By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Post-Soviet States Recognize Russia’s Suzerainty

Bolshevik rule was born in a crucible of internal and foreign intrigue. The Red Army fought a civil war against a coalition of ‘White’ anti-communist forces, white being a color traditionally associated with the Romanov tsars. They scythed down pro-monarchists (‘former people’), as well as members of the bourgeoisie (‘class enemies’), saboteurs (‘fifth columnists’), ‘wreckers’ (a loose term, effectively meaning all who opposed the Bolsheviks), and spies, some sponsored by Western powers – but not as many as Lenin believed. The ensuing Russian Civil War resulted in the deaths of approximately 3.3 million people. The war, and foreign subversion in it, would shape the thinking of successive Soviet leaders and their secret police. By 1922, the Red Army was victorious. The Russian Soviet Republic became the centerpiece of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), eventually a federation of sixteen republics carved out of the former tsarist empire, stretching from the Arctic north to subtropical southern areas in the Caucasus. The Bolsheviks would eventually rule over and terrorize six hundred million people.

The Bolsheviks faced armed Western hostilities. The Western Entente powers overtly intervened in Russia to try to strangle Lenin’s regime at birth. In March 1918, an advance party of British marines landed at Archangel, on the White Sea, some seven hundred miles northeast of Petrograd. The invasion, which included American warships, was enthusiastically and publicly backed by Britain’s wartime first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. The landing party was part of an Allied wartime strategy to destroy the Bolshevik regime, restore the wartime eastern front, and thus relieve pressure on the Allies on the western front. Scholars have described US intervention in the Russian Civil War as a secret war against Bolshevism and even the ‘first Cold War.’ There is much to this. As well as facing overt military intervention, the Cheka also uncovered covert Western plots to unseat the Bolsheviks, some initiated by Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6 (then known as MI1c). These plots by the British, Americans, and other Western powers confirmed Lenin’s worst fears. Evidence of Western secret conspiracies left a burning impression in the hallways of the Kremlin that lasted throughout the Soviet era. Its echoes still reverberate there today.4 According to later Cheka valorizations, one British operation, known as the envoy's plot, known as the envoy's plot, was part of a clandestine conspiracy by Western powers to depose the Bolsheviks. The truth was different. MI6’s archives reveal that it had little intelligence from inside Russia in the first chaotic months of Bolshevik rule. Even if it wanted to, it would have been unable to orchestrate a plot to depose Lenin. MI6 in Russia relied on adventurers, con men, and informants, some of whom were left-leaning journalists like Arthur Ransome (known as ‘S76’), later the author of Swallows and Amazons. His mistress was Trotsky’s secretary. Most of his ‘intelligence’ was devoted to getting her out of Russia. There was, then, a vast gulf between the intentions and capabilities of Western services when it came to spying on and subverting the Bolsheviks. Soviet leaders from Lenin onwards never grasped that. In August 1918, the Cheka stormed the British embassy in Petrograd in retaliation. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a hard-drinking Scottish thirty-three-year-old diplomat associated with the plot, was imprisoned at the Lubyanka for a time. A British MI6 operative, Sidney Reilly (code-named ‘ST1’), a womanizer and philanderer, the so-called ‘ace of spies,’ escaped in disguise. Rumors have rumbled ever since that Reilly, who seems originally to have come from Ukraine, was a Soviet Cheka agent. It is impossible to know; the documentary evidence is incomplete. But that story seems too clever by half.5

For eighteen months, Britain and Soviet Russia were effectively at war, as Britain intervened militarily, supporting White Russian forces. In Lenin’s mind, with justification, Soviet Russia was a ‘fortress besieged by world capital,’ which conjured up memories of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 and European intervention in the Crimea in the 1850s. The Bolsheviks could justifiably call themselves the defenders of Russia against foreigners. In reality, however, there was no unified Western conspiracy against the Bolsheviks. If there had been, the regime surely would have lost the civil war. Those Western troops that did intervene militarily in support of White Russian forces were too few to affect the war’s outcome, but numerous enough to convince the Bolsheviks that they were defending the regime against Western imperialism.6

As the Bolsheviks fought for their survival during the Russian Civil War, the Cheka began to send undercover officers and agents behind enemy lines. By June 1919, the number of these so-called illegals was large enough to justify their department within the Cheka. In December 1920, on the third anniversary of its founding, the Cheka created a new foreign intelligence department, called the INO, to direct all operations beyond Soviet borders. The INO, led by Artur Artuzov, grew from 70 men in 1922 to 122 seven years later, of whom 62 served abroad.9

As the Soviet government established commercial relations with Western powers, it used trade offices to open illegal intelligence stations in foreign capitals, by default operating without diplomatic protection. They were headed by a rezident (head of the station). In the early years, such residencies (rezidentury) served both the Cheka and Soviet Red Army military intelligence (later known as the GRU), though later they would separate.10

Despite their later protests to the contrary, local communist parties, and the Comintern itself, facilitated Soviet espionage. The Comintern provided technical support, safe houses, and courier networks, and orchestrated the illicit transfer of funds for Soviet agents overseas, as well as paying secret subsidies to communist parties in the West.11

The basic structure of Soviet foreign intelligence, with rezidentury overseas reporting to headquarters in Moscow – called ‘the Centre,’ known to readers of John le Carré as Moscow Centre – was thus established in the early years of the Soviet Union. It would remain in place throughout the seven decades of its existence. Even after the Cheka could create legal rezidentury, with the opening of diplomatic relations, it continued to operate illegally. They were cut off from a Soviet embassy, out in the cold, who worked without the benefit of diplomatic protection. This meant that if they were caught, they could be arrested, as opposed to expelled, which diplomatic cover afforded. Illegals were, and still are, viewed as Russia’s foreign intelligence elite; they use complicated codes, hollow coins, hidden deposits (‘dead drops’), and the like. The INO would later be transformed into the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, known as the First Chief Directorate.12

Vladimir Putin, the former intelligence officer who rules Russia as president, is a small man, at five foot seven. But his ambition is unlimited. Whatever his title, he has ruled Russia since 1999, the longest reign of a Kremlin leader since Stalin. His early KGB career has shaped his worldview and his subsequent rule. He has used his security and intelligence agencies to turn Russia into a great power again, correcting what he sees as the catastrophe that befell Russia when the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991. He is trying to force a new European security arrangement. Like Stalin after 1945, Putin’s strategy has been dominated by fear of Western encirclement and subversion. His policy has been to ‘contain’ perceived Western subversion, which in practice means undertaking military and hybrid warfare against those he sees as preventing Russia’s greatness: NATO, the EU, and the United States.

Putin’s election meddling in the United States in 2016, and beyond, was part of his larger escalation to reclaim Russia’s past and to seek revenge against his enemies – impose his rule on Russia’s ‘near abroad,’ countries in the previous Soviet ‘sphere of influence,’ the former Soviet bloc, silence his critics, and smite capitalist democracies in the West. Putin’s increasing tyranny, however, is not a straightforward continuum of the Soviet past. In terms of intelligence, he has updated Soviet spycraft for the new digital world, weaponizing social media to spread disinformation. Unlike past Soviet leaders, who had the Politburo, he treats Russia as his fiefdom, which he rules with a small number of sycophantic oligarchs and siloviki. Under Putin, Russia has become a Mafia state, as he married its intelligence services with organized crime. His obsession with recreating the Soviet past, seen in his occupation of Georgian territories in 2008 and his annexation of Crimea in 2014, reached its apotheosis with his bloody military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

‘We’re in the middle of a cyber war,’ claimed the US deputy secretary of defense, John Hamre. This was in 1999, not 2019. For about three years, Russian hackers had breached some of the most sensitive computer networks in the US federal government, NASA, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and a dozen US universities and other research centers. It was a colossal security failure. Pentagon officials described the high-tech espionage as a ‘state-sponsored Russian intelligence effort to get US technology.’ It was, they said, ‘sophisticated, patient and persistent.’

The hackers were only identified by accident, as part of a US simulation game against its systems. After a detailed forensic investigation, NSA experts discovered that the hackers had stolen passwords, logged in, and covered their tracks by erasing the logs. They gained access denied to all but the most senior administrators. They created back doors so they could enter and leave largely without a trace, stealing information at will. Some federal employees saw files disappearing in real time before their eyes. NSA and Pentagon officials played cat and mouse with the hackers in the systems. They were eventually identified as Russian – for one thing, their keystrokes were spelled in Cyrillic, and they worked from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Moscow time. They were traced to sites linked to Russia’s Academy of Sciences, the old stamping ground of former SVR director Yevgeny Primakov.1

Russia’s unprecedented cyber hack into US federal computer systems, detected in 1999, and code-named MOONLIGHT MAZE, was a wake-up call to the new intelligence war being waged by the Kremlin. Or at least it should have been. Russia was conducting espionage by new means, across networks, and Pentagon officials feared they might move from espionage, observing data, to sabotage – changing it. The volume of information stolen was so great that, if printed out and stacked up, it would reach as high as the towering obelisk of the Washington Monument.

It is still an active US investigation, as data analysts unpack the scope of secrets stolen from US networks. It is equally difficult to establish what the US government’s corresponding internet capabilities at that time were, as details are opaque.

Russia’s hack into the US government in 1999 revealed significant differences between the uses of the internet in Russia and the United States.

Silicon Valley conceived of the internet as a positive advance toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The web supported free speech and offered its architects and corporate users the chance to earn vast sums of money. The road to utopia went through Silicon Valley. In Russia, the opposite was true. The internet was used to create a dystopia. Russia’s security and intelligence services – the FSB, SVR, GU, and FAPSI – viewed as a means for domestic surveillance, repression, censorship, bribery, blackmail, foreign espionage, and the trafficking of narcotics, people, and sex. Russia’s ‘red web’ offered new opportunities for transnational organized crime and foreign intelligence, which fused under Vladimir Putin.

Pundits who claim that Putin has gone crazy during Covid isolation overlook the almost ‘maniacal hatred’ that he has harbored against the US since the early 1990s.

Vladimir Putin, who compared himself to Peter the Great, is determined to shape the future to look like his past version. 

He laid out this mission in a 5,000-word treatise published in July 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. In it, Putin insisted that Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians are all descendants of the Rus, an ancient people who settled the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas. He asserted that they are bound together by a familiar territory and language and the Orthodox Christian faith. In his version of history, Ukraine has never been sovereign, except for a few historical interludes when it tried - and failed - to become an independent state. Putin wrote that “Russia was robbed” of core territory when the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Union in 1922 and established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In his telling, since the Soviet collapse, the West has used Ukraine as a platform to threaten Russia and supported the rise of “neo-Nazis” there. Putin’s essay, which every soldier sent to Ukraine is supposed to carry, ends by asserting that Ukraine can only be sovereign in partnership with Russia. “We are one people,” Putin declares.

This treatise, and similar public statements, make clear that Putin wants a world where Russia presides over a new Slavic union composed of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and perhaps the northern part of Kazakhstan (which is heavily Slavic) – and where all the other post-Soviet states recognize Russia’s suzerainty. He also wants the West and the global South to accept Russia’s predominant regional role in Eurasia. This is more than a sphere of influence; it is a sphere of control, with a mixture of outright territorial reintegration in some places and dominance in the security, political, and economic spheres of others.

Putin is serious about achieving these goals by military and nonmilitary means. He has been at war in Ukraine since early 2014, when Russian forces, wearing green combat uniforms stripped of their insignia, took control of Crimea in a stealth operation. Covert operations swiftly followed this attack to stir up civil disorder in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions close to the Russian border. Russia fomented revolt in the Donbas region and sparked an armed conflict that resulted in 14,000 deaths over the next eight years. All these regions have been targeted for assault and conquest since February 2022. Similarly, in Belarus, Putin took advantage of internal crises and large-scale protests in 2020 and 2021 to constrain its leader’s room for maneuver. Belarus, a so-called union arrangement with Russia, was then used as the staging ground for the “special military operation” against Ukraine.

The Russian president has made it clear that his country is a revisionist power. In a March 2014 speech marking Crimea’s annexation, Putin told the West that Russia was on the offensive in staking out its regional claims. To make this task easier, Putin later took steps that he believed would sanction-proof the Russian economy by reducing its exposure to the United States and Europe, including pushing for the domestic production of critical goods. He stepped up repression, conducting targeted assassinations and imprisoning opponents. He carried out disinformation operations and tried to bribe and blackmail politicians abroad. Putin has constantly adapted his tactics to mitigate Western responses - to the point that on the eve of his invasion, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, he bragged to some European interlocutors that he had “bought the West.” There was nothing, he thought, that the United States or Europe could do to constrain him.

 

 

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