Western democracies and the Soviet Union.The Soviet security and
intelligence services played critical offensive and defensive roles in
that struggle: they were the sword and shield of the Communist
Party. The security services, beginning with the Cheka, pursued
enemies of the regime at home and abroad. The Cheka and its suc-
cessors, as well as the GRU, provided four generations of party pol-
icy makers with intelligence and the capability of conducting active
measuresagainst all opponents.
Marxist–Leninist ideology was a key motivationin the recruitment
of the first generation of Soviet intelligence officers and their agents.
Agents like Kim Philbysaw themselves in a romantic battle for the
future. Philby compared himself in later life to English Catholics who
in the 16th century decided to serve Spain against their own country
in the wars of the Reformation. But ideology was a double-edged
sword in the Cold War: when KGBand GRU officers like Petr
Popovand Dmitry Polyakov rejected their country’s official ideol-
ogy, they looked for a replacement.
The greatest impact of Cold War ideology was not, however, on
the intelligence services. The Soviet political leadership—the Central
Committee and the Politburo of the Communist Party—tended to be
blinded by Marxist–Leninist thought. The decision to control aca-
demic thought through First Sectionsand Glavlit, which limited ac-
cess to foreign books and other publications, delayed the Soviet
Union’s entrance into the second industrial revolution and its acqui-
sition of computer technology. The decision to prosecute religious
and political dissidentsin the name of ideological conformity under-
cut Moscow’s desire for legitimacy and commercial ties.COLLECTIVIZATION. The decision by the Soviet leadership to
force the Soviet peasantry into collective and state farms between
1929 and 1932 was executed at a terrible price. More than half the
farm animals in the country were killed by peasants refusing to sur-
render their livestock. The human cost was far more horrible: al-
most a million peasant households, perhaps as many as 7 million
people, were deportedto Siberia and Central Asia, where many
perished. Moreover, 5–7 million died in famines that followed col-
lectivization in the early 1930s. The total human cost to the peas-
antry may have reached 10 million dead. It was the greatest peace-50 •COLLECTIVIZATION06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 50