The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

The attempt on Lenin’s life, the killing of Uritsky and the announcement of the “liquidation” of “the envoys’ plot” were quickly followed by the declaration of the Red Terror. With the Bolsheviks engaged in a bitter civil war against their White enemies, the Cheka set out to terrorize the regime’s opponents. Lenin himself, only three weeks before the attempt on his own life, had written to the Bolsheviks in Penza, and probably elsewhere, urging them to organize public executions to make the people “tremble” “for hundreds of kilometers around.” While still recovering from his wounds, he instructed, “It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror.” ¹⁶ On October 15 Uritsky’s successor in Petrograd, Gleb Ivanovich Boky, proudly reported to Moscow that 800 alleged counterrevolutionaries had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Among those arrested, and probably executed, in Petrograd was the Cheka’s first foreign agent, Alexei Filippov. His liquidation was due, in all probability, not to the failure of his Finnish missions but to his “bourgeois” origins, which marked him down as an enemy of the people in the paranoid atmosphere of the Red Terror.¹⁷ Twenty years later Boky was himself to fall victim to the even greater paranoia of Stalin’s Terror.¹⁸

Berzin and Buikis, the Cheka agents provocateurs who had helped orchestrate the “envoys’ plot,” subsequently became victims of their own deception. Berzin’s career initially prospered. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his role as agent provocateur, joined the Cheka and later became head of a forced labor camp in the Kolyma goldfields which had one of the highest death rates in Stalin’s gulag. In 1937, however, he was arrested and shot as an enemy of the people.¹⁹ The exact charges leveled against Berzin are not known, but it is likely that they included accusations that he had actually collaborated with Western plotters in 1918. In the somewhat paranoid Stalinist interpretation of the “envoys’ plot,” his collaborator Buikis (alias “Shmidkhen”) was portrayed as a covert counter-revolutionary rather than a Cheka officer carrying out his orders. That remained the accepted interpretation even in classified KGB histories during Mitrokhin’s early career. Buikis survived the Terror only by concealing his identity. Not until the mid-1960s did research in the KGB archives reestablish “Shmidkhen’s” true identity and his real role in 1918.²⁰

Throughout Mitrokhin’s career, KGB historians continued to interpret all plots and attacks against the young Soviet regime as “manifestations of a unified conspiracy” by its class enemies at home and the “imperialist powers” abroad.²¹ The reality was very different. Had there been “a unified conspiracy,” the regime would surely have lost the civil war. If two or three divisions of Western troops had landed in the Gulf of Finland in 1919, they could probably have forced their way to Moscow and overthrown the Bolsheviks. But in the aftermath of the First World War not even two or three divisions could be found. Those American, British, French and Japanese troops who intervened against the Red Army served mainly to discredit the White cause and thus actually to assist the Bolsheviks. They were too few to affect the military outcome of the civil war but quite sufficient to allow the Bolsheviks to brand their opponents as the tools of Western imperialism. Most Bolsheviks were, in any case, sincerely convinced that during the civil war they had faced a determined onslaught from the full might of Western capitalism. That illusion continued to color Soviet attitudes to the West throughout, and even beyond, the Stalin era.

THE CHEKA’S INTELLIGENCE operations both at home and abroad were profoundly influenced not merely by the legacy of the Okhrana but also by the Bolsheviks’ own pre-Revolutionary experience as a largely illegal clandestine underground. Many of the Bolshevik leadership had become so used to living under false identities before 1917 that they retained their aliases even after the Revolution: among them the Russian nobleman Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov,²² who kept the pseudonym Lenin, and the Georgian Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who continued to be known as Stalin. Both Lenin and Stalin retained many of the habits of mind developed during their underground existence. On highly sensitive matters Lenin would insist no copy be made of his instructions and that the original either be returned to him for destruction or destroyed by the recipient. Happily for the historian, his instructions were not always carried out.²³