Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

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.