Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

and was fired. His replacement, Rudy Baker, was even better at

managing the sensitive CPUSA-NKVDrelationship.

Peters later appeared before the House Committee on Un-American

Activities and admitted that he was an illegal immigrant. He refused to

answer any questions about his intelligence activities and was deported

to Hungary. Peters’s heritage was the establishment of tight links be-

tween the CPUSA and the intelligence services, which made the So-

viet successes of the 1940s possible. See alsoBROWDER, EARL.

PETRASHEVSKIY CIRCLE.A minor official in the Ministry of For-

eign Affairs, M. V. Petrashevskiy came under surveillanceby the

Third Sectionin early 1848 because of a political tract he wrote. Pe-

trashevskiy and 33 other men then quickly came under suspicion for

a “plot of ideas” and were arrested and interrogated by the authori-

ties. After a military court-martial of 23 dangerous plotters, 21 were

sentenced to death by firing squad in December 1848. Three days be-

fore Christmas, the convicted men were prepared for execution, but

instead of being shot, they heard an imperial decree commuting their

death sentence and sentencing them to prison and exile. One of the

condemned was the writer Feodor Dostoyevsky. Petrashevskiy and

his coconspirators were not revolutionaries. But the waves of revolu-

tion sweeping over Europe in 1848 convinced Nicholas I that the

Third Section had to nip subversion in the bud to prevent another De-

cembrists’Revolt. The arrest and punishment of Petrashevskiy and

his associates presaged the prophylactic arrests of dissidentsby the

Okhranaand the Soviet security services.

PETROV, VLADIMIR (1907–1991); PETROVA, EVDOKA (1915–

2002).Among the defectorsmost damaging to the KGBin the post-

Stalin years were the Petrovs, who served in the rezidenturain Can-

berra, Australia. Between them, they had more than 30 years of ex-

perience in human intelligence and technical intelligence when they

defected in 1954. The Soviets tried to prevent the defection by forc-

ing Petrova onto an aircraft bound for Moscow, but the Australian po-

lice pried her away from her KGB escorts. The scenes of a frightened

woman escaping the clutches of the KGB were caught by an Aus-

tralian photographer and were on the front page of newspapers

around the world. The publicity generated by the incident convinced

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