A Brief History of Russia’s Secret Police and Intelligence Services
This is the first article in a new series entitled“Putin’s Russia, Global Corruption, and the Road to the 2016 American Election.”
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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The first modern Russian secret police and intelligence service formed in St. Petersburg in 1881 following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The Okhrana was established to combat anarchism, left-wing agitation, and the political terrorism that convulsed Russia in the late 19th century.
Distinct from its imperial predecessor the Third Directorate, the Okhrana expanded its focus beyond anti-Tsarist nobles and aristocrats and developed a system of comprehensive, counterrevolutionary surveillance over broad swaths of society, with a special focus on students, professors, urban workers, artists, writers, and elements of the Russian intelligentsia.
Methods it employed included covert operations, the reading of private correspondence, and the use of agents provocateurs. By 1883, the Okhrana had opened a branch in Paris to monitor emigres abroad, thus making it an international intelligence operation.
Despite its modern methods, the Okhrana failed at its core mission. In 1917, revolution in Russia succeeded in ending 304 years of Romanov rule. December 20th, 1917, six weeks after the Bolshevik revolution, saw the establishment of the Cheka, the direct predecessor to the KGB and the current Russian domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, the FSB and the SVR.
A separate institution, Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, was established under Stalin in 1942. To this day, individuals affiliated with the Russian secret services are referred to as “Chekists”.
The Cheka didn’t primarily focus on the collection and analysis of intelligence, but rather sought to perfect the arts of deception, agitation, propaganda, subversion, repression, and murder to achieve the Communist Party’s political ends.
To understand the ideology and modus operandi of the Cheka, one can do no better than to read the words of its infamous founder Felix Dzerzhinsky: “We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life.”
During the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War between Communist Red and anti-Communist White forces, Dzerzhinksy and the Bolshevik leadership were convinced that the forces arrayed against them were being orchestrated by a vast Western capitalist conspiracy.
This conspiratorial, paranoid mindset pervaded the Russian secret services throughout the Cold War and that persists to this day.
During the Russian Civil War, the Cheka initiated the “Red Terror”. While figures vary, the most reliable place the number of executions at the hands of the Cheka at roughly 100,000, though other estimates range higher.
After the Bolsheviks emerged victorious and established themselves as a presence in the geopolitical world order, the Soviet secret intelligence services underwent a variety of name changes and departmental reorganizations. By the time Stalin assumed power, he used the NKVD (a successor agency to the Cheka) to implement a ruthless program of primarily domestic repression but also international espionage activities.
Domestically, the NKVD operated a sprawling system of prisons known as gulags that incarcerated millions of Russians. Entire groups of ethnic minorities were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands at an appalling cost of life. The NKVD also ruthlessly implemented a vast program of extrajudicial execution. Between the years of 1937 and 1938, a period known as the “Great Terror”, the NKVD rounded up and imprisoned over 1.5 million people and an additional 680,000–1,200,000 were summarily shot.
The NKVD was also involved in international, covert activities. Throughout the 1930s, it was behind a string of assassinations of individuals determined to be ideological opponents of Stalin. Most notably in 1940, Stalin’s bête noire, Leon Trotsky, was murdered by an icepick wielding NKVD assassin while in exile in Mexico City.
The NKVD was also active in the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and in the post-war period it was dedicated to spreading communism around the world.
The death of Stalin in 1953, and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev as the leader of the Soviet Union had far reaching consequences for the secret intelligence services which, after a few more name changes, came to be known as the KGB.
In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev delivered a famous speech in a secret session of the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress in which he denounced Stalin and the cult of personality that was cultivated around him. From that point on, while repression would most certainly exist within the Soviet Union, the era of state sponsored executions on an industrial scale came to an end.
By the time a desire to join the KGB had taken hold of Russia’s future president, Vladimir Putin, it was led by Yuri Andropov.
Gaining power in 1967, Andropov was the longest serving leader in the history of Soviet intelligence. He had an enduring influence on Putin, and his complex legacy was resuscitated during the Putin era by the leaders of the security services in an effort to salvage their prestige following the collapse of the USSR.
During his tenure as head of the FSB, Putin ordered the restoration of a plaque commemorating Andropov that had been taken down in 1991.
Andropov’s worldview was shaped by his experience as the Soviet ambassador in Budapest during the 1956 uprising. From the windows of the embassy, he watched as members of the Soviet-backed Hungarian security services were hanged from lamp posts by angry crowds protesting Soviet domination. The uprising was suppressed by Russian tanks, but not before the stunning vulnerability Communist regime was seared into Andropov’s memory.
Following this experience, Andropov developed what his staff would refer to as a “Hungarian Complex.” From then on, whenever a Soviet-backed government seemed at risk by popular uprising Andropov advocated the use of military force to protect the regime.
Andropov oversaw a campaign directed against soviet dissidents and believed the human rights movement in Russia was an imperialist plot to undermine the Communist state. As a result, he expanded the practice of institutionalizing dissidents in Soviet psychiatric facilities.
A notable episode during Andropov’s tenure that would have parallels in the Putin era was the assassination of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov on the streets of London in 1978.
Following the collapse of the USSR, the Russian security establishment believed that Andropov had foreseen the economic troubles the country faced and had sought to address them through limited market mechanisms, overseen by the KGB, to modernize the Soviet economy. According to this view, it was the democratic and political reforms instituted by Gorbachev that led to the ruin of the state.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, in an attempt to broaden perspectives within the KGB, Andropov embarked upon a recruiting drive aimed at developing a new cohort of officers from differing social groups who possessed greater critical thinking skills than previous generations. This new generation would not only include Vladimir Putin, but also many of the men who would later form his inner circle as President.
The Dark Arts: Active Measures and Disinformation
The Russian cyber and disinformation campaign targeting the 2016 presidential election was preceded by similar malicious activities across Eastern and Western Europe and in the United States conducted by many of the same units and individuals involved in the 2016 election.
While developments in technology exponentially increased their potency, the basic ideas and methodology behind Russian active measures and disinformation practices have been honed over decades. Understanding the basic concepts behind these attacks, and the actions the attackers took immediately before their assault on America’s democracy, is essential.
Active measures — activnyye meropriyatiya — is a term of art used to describe a form of political warfare conducted first by Soviet and later Russia’s security and intelligence services.
The US Information Agency describes active measures as “a Soviet term that refers to the manipulative use of slogans, arguments, disinformation, and carefully selected true information, which the Soviets used to try and influence the attitudes and actions of foreign publics and governments.”
Retired KGB Major General and defector Oleg Kalugin has described these “subversion” practices as “the heart and soul” of Russian intelligence. They are meant to “weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, [and] to sow discord among allies.”
Active measures are influence operations designed to confuse and discredit Russia’s opponents, chief among them the KGB’s self-described “Main Adversary,” the United States.
Various forms of active measures include the use of forged or fake materials targeting politicians, government officials, the academic community and the public at large, media manipulation either covertly or through state funded media, establishing and/or funding front groups, the use of agents of influence or agents provocateurs, incitement of radical elements in foreign publics and at their most extreme, assassinations and political terrorism.
Covert active measures are often done in tandem with overt propaganda campaigns conducted by the Russian government, state funded media and witting or unwitting third party intermediaries. They are the deliberate product of intelligence bureaucracies and are utilized with specific end goals in mind.
Soviet active measures campaigns against the United States included attempts to undermine notable politicians and public personages, the FBI, the State Department and civil rights leaders, among others. The Soviets placed a special emphasis on both exploiting and inciting racial violence and hatred within the US.
Disinformation — dezinformatsiya — is central to all forms of active measures.
According to legend, the term was coined by Joseph Stalin, who gave it a French-sounding name to suggest that it had Western origins.
As distinct from misinformation, which is the unintentional spread of false information, disinformation is spread intentionally and for a purpose. It can be aimed at the public at large, or at select targets through private information channels.
Disinformation does not need to be false information, it can also consist of weaponized bits of the truth selectively disseminated. In order to function, liberal democracies rely on citizens enjoying a shared factual, epistemic framework. As such, they are the specific target of, and uniquely vulnerable to, disinformation operations.
Counterintuitively, the revelation of disinformation campaigns to their intended targets can increase their potency by increasing suspicion towards all forms of public information, which is the end goal of disinformation campaigns.
Disinformation, Russian Intelligence, and the 2016 American Presidential Election
In July of 2021, The Guardian reported on the existence of a leaked classified report entitled “No 32–04 \ vd,” allegedly written by Vladimir Symonenko, the head of the Kremlin’s expert department responsible for providing Russian President Vladimir Putin with analysis and reports.
The authenticity of this leak has never been verified.
The document in question addressed the upcoming 2016 American presidential election, writing that from the Russian perspective — perspektivny — Donald Trump was the “most promising candidate.”
It further provided psychological analysis of the candidate, describing him as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
Referring to “certain events” that took place “during non-official visits to Russian Federation territory,” it hinted that the Russian state possessed kompromat on Trump. “It is acutely necessary,” the report reads, “to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US President.”
The leaked report pointed out American vulnerabilities, including the “deepening political gulf between left and right” which was surfacing in the US “media-information” space.
It suggested that Russian intelligence could plant “media viruses” into America’s political discourse that would take on a life of their own and impact certain populations.
Responsibility for collecting and systematizing information and “preparing measures to act on the information environment of the object,” an apparent reference to hacking, was given to Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister in charge of Russian military intelligence, the GRU.
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Agency, the SVR, under the leadership of Mikhail Fradkov was tasked with gathering information in a support capacity.
The FSB under Alexander Bortnikov was in charge of counterintelligence.
Symonenko distributed an executive summary of the report on January 14th, 2016.
Two days later, Putin personally signed an order for Alexander Manzhosin to convene a closed session of the Russian national security council. On January 22nd, Putin sat at the head of the table in a meeting at the Kremlin that included Shoigu, Fradkov and Bortnikov. Also present was security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, former head of the FSB during the time of the September 1999 Apartment bombings.
The participants agreed that Trump’s election would strategically benefit the Kremlin, both by causing “social turmoil” in the United States while also handicapping the negotiating position of the American President abroad. At that momentous meeting, Putin ordered his intelligence chiefs to execute a multi-agency effort to interfere in the the 2016 American election.
Or did he? As of this writing, there is no confirmation that the report “leaked” to The Guardian isn’t, in fact, an excellent example of Russian disinformation itself.
The next article will provide the early biography of Vladimir Putin and describe his experiences in the KGB.