Bibliography
329Any historian of the Russian intelligence and security services is bedeviled
by questions of quantity and quality of information. This bibliography is a se-
lection of relevant and important books and articles mostly in English and
Russian that deal with the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian intelligence
and security services. It does not include histories and memoirs unless they
deal with the services directly. It also does not include general Soviet/Russian
histories, military histories, or many of the Cold War memoirs by participants
on both sides.
Until 1991, much of the information on the Soviet services and the most
important cases came from dubious sources. Literally thousands of books
have been written on the subject of Soviet intelligence—many of which are
quite frankly useless to the modern scholar. For example, 12 books were writ-
ten in Great Britain between 1953 and 1977 about the Soviet agents Donald
Maclean and Guy Burgess: most of them frightfully inaccurate. Two of Kim
Philby’s wives have written memoirs. Even much of the “factual” material
scholars must rely on remains questionable: scholars have recently been able
to establish that Stalin was born in 1878 not 1879, and that Nikolai Yezhov
was born in Lithuania, not St. Petersburg. The death dates for many eminent
Chekists are also in doubt.
Information on the number of victims of the Joseph Stalin era also remains
a subject for bitter debate among scholars, as does the relationship between the
Soviet security services and left-wing movements in the Western democracies.
A French scholar, Stephanie Courtois, noted in a history of the crimes of com-
munism that we have far less evidence of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and
almost no photographs or films of the terrors of their rule: “Alas, we have only
a handful of rare archival photographs of the Gulag. There are no photographs
of dekulakization or of the famine.... The victorious powers could at least
photograph and film the thousands of bodies found at Bergen-Belsen.... No
such record exists in the Communist world, where terror has been organized in
strictest secrecy” (Courtois, 36).
Evidence for this study had to be carefully reviewed, and this bibliography
therefore had to exclude many interesting books. For example, there have been06-313 z11 Bib.qxd 7/27/06 8:07 AM Page 329