Rosenberg cases remain the subject of polemics and histories. The collection of
Venona messages released in 1995—more than 2,400 decrypted and partially
decrypted Soviet intelligence messages—indicates that Moscow believed most
of the infamous Cold War spies were in fact Soviet agents. Some historians
have continued to challenge this judgment, and it seems likely that the debate
over Soviet espionage will continue.
Post–Cold War memoirs by former Soviet intelligence officers, diplomats,
and politicians have added both heat and light to a history of the Soviet Union.
There are books by Beria’s son as well as a number of men and women who
survived the court of Stalin. Most of these books, while informative, contain
some factual errors and do not cite specific documents to allow scholars to
check specific claims. There are a number of good books by former Soviet in-
telligence officers in English and Russian. The FSB website (www.fsb.ru.) con-
tains an excellent annotated bibliography for the scholar of Soviet intelligence.
Moreover, Christopher Andrews has written several monographs and two gen-
eral histories of the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations using recent Soviet
defectors. Nevertheless, we still lack a good institutional history of the GRU,
good biographies of Viktor Abakumov, Yuri Andropov, Aleksandr Shelepin,
and other important security chiefs, as well as a new look at Soviet national se-
curity decision-making.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of excellent websites have
appeared on the Soviet intelligence and security services. The Federation of
Atomic Scientists Intelligence Research Program (www.fas.org/irp) provides
useful though dated information on the Russian services. The Russian intelli-
gence services have their own “informal” website (www.agentura.com) in
both Russian and English. Essays in the Russian language on this website pro-
vide detailed information on the organization, chronology, and personnel of
the Soviet and post-Soviet intelligence and security services. Both the Rus-
sian counterintelligence and foreign intelligence services have their own web-
sites (www.fsb.ru.gov and http://www.svr.ru.gov), which contain sanitized biogra-
phies of heroes and agents and accounts of operations against enemies foreign
and domestic.
A website with detailed and accurate information on the Stalinist services is
managed by Memorial, a Russian human rights organization (www.memorial
.com). One entire section of this website is given over to a detailed history of
the NKVD between 1934 and 1941, “Kto Rukovoditel NKVD, 1934–1941”
(Who Led the NKVD, 1934–1941). The section includes detailed bibliogra-
phies of more than 500 senior security and intelligence officers. There are a
number of good English, German, Polish, and Russian websites on forced la-
bor camps: among the more interesting are the Open Societies Archives on the
gulag system (www.osa.ceu.ru/gulag), a German site on the northern camps
(www.solovki.org), and the Katyn website (www.electronicmuseum.ca/332 •BIBLIOGRAPHY06-313 z11 Bib.qxd 7/27/06 8:07 AM Page 332