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

Attempts to persuade Tutyunnik himself to return to Ukraine finally succeeded on June 26, 1923.⁴⁹ Tutyunnik, with his bodyguard and aides, arrived at a remote hamlet on the Romanian bank of the river Dniester, where Zayarny met him with the news that the VVR and Pyotr Stakhov were waiting on the other side. At 11 p.m. a light from the Ukrainian bank signaled that it was safe for Tutyunnik and his entourage to cross the river. Still cautious, Tutyunnik sent his bodyguard to make sure that no trap had been laid for him. Stakhov returned with the bodyguard to reassure him. According to an OGPU report, Tutyunnik told him, “Pyotr, I know you and you know me. We won’t fool each other. The VVR is a fiction, isn’t it?” “That is impossible,” Stakhov replied. “I know them all, particularly those who are with me [today]. You know you can rely on me…” Tutyunnik got into the boat with Stakhov and crossed the Dniester. Once he was in the hands of the OGPU, letters written by Tutyunnik or in his name were sent to prominent Ukrainian nationalists abroad saying that their struggle was hopeless and that he had aligned himself irrevocably with the Soviet cause. He was executed six years later.⁵⁰

OPERATIONS AGAINST THE White Guards resembled those against Ukrainian nationalists. In 1922 the Berlin residency recruited the former Tsarist General Zelenin as a penetration agent within the émigré community. A later OGPU report claimed, possibly with some exaggeration, that Zelenin had engineered “a huge schism within the ranks of the Whites” and had caused a large number of officers to break away from Baron Peter Wrangel, the last of the White generals to be defeated in the civil war. Other OGPU moles praised for their work in disrupting the White Guards included General Zaitsev, former chief of staff to the Cossack Ataman A. I. Dutov, and the ex-Tsarist General Yakhontov, who emigrated to the United States.⁵¹

The OGPU’s greatest successes against the White Guards, however, were two elaborate deception operations, codenamed SINDIKAT (“Syndicate”) and TREST (“Trust”), both of which made imaginative use of agents provocateurs.⁵² SINDIKAT was targeted against the man believed to be the most dangerous of all the White Guards: Boris Savinkov, a former Socialist Revolutionary terrorist who had served as deputy minister of war in the provisional government overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution. Winston Churchill, among others, was captivated by his anti-Bolshevik fervor. “When all is said and done,” Churchill wrote later, “and with all the stains and tarnishes there be, few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people.” During the Russo-Polish War of 1920, Savinkov was largely responsible for recruiting the Russian People’s Army which fought under Polish command against the Red Army. Early in 1921 he founded a new organization in Warsaw dedicated to the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime: the People’s Union for Defence of Country and Freedom (NSZRiS), which ran an agent network inside Soviet Russia to collect intelligence on the Bolsheviks and plan uprisings against the regime.