over a dozen books in Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Russian, and German on
the riots in the Soviet labor camps in 1953. Nevertheless, for readers interested
in the subject, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago(1974) and Anne
Applebaum’s Gulag: A History(2003) still provide the best accounts. Like-
wise, Pavel Sudoplatov’s Special Tasks(1994) is listed, but not his Spets oper-
atsii(1995) and Razvedka i Kreml(1996), which are basically Russian versions
of the English best-seller.
In the last 15 years, it has been possible to study the tsarist police and intel-
ligence service from archives in the West and Russia. While some of the Rus-
sian archives may have been adulterated or purged during the Soviet period,
historians are now far better able to gauge the effectiveness of the Okhrana’s
operations against the revolutionary parties, and the professionalism of the
tsarist military intelligence service. Another important trove of Okhranamate-
rial can be found in the Hoover Institute archives in Stanford, California.
While there have been a staggering number of books on Soviet history since
the dawn of the Cold War, few studies address the role of the security services
in Soviet domestic and foreign policies. There are hundreds of memoirs of the
inmates of forced labor camps as well as almost as many from defectors and
émigrés. But general histories of the Soviet Union have little time or space for
the security police, and few even try to define the role of the Soviet services in
protecting the Communist Party and the Soviet state. As one outstanding Krem-
linologist wrote near the end of the Cold War: “The Soviet security police, or
KGB, looms as an uncertain variable for scholars, mainly because we have no
commonly accepted conceptual framework to explain its role in the system.
The KGB has never received much scholarly attention in the West... the
dearth of serious scholarly research on the KGB has left a deep gap in how the
Soviet system works and what factors influence Soviet decision making”
(Knight, 1988, xvi).
There are some exceptional monographs on Soviet and post-Soviet intelli-
gence: Amy Knight’s Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant, Michael Parrish’s The
Lesser Terror, and Robert Conquest’s The Great Terrorand Inside Stalin’s Se-
cret Policehave enriched us with their research, writing, and courage. Con-
quest’s books on repression, beginning with The Great Terror, forced both the
academic community and the Western intelligentsia to consider the costs of the
Soviet experiment. Revisionist histories in the 1980s tried to minimize repres-
sion and the number of victims, but the opening of the Soviet archives after
1991 showed that it was Conquest rather than his critics who was closer to the
truth. Robert W. Stephan’s recent Stalin’s Secret War: Soviet Counterintelli-
gence against the Nazis(2003), which mined Soviet, former Wehrmacht, and
American records, is the first Western monograph on the “invisible front,” the
intense battle between the Soviet and German secret services. Two recent his-
tories of the first days of World War II have also successfully mined Soviet330 •BIBLIOGRAPHY06-313 z11 Bib.qxd 7/27/06 8:07 AM Page 330