“Spy Mania” Ë 67
Pitskhelauri himself allegedly operated twenty-four agents (many of whom ran din-
ing cars) scattered along the railways who, according to his confessions, provided
excellent intelligence: Egor Gdzelidze, Grigol Dzhaparidze, Irakli Matikashvili, Abel’
Tatulov, Ismail Abashidze, Noe Muskhulia, Grigol Danelia, Antimos Tskhomelidze,
Sokrat Revia, Aslan Bakradze, Lavrenti Abashidze, David Dvali, Platon Dadiani, Ivan
Metreveli, Egor Dzhakeli, and others.⁶¹
Needless to say, one cannot take these confessions, made at the time of the Great
Terror, at face value. What they do suggest is that Japan was targeting ethnic non-
Russians (including Georgians and other peoples from the Caucasus) for intelligence
operations, and that the Russian government remained keenly aware of this link be-
tween Japan and the ethnic national minorities. Obviously, the Soviet government in-
herited those suspicions.
In any case, the message Russia projected to the nation was that of Japan’s “total
espionage,” as discussed in the previous chapter. Discussing foreign espionage, one
Russian book sounded a tocsin:
No other country in the world has organized a military espionage network on such a large scale
as Japan. Because the Japanese have a special, innate ability as military spies, it is very easy for
the Japanese Emperor to increase ten-fold the number of military spies now placed in various
countries. In fact he has no need for it, because today military spies have already been placed in
many countries in the world... Japan has no ordinary general moral senses such as we have in
Europe... Japanese behavior is not restricted by any morality but their patriotism for Japan.⁶²On the eve of 1914, the number of those suspected of being Japanese spies in Russia
was the second largest (309), after Austro-Hungarian spies (353).⁶³
Of course, Russia had learned a bitter lesson from Japan, and so emulated and
enriched its own total espionage. In the autumn of 1912, for example, “at least four
Russian army o cers dressed and disguised as Kurds crossed into Ottoman lands in
order to incite the Kurds.” Meanwhile, Russia was running its own intelligence oper-
ations using in part its banks in Ottoman Turkey.⁶⁴Of course, Russia was well aware
of the Ottomans’ similar use of Kurds against Russia.
Whatever the case, Russia’s spy mania created a “tendency to view whole nation-
alities within the sensitive border zones as potential intelligence threats.”⁶⁵Clearly,
61 File of K.O. Gelovani, Archive of the Ministry of Internal Aairs of Georgia (Tbilisi).
62 Quoted in Yoshimura, “Nichiro sens ̄o go,” 15–16. Unfortunately we have been unable to identify
the Russian original.
63 Grekov,Russkaia kontrrazvedka, 175.
64 Reynolds,Shattering Empires, 64. Regarding the use of banks, Russians suspected during World
War I that “the very epicenter of German espionage in Russia was the banking system.” See Alex Mar-
shall, “Russian Military Intelligence, 1905–1917: The Untold Story behind Tsarist Russia in the First
World War.”War in History11, no. 4 (2004), 413.
65 Alex Marshall, “Russian Intelligence during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05,”Intelligence and
National Security, 22:5 (October 2007), 695–96.