Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

Russian historians since Stalin’s death have sought to explain this

monumental intelligence failure. Stalin, who acted as his own intelli-

gence analyst, was clearly fooled by German disinformation, which

played on his distrust of the British leadership. The Soviet leader also

wanted at all costs to delay a general war with Hitler’s Germany un-

til 1942, when the Red Army would have more fully recovered from

the purges of the 1930s. Moreover, Stalin believed that he understood

Hitler better than any of his intelligence officers or their agents; he

thought Hitler would not move against his country in 1941, and he in-

formed his military and intelligence chiefs that if Hitler did strike, the

offensive would be a local one to force the Soviet Union to make

diplomatic concessions. The cost of Stalin’s dogmatism was the de-

struction of several Soviet armies clustered on the Soviet–German

border and the death of millions of Soviet soldiers. According to So-

viet records, in the first 10 weeks of the war, more than 2.5 million

Soviet soldiers were killed or taken prisoner.

BATTLE OF MOSCOW. The first—and most important—Soviet vic-

tory over the German military and intelligence services during World

War IIcame in the Battle of Moscow in the late fall and early win-

ter of 1941. By October 1941, German troops were approaching

Moscow on two axes, and on 16 October most of the government

ministries and foreign embassies were evacuated to Kuibyshev

(Samara). This evacuation set off an orgy of looting that lasted for

48–72 hours. Had Joseph Stalinnot been able to marshal the NKVD

and Red Army resources, it is likely that Moscow would have fallen

and the war would have had a different outcome.

The NKVD’s first task was to make sure the evacuation went off

as planned. Lenin’s corpse was removed by train to Tyumen in west-

ern Siberia, and the secret police began to mine the most important

government buildings. A new NKVD special forces group was cre-

ated called OMSBON (Otdelniy motorstrelkovoi brigadi osobovo

naznacheniya, or the Independent Motorized Rifle Brigade for Spe-

cial Operations) to supervise the defense of the capital and organize

partisandetachments in the enemy’s rear. One of the battalion com-

manders of the brigade, Stanislav Vaupshasov, took his unit hun-

dreds of miles into the enemy’s rear before returning to his base three

months later. OMSBON mined more than 70 kilometers of highways

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