Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

Nevertheless, many of the operational successes of the Soviet and

Russian services were squandered by the country’s political leader-

ship. Knowledge of the Austro-Hungarian war plans in 1914 was not

enough to make the tsarist army capable of defeating the combined

forces of imperial Germany and Austria. Stalin and his successors of-

ten ignored political intelligence and punished intelligence officers

who challenged the leader’s judgment. The failure of Stalin to heed

GRU and NKVD warnings of Operation Barbarossa constitutes the

greatest intelligence failure of the 20th century. KGB Chair Yuri An-

dropov in the early 1980s mandated that his service collect informa-

tion to show that the United States was planning and ready for nuclear

war. This campaign, dubbed RYaN(for Nuclear-Rocket Surprise At-

tack), politicized Soviet intelligence activities and artificially created

a crisis in the fall of 1983 that took the United States and the Soviet

Union to the brink of war.

The Soviet intelligence establishment shared scientific intelligence

effectively with consumers in the military industries. However, unlike

the “secular” states in the West, political information was often rejected

by important consumers: the Russian services never had strong analyt-

ical components. Stalin acted as his own intelligence analyst, and in the

post-Stalin years the Communist Party Central Committee became a

major consumer of raw intelligence. In the post-Stalin years, political

reporting often was sent to the relevant components of the Central Com-

mittee, which interpreted reporting through a strong ideological prism.

In the post-Soviet years, Russian foreign intelligence remains formi-

dable. The recently established SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service of

the Russian Federation) has run agents within the CIA and Federal Bu-

reau of Investigation (FBI). Both the SVR and the GRU continue to

play an important role in Russia’s war in Chechnya and policy toward

the near abroad, the former republics of the Soviet Union. Both appar-

ently have access to the national leadership.

THE PEOPLE

Any study of Russian intelligence has to concentrate on the competence

and personality of those who lead the service and their relationship to

the country’s rulers. The men who directed the Okhranain the first

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