrokhin between 1972 and 1984 as he archived them for First Chief Directorate (i.e., foreign intelligence). Christopher Andrew has therefore wisely decided to fit archival material into a straightforwardly chronological history of KGB's foreign operations. It begins with Cheka, original Soviet ancestor of KGB. In this and many later chapters, there is some obvious repetition of Andrew's earlier collaborative writing with another defector, Oleg Gordievsky, as well as opportunity to answer critics and to incorporate newer Russian works on subject. The story continues with accounts of Great Illegals of 1930s, magnificent five (Kim Philby et al.) recruited at Cambridge University by Anthony Blunt, pursuit of Trotsky, war, and Cold War. Throughout these early chapters, as well as later, we discover or rediscover some of great Soviet espionage successes, and occasional failures. The failures resulted from intelligence being sidelined by ideology, with Stalin, Khrushchev, and even Andropov acting as their own analysts, and with residencies providing Moscow with what it wanted to hear rather than what it needed to know. Christopher Andrew does a phenomenal job of matching data handmade archive with rest of literature, current and past, field of intelligence studies. Intelligence agencies West will be pulling up names and aliases from this book to match up with their files, if they have not already done so, as a check on their own past counterintelligence records. For non-specialist, neither historian nor analyst, however, it is all just a long, sad story of betrayal and deception based on misplaced faith a false cause or, more recently, purely mercenary motives. It shakes one's faith human intelligence and intelligence of humans as none of deceptions, spying, active measures, or theft of scientific and technical knowledge prevented decay and eventual collapse of USSR The author skillfully brings very many bits and pieces of information together to answer a vast array of questions, as well as to debunk numerous myths about overblown reputations. There is much to ponder this volume, but end this world of spies remains a hall of mirrors. The book devotes considerable attention to Soviet operations against its main adversary, United States. Moscow had greatly inflated expectations of its illegal agents. In fact, though, just how much can an unacculturated foreigner living undercover teeming New York City learn about American government secrets? One such illegal did work as a piano tuner for Steinway & Sons. And from archive we do learn how, exactly, Vladimir Horowitz liked to have his piano tuned. There is no indication as to whether this was a vital American secret or whether it influenced Soviet policy. Moscow was also for a long time convinced United States was planning to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike; its agents fed that preconception. Rather than its network of legal and illegal spies, KGB had better results from American citizens working intelligence trade, such as Aldrich Ames, who would walk in to Soviet residencies offering their services. …

The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives

This lively account of Soviet foreign intelligence activity in Great Britain during Cold War is based on documents newly released from KGB archives, their crown jewels, as KGB unofficially called its most valuable assets. Written by Nigel West, called by Sunday Times the unofficial historian of secret services and Oleg Tsarev, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, The Crown Jewels provides much new information on activities of all well-known British pro-Soviet spies, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, as well as many lesser-known spymasters and recruiters, reproducing many of their reports for first time. The book adds unsuspected dimensions to famous Cambridge ring (including details of Burgess's offer to murder his fellow conspirator Goronwy Rees). It also reveals a completely unknown Soviet network based in London and headed by a named Daily Herald journalist; describes huge scale of Soviet penetration of British Foreign Office from 1927 to 1951; explores a previously unknown spy ring in Oxford; and tells about key role played by Blunt in supervising post-war Soviet espionage activities in London.

In the line of fire: The Soviet crackdown on Hungary, 1956–57

Four decades ago, the first major anti‐Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe ‐ the 1956 Hungarian revolution ‐ took place. To Western observers, Soviet military interventions have usually appeared flawlessly executed. However, newly declassified documents from KGB, Central Committee and Foreign Ministry archives reveal the difficulties Soviet leaders had in getting their Hungarian communist colleagues to fight resolutely. The violent student demonstration of 23 October caught off‐guard the Soviet ‘Special Corps’ stationed in Hungary under General Lashchenko, despite earlier signs of popular discontent. The intervention and subsequent ‘pacification’ were far removed from the ‘neat’ operation as they have been portrayed. Pro‐Soviet Hungarians found themselves in a particularly difficult position, the Soviet military operations displayed serious flaws, and KGB officials faced substantial obstacles in the ensuing period of ‘normalization’.

The Life of Zabolotsky

This is a biography of the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, written by his son, illustrated with examples of his work and telling in detail the story of his arrest during Stalin's terror, eight years of prison and exile, and stubborn survival. Since his death, Nikolay Zabolotsky has come to be recognized as a writer of international importance, on a par with Pasternak of Mandelshtam: but compared with them he has been little studied or translated, and until recently aspects of both his life and his work remained mysterious. During the experimental period of Russian art in the 1920s he was a member of the Oberiu movement which this biography documents. In 1938, though uninterested in politics, he was arrested and remained in prison and exile until 1946, after which (with much difficulty) he resumed writing. whole episode is not only a moving and exemplary human story, but also a notable case study in the effects of Stalin's terror. It makes use of the testimony of family and friends, as well as of material from KGB archives, only recently made available. It also constitutes an introduction to a Zabolotsky's body of poetry. book contains, as appendices, Zabolotsky's own The Story of My Imprisonment and the hitherto secret text of the writer Lesyuchevsky's denunciation of Zabolotsky to the secret police. There is also an anthology of Zabolotsky poems in English translation by Daniel Weissbort and Robin Milner-Gulland and biographical notes on a host of literary figures from the 1920s onwards. volume is illustrated with a number of early photographs.