archives: David Murphy, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa(2005),
and Constantine Pleshakov, Stalin’s Folly (2005), are the best accounts in Eng-
lish of Stalin’s intelligence failure in 1941. Murphy’s book also uses GRU ma-
terial effectively, detailing the operations of illegals in Europe and Japan.
The status of Russian archives has been a matter of concern to researchers
and human rights activists. Many of the KGB archives were reportedly de-
stroyed in 1989–1991. According to a press release, the KGB burned 583
archival files pertaining to Andrei Sakharov. Since the end of the Cold War
some of the former Soviet archives have been opened and are being mined by
scholars—Russian and Western. The Cold War International History Project,
Louise Shelley’s Policing Soviet Society, and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag on the
forced labor camps show what can be achieved by scrupulous research.
Michael Parish’s The Lesser Terror, on the role of repression in Soviet politics
after the Great Terror, is one of the best examples of how to mine and refine
material from the Russian archives. There are several new books in English and
Russian on Stalin’s relationships with the secret police based on archival re-
search. Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who
Killed for Him(2004) is a passionate account of Stalin’s personal and profes-
sional relationship with his security chieftains. Marc Jansen and Nikolai
Petrov’s biography of Nikolai Yezhov is a particularly good monograph.
Material in the Russian Soviet archives has also allowed Western and Rus-
sian historians to better understand the intelligence war between the Cheka and
the foreign intelligence services. Archivists of the Federal Security Service
(FSB) have written three histories of Russian special service operations in the
Great Patriotic War. V. S. Khristoforov, the service chief archivist, used over
100 top secret documents to write Lubyanka in the Days of the Battle of
Moscow(2002). The same team of archivists and historians has also written a
history of Smersh. The new generation of archivists and scholars is to be con-
gratulated for taking on difficult subjects such as the Red Terror and collabora-
tion with the Germans during the early days of the war. There remain, however,
important limitations for scholars of this field: many of the archives have not
been opened or are only available by the whim of the archivists. The archives
of the SVR, the FSB, and the GRU generally remain closed, though some doc-
uments have been released and published in documentary collections and on
websites. While more is known about the Stalinist and post-Stalinist intelli-
gence and security services, there are still major lacunae.
The role of Soviet intelligence in the United States and the United Kingdom
remains a contentious issue. The best summary of the debate within academe is
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s In Denial(2003). There are two recent
bibliographies of Elizabeth Bentley, the “Red Spy Queen,” as well as case stud-
ies of Judith Coplon and Harry Dexter White. Ethel Rosenberg’s granddaugh-
ter has recently produced a film biography of her grandmother. The Hiss andBIBLIOGRAPHY• 33106-313 z11 Bib.qxd 7/27/06 8:07 AM Page 331