Читать книгу The Spy Who Changed History - Svetlana Lokhova - Страница 14

The Communist victors of the Russian Civil War inherited a ruined and backward land surrounded by enemies. By 1921, the level of the country’s economic activity had plunged to less than a quarter of that in 1913. Agricultural production had tumbled to a point where it was insufficient for the country to feed itself. The Communists were big dreamers, but their initial grandiose projects to modernise the transport network at a stroke by buying thousands of railway locomotives abroad and carrying out a national electrification scheme were soon scaled back when no foreign nation would advance them credit. In frustration, the leadership turned once more to their political vanguard and gave them a new task. The country had to be rebuilt and modernised and the Party’s elite was to bring to the factory floor the energy, drive and commitment responsible for the successes on the battlefield. Men like Shumovsky left the Red Army to lead the drive for industrialisation. The zealots were assigned to central roles in industry to replace the old, tired management teams.

In 1925, Shumovsky transferred to the military reserves and was assigned the pivotal role as head investigator of the armaments industry on behalf of the People’s Commissariat (Ministry) of Finance.¹ War with the capitalists was expected to break out at any time and the armaments industry needed to be ready. Shumovsky brought his military experience and Party loyalty to the role. On his factory visits, he saw the dire state of Soviet industry, which after decades of neglect was suffering from an absence of training, underinvestment, and a lack of leadership. The plants he toured struggled under the burden of pre-war machinery that was worn out and outmoded. As a result, the end product was of poor quality and frequently obsolete. Across the armaments industry, productivity was unacceptably low, and this was not merely because of the quality of the machinery. Labour relations in the workers’ state were a complicated and delicate issue. Factory directors, former Tsarist middle managers of questionable loyalty and motivation, lacked authority on the factory floor as workers did not respect their orders. Foreign consultant engineers brought in to advise on improvements despaired at Russian working practices. They noticed large numbers of Soviet workers disappearing on endless smoking breaks. Female workers often carried out heavy manual work in factories, while the men sat idly watching.

Early, piecemeal efforts to improve matters had failed. With their scant foreign exchange reserves, the Soviets had bought small amounts of expensive new manufacturing machinery abroad, which the unskilled Russian workers promptly ruined. Shumovsky noted that most of the new machinery sat unused in the factories, either uninstalled or broken. Spare parts were never on hand, nor were there engineers trained to conduct the regular maintenance required to service the machines. Faulty installation of new equipment was often to blame for the poor quality of the final output. In their current state, Soviet arms factories were incapable of making precisely engineered products even in small numbers. Above all, a chronic shortage of young engineers versed in the latest techniques and methods held the country back. Owing to a decade of war and strife, none had been trained. The armaments industry was in no state to support even a small-scale conflict. Shumovsky’s reports to the Finance Commissariat detailed his dire conclusions. The reports matched similar ones written by the other inspectors, visiting factories across the whole of Soviet industry. The flow of bad news exacerbated a building sense of crisis.

The leadership was aware of the desperate issues and, under an ailing Lenin, a gradualist approach had been adopted. Lenin was a deep admirer of US invention, if not of its capitalist system. He spent considerable time in his office in Moscow’s Kremlin flicking through his subscription copy of the magazine Scientific American, the Advocate of Industry and Enterprise. The US monthly showcased all the latest technological inventions and innovations. Lenin wanted to secure the technology to help build Communism. On the day before his death, 20 January 1924, the leader of the world’s first proletarian state passed the day watching a film about the workings of a tractor assembly line in a Ford factory.² While Lenin believed that in the American factory, owners used machinery as a means of oppressing the working class, in the USSR the same US-made technology and modern production methods would help build Communism. Introducing modern machines together with efficiency measures in Soviet factories would eventually allow workers greater free time and higher living standards.

Lenin hoped that greedy American businessmen would sell his government everything it wanted, even if the Soviets’ ultimate goal was the destruction of capitalism. He was said to have joked that if he announced the execution of all capitalists, one would sell him the rope to hang the others. As he predicted, the US was intent on selling its technology and had the best on sale, but only for hard cash. Lenin’s plans were expansive, but in the absence of credit he could buy only a limited number of US-built tractors, other advanced farm machinery and some factory equipment. In his business dealings, Lenin favoured market leaders, the likes of International Harvester and Ford, as his trusted partners. When the money ran out, which it soon did, he sold the nation’s treasures. The Kremlin’s famous bells had to be saved by the curator of its museum from being auctioned off abroad.³ It was not only the crown jewels that were given away; in a sign of the Russians’ commercial naivety, Trotsky negotiated to exchange the rights to exploit all Siberia’s vast mineral resources for the next seventy years to one American company for a pittance.⁴ The Communists had returned to the Tsar’s method of offering long-term concessions to foreign investors. In desperation, the Soviets even resorted to barter; to its complete bemusement, the Douglas Aircraft Company was offered payment for an aircraft in oriental rugs and antiques. For US entrepreneurs venturing into the USSR, the experience of doing business under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was disappointing. Once profits began to flow from their Soviet concessions, the intrepid US investors complained that they were subject to unexpected taxes or the sequestration of assets. For the Russians, the results of the programme were all too slow and involved tolerating a wild free market, risking social chaos at the hands of a class of newly rich ‘NEP men’, Russian capitalists who thrived by exploiting others.

The exchange of American ideas for Soviet cash or concessions should have been mutually beneficial. But ideological issues sharply divided the two societies. There were those in the US who flatly opposed doing any business with the Russians. They believed that under direct orders from Moscow, the US Communist Party members were secretly working to destroy the whole American way of life. They argued that if Communism were to spread to the US, it would mean taking away religious freedom, private property and access to justice. To the Communist way of thinking, America was a society built entirely on unfairness and the institutionalised mass exploitation of the working class for the benefit and enrichment of a few. The greatest success of the US had been to mobilise mass consumer demand. The American working class was not political and aspired to a life of consumption that the Soviets viewed as a shallow, material existence. Every Soviet visitor to America would comment on the extraordinary proliferation of advertising hoardings cajoling consumers to purchase the latest model of automobile, Coca-Cola or cigarettes.

The key barrier to greater trade was the US government’s implacable opposition to lending the Communists any money while Russia owed vast sums to US investors. Assets granted to American businessmen by the Tsar had after the revolution been expropriated by the Communists, who refused to pay any compensation. With the debt issue unresolved, the Soviets could not legitimately buy technology in the quantities they required. So they adopted a roundabout approach, which US manufacturers learned about the hard way: the unlicensed reproduction of foreign technology. Foreign cars, tractors, and other machinery exhibited at Soviet trade fairs were examined and copied. Henry Ford’s deputy, Charles Sorensen, on a visit spotted near-perfect copies of Fordson tractors manufactured under the name Red Putilovets.⁵ The Soviet design originated from technical drawings based on a dismantled American vehicle. Following the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, the first American ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, would be plagued by constant complaints from US firms about infringement of their patents.

It was not just mechanised harvesters and cotton pickers that Lenin imported to transform backward Russia, he adopted advanced US management techniques. The Soviet Union introduced the Taylor system of time and motion study – a technique to improve productivity – to encourage the scientific efficiency of labour in its factories. To much puzzlement, an army of officials armed with clipboards, stopwatches and tape measures appeared on factory floors. Russian workers were unimpressed and did not want to be timed, measured and subjected to flip charts. New technology from abroad, augmented with Gantt organisation charts – which broke down processes into their component stages – was supposed to lead to a rapid reduction in working hours and improvement in the quality of workers’ lives. It didn’t.

In a more successful step, the Soviets translated Henry Ford’s works into Russian as essential reading for factory managers. There was an official government campaign to ‘Do It the Ford Way’.⁶ By such innovative manufacturing techniques of mass production, the United States had overtaken the British Empire as the world’s number-one economy, helped in part by the Great War. Imported to the Soviet Union, these same techniques were expected to bring about the inevitable triumph of socialism. Capitalism was a smart, inventive beast. American business, as well as Marx, had much to teach those embarking on the sure road to socialism. The US had met and defeated the same challenges that confronted the newly formed Soviet Union, including how to industrialise with only untrained, unskilled workers and few managers. The US was the teacher, the model of mass production, an urbanised country boasting the highest living standards in the world. Copying US techniques and methods would turn Russia’s army of uneducated, conservatively minded peasants, tied to their traditions and land, into a progressive communist urban proletariat.

From the 1920s, hundreds of Soviet engineers were sent abroad annually on short foreign trips for hands-on training with new technology. They were instructed to gather as much helpful information as they could on their visits. It was not a difficult task in the US. One engineer described his surprise at the openness of the Americans he met. While visiting a factory, he and his comrades would be given unhindered access to a broad range of technical data. They could make sketches and take copies back to the USSR free of charge. Their host company did not disclose its patented secrets, but everything else was considered advertising for the firm. From such early trips, the Soviet leaders gained the idea that America, more than any other country, was wide open to industrial espionage.

• • •

In October 1922, just a few weeks after the Reds’ victory in the Russian Civil War, an ex-Russian Orthodox seminary student and his close friend, a former Jesuit student, set in motion a more radical long-term reconstruction of Russia. In their frequent correspondence, they planned a transformation of their backward land, now shattered and starved by three wars and revolutions in short order.⁷ The lapsed Catholic, ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky (his nickname arose on account of his ruthlessness and devotion to the Communist cause), was the founder of the Soviet security services. The former seminary pupil, Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Party, was on his path to become Lenin’s heir. In 1925, Dzerzhinsky became the first and only known intelligence chief to be given simultaneously a major economic post as Chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. The two friends could discuss almost anything.

In their shared desire for rapid change, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin emphasised the use of intelligence as one tool to tackle the economic crisis. Both men had a fine appreciation of the value of espionage: Dzerzhinsky was a spymaster, and his friend the most spied-upon man in history. Dzerzhinsky had a pivotal role in identifying the potential contribution of both Western technology and scientific and technological (S&T) espionage to the modernisation of the Soviet economy. He identified America, the world’s number-one technical innovator and leading industrial power, as a role model and target. Dzerzhinsky studied and grew to admire American industrial methods – most surprisingly those of the world’s first billionaire, Henry Ford, the pioneer of the industrial practices from which Dzerzhinsky believed the backward Soviet economy needed to learn. Dzerzhinsky wrote in 1925: ‘It is essential to engage in the study of Ford’s methods and their adoption in practice … Perhaps it would be worth recruiting from abroad practitioners and organisers of Fordism.’⁸ Dzerzhinsky’s ideas and recommendations were incorporated into the Five-Year Plans – Stalin’s centrepiece programmes to industrialise the Soviet Union at breakneck pace. Ford’s top architect, Albert Kahn, was recruited to design and build Stalin’s giant dual military/civilian-use factories along Ford lines, and was responsible for establishing automotive, tractor and tank facilities in the Soviet Union.

On assuming control after the death of Lenin, the new leadership decided enough was enough and immediately galvanised the entire efforts of the state to build up heavy industry. Amid enormous publicity, Stalin announced the first Five-Year Plan in 1928. The first and second Five-Year Plans proposed the creation of new capital-intensive aviation, automobile, tractor and chemical industries. Stalin’s plans were on a truly grand scale and required building over 1,500 modern factories between 1928 and 1933; yet he understood that the Soviet Union’s early attempts at going it alone to develop industry without adequate foreign help had failed. The most notable example was the first project at the vast Magnitogorsk metallurgical plant. The inexperienced Soviets had tried to build the plant at breakneck speed, cutting corners; as a consequence, urgent and extensive repairs to the twin blast furnaces were needed just days after first starting them. The production of steel was pushed back years. The lesson of such failures was that the design and building of large, technically complex industrial facilities was beyond Soviet capabilities without significant long-term foreign expertise. The help of the West was required and was sought once more – this time in the new form of fee-based technical assistance programmes, not long-term concessions. Stalin’s proposed commercial terms were attractive to foreign companies, as they were for a limited period and so did not require risky long-term investment. During the Great Depression of the 1930s Western companies desperately needed large orders, allowing the Soviet Union the opportunity to acquire advanced technology and technical skills quickly and cheaply.

Under the standard terms of the contract, a foreign firm would provide the Russians with a complete description of a project including specifications of equipment, machines and mechanisms. They transferred all the technological secrets, including patents, and sent representatives to the USSR to supervise the construction and start-up of the facility. The Russians had to compensate the foreign company for the cost of manufacturing drawings, business trips and the work of its employees in the USSR and provide the necessary living conditions. The international company would receive a fixed profit as a percentage of the estimated cost of the work. The contribution of US companies and engineers to the success of the first Five-Year Plan was enormous, yet it is generally forgotten, especially in America. Around 1,700 US engineers entered Russia in 1929 to work on major industrial projects.

The plan to work closely with the US had its genesis in September 1927, when Stalin set up a permanent commission of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to manage technical and scientific relations with the United States. He stated: ‘It is clear to me that the USA has more grounds for extensive business relations with the Soviet Union than any other country.’⁹

The vast new industrial capacity developed under supervision of US engineers boosted the economy. But most of them left in 1932–3 when hard currency ran out, sent home unless they would accept payment in roubles. From 1931 the USSR could only afford to import essential US technology. To survive on Stalin’s route to the future, there was a need for elite engineers able to invent local solutions. The Soviet government had sought from its international partner an efficient balance of trade and a long-term supply of credit, but the US refused. On 25 August 1931, Stalin declared:

Because of the foreign exchange difficulties and unacceptable conditions for loans in America, I demand an end to all business contracts with the United States. Instead we must seek every opportunity to break existing agreements. In the future all orders will be placed with European or Soviet factories, making no exceptions, even for the most important construction projects.¹⁰

The world’s first Communist state had spent so heavily in the first stage of the investment plan that it had run out of money and credit. Turning the Soviet Union from a country of peasants with wooden ploughs into a modern industrial society was proving prohibitively expensive. Despite Stalin’s exploitation to the full of American commercial terms, he now needed to rely on industrial espionage. The Soviets pressed on with their plans, but with no cash to pay engineers from abroad, they were required to use their own experts, helped by the information provided by their intelligence gathering abroad.

Until the money ran out, every large Soviet enterprise built in this period received most of its equipment from American or European engineering companies. As diplomatic relations between the US and the USSR improved, the floodgates had opened to facilitate the transfer of skills and technology to Russia. All Soviet commercial activities in the United States were overseen by its single agency, the American Trading Corporation or AMTORG, established in 1924 with offices on New York’s Fifth Avenue, in Moscow and eventually in several other cities in the USSR and the USA. Although nominally independent of the state, which was a requirement if it were to obtain legal status to trade in the United States, it was the sole Soviet reseller as well as being tasked with providing information on all aspects of US business. All commercial deals and contracts with American firms, experts, and payment for their services went via AMTORG. It would develop a well-deserved reputation as a veritable nest of spies, its employees under constant US counter-intelligence surveillance.

• • •

The Five-Year Plans had three interrelated goals: to build an industrialised society, to create an educated population, and to ensure that the Soviet Union had the means to defend itself in the event of an attack. Stalin spoke of the imperative to modernise the Soviet economy as fast as possible to meet the imminent imperialist threat. A substantial challenge for Stalin’s Russia was how to protect its vast land borders and natural resources. After invasions from the Polish King Stephen Báthory,^fn1 the Swedish King Gustav Adolphus,^fn2 the French Emperor Napoleon^fn3 and the German Kaiser, followed by the Allied intervention, the lesson of history was that the Soviet army must be equipped with the most up-to-date weapons to deter further invaders. Dzerzhinsky had analysed the Tsar’s defeat. Iron Felix’s assessment of Russia’s performance in the Great War was strikingly similar to that of the current Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki), whose official history mocks the naivety of the Tsarist government in embarking on a modern war without the technical resources to equip its armed forces.¹¹ Dzerzhinsky’s studies for the Supreme Economic Council in 1924–5 emphasised that the reason for defeat lay in the dependence of the Tsarist war effort on imports of arms and munitions from its Western allies. In 1914, Russia could not even manufacture sufficient rifles for its army. It was not until 1916, thanks largely to British finance and US industrial expertise, that Russia developed a somewhat more adequate munitions industry. The Western allies had rescued the wartime Tsarist arms industry for their own war aims but were unlikely to help Communist Russia. Like defeated Germany, the Soviet Union was treated as a pariah state.

The British Empire was seen as the likely enemy. Stalin was privately convinced, as Dzerzhinsky had been, that the modernisation of the Soviet defence industry also required S&T from the West – first and foremost from the United States. And, since Stalin believed that war with the imperialist powers was inevitable, S&T was therefore a top priority. As he was to declare in February 1931 in a speech to industrial managers: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.’¹² Though he did not realise at the time who the most dangerous potential enemy would be, the forecast was to prove prophetic.

Given the urgency, Stalin turned to his intelligence service. His library gives an extraordinary glimpse into his thinking as he marked up the passages of his reading that he found most insightful. Stalin’s deep interest in developing S&T operations in the United States grew from a fascination with US and British writing on espionage. Dzerzhinsky’s death in 1926 seems to have slowed the development of S&T, but only for a short while. In 1929, the autodidactic Stalin devoured the informative book Spy and Counterspy: The Development of Modern Espionage by the US writer Richard Wilmer Rowan.¹³ Stalin’s copy survives in his archive, with notes scrawled in the margin. It was from this US book that he learned how to direct and organise intelligence-gathering operations. He was attracted to the idea of using spies, not least because, as Rowan argued, they were inexpensive and efficient. In Rowan he had found the solution to his problem of how to acquire the best technology without paying for it. But he needed extraordinary men and women to become his spies.

Stalin’s copy of the Russian translation of Rowan’s Spy and Counterspy – special edition for Soviet Military Intelligence. Stalin’s note says, ‘Abridged translation from English’

Shumovsky’s reports had highlighted the extensive problems of the armaments industry. Given the perceived threat, the country had to develop its industrial capability to sustain a prolonged fight. Without modern factories to manufacture arms, Russia remained vulnerable to a foreign invasion. Some modernisation of the armed forces was achieved thanks to secret Soviet-German military cooperation^fn4 during the 1920s, but not enough. Both Germany and Russia believed, correctly, that the other was spying on them. Their shared distrust of the well-armed buffer state of Poland did not provide enough common ground to make them real allies. Moreover, the Germans were concerned that the Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International) interfered, sometimes violently, in their domestic politics. The Soviets, on the other hand, were convinced by the evidence that they were only gaining access to obsolete German military equipment, not the latest and best.¹⁴ The issues were greatest in aviation. Dzerzhinsky highlighted to Stalin a joint venture to design and build aircraft with the German manufacturers Junkers in Moscow as a particular failure. The Soviet Union urgently needed a modern air force and Germany could not provide one. The United States, not Germany, Dzerzhinsky convinced Stalin, held the key to the future of the Soviet aircraft industry. But they also knew that only some American industrial expertise could be openly obtained through commercial contracts. In 1925, the Foreign Department (INO) of the NKVD adopted S&T operations as one of its objectives for the first time.¹⁵ The US aviation industry was one of the key targets. Shumovsky and his cohort were the men that Stalin would come to rely on to help fulfil his dreams to industrialise and defend his country.

• • •

Stalin’s Russia was the first country in the world to try to identify each year its ablest, most loyal workers to train as scientists and engineers. Some of these elite scientists and engineers would later become spies. As part of the Five-Year Plan launched in 1928, a thousand of the best and brightest young Communist Party members (the parttysiachniki) were selected to receive the finest higher education on offer in Moscow and Leningrad. The Party had identified Shumovsky during his three years’ work at the Ministry of Finance as a potential future leader, a Party cadre. Already a qualified pilot, he was one of a very few selected to study aeronautics at the elite Bauman Institute, where his Professor of Aerodynamics was none other than Andrey Tupolev, Russia’s most famous aircraft designer. Teacher and pupil became fast friends. Towards the end of his course at the Bauman, Shumovsky was invited by the local Committee of the Communist Party to a meeting at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD, that would once again change the course of his life. At this meeting, he met Stanislav Messing, the head of INO, and the legendary Artur Artuzov, then the deputy head.

As the foreign intelligence arm of the NKVD, INO was in 1930 tiny and poorly funded by the modern standards of espionage agencies. It deployed only ninety-four agents abroad to cover vast areas of responsibility and geography. The proposed addition of seventy-five new intelligence assets in the United States, working for up to three years, was a massive coup.¹⁶ It was the largest and most expensive operation ever attempted by INO and required close cooperation with Military Intelligence, called at the time the Fourth Department of the Red Army. The members of the NKVD’s American desk in Moscow Centre – the name given to the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence department – that directed the highly successful campaign in the USA all sat in a small room and were perhaps at most five strong.¹⁷ It was a small team to take on the FBI. Artuzov, by 1931 the head of INO, was the architect of some of the greatest Soviet intelligence coups. He was responsible for the capture and execution of ‘Ace of Spies’ Sidney Reilly in the elaborate ‘Trust’ sting,^fn5 one of the greatest counter-intelligence operations of all time, earning a deservedly prominent place in espionage history. Artuzov was also responsible for setting in train the recruitment as agents of Communist students at universities across Europe who later in their careers might hold significant positions of influence in their governments. The programme’s best-known products were the Cambridge Five.

It was the prickly aircraft designer Andrey Tupolev who insisted on the recruitment of Shumovsky for intelligence work. Since 1925 INO had been tasked with gathering S&T on top of political intelligence. There was a significant overlap with the work of Military Intelligence. Under the Five-Year Plan, the demand for S&T ramped up, creating the need for a fresh approach. A new type of intelligence officer with a unique set of skills was required. Besides the ability to speak languages and operate in a foreign country, this new breed of spies had to be at the top of their field in their chosen technical specialisation. Tupolev needed an aeronautics specialist on the ground in the US to bring TsAGI – the Moscow-based Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute, the country’s leading centre of aircraft design – answers to thorny questions, not just blueprints. Above all, the agents needed to be unquestionably loyal.

Shumovsky’s interview at the NKVD was a mixture of background checks and ideological questioning. Given his record as a Russian Civil War hero, endorsements from the local Committee of the Communist Party and Tupolev, he passed. Accepting the job without a moment’s hesitation, for he was a Party loyalist prepared to do anything for his proletarian motherland, he began a year of intense training, starting in Leningrad. Artuzov was responsible for developing the Soviet spy training programme using veteran practitioners as teachers. Later he industrialised spy training by building a dedicated school in the woods outside Moscow. Some previous operations had proceeded with no training at all, even in basic foreign languages; intelligence operatives used the cover of being a foreigner to explain away their accents and lack of language proficiency. One Soviet agent deployed to England had to get blind drunk to avoid exposure when he discovered the ambassador of Hungary, the country he claimed to be from, while speaking not a word of the language, was arriving to join the house party. Luckily, his English aristocratic hosts were used to such eccentric behaviour.¹⁸

Later, KGB defector General Oleg Kalugin would describe attending large classes in the 1950s that trained hundreds of newly minted agents to operate both domestically and abroad.¹⁹ An heir of Shumovsky, Kalugin was to attend Columbia University to complete his assimilation into American life. By then, espionage training was conducted with military-style discipline, befitting those entrusted with protecting the Revolution. Shumovsky had no such formal training, but he received instruction from experienced officers in the skills of intelligence gathering, agent recruitment and how to avoid being followed. He also learned radio operations, working with codes and had a refresher on shooting a pistol. He was taught how to microfilm documents for ease of storage, concealment and transport.

Shumovsky was to operate as an intelligence officer without the benefit of diplomatic cover. As the USA was always his intended destination, he undertook a six-month intensive course in the English language, American customs and way of life. Intelligence officers, even novices, were well paid and, more important in a land of shortages, fed three hot meals a day. For recruits joining the NKVD, the experience was life-changing. One of them, Alexander Feklisov, described sleeping in a real bed for the first time in his life at the training school. The intelligence code included a vow of silence, which included never admitting to working for the organisation, even to one’s parents. A new recruit would need to develop a good cover story, for his friends and family.²⁰

Shumovsky’s mission to enrol at MIT as a science student evolved into the perfect cover for a Soviet intelligence officer on a long-term S&T assignment in the USA. The plan was that he would enter the US concealed among a large party of students, thus attracting little attention. In 1930, the best of the ‘Party Thousand’, the crème de la crème, were chosen to study abroad. The Soviets used scarce foreign currency and gold reserves to give their elite the best education money could buy. With his exemplary academic record and political background, Shumovsky made the list with the help of the secret service. He resembled his fellow travellers in every respect. His background was identical to that of his companions, as he was a recent graduate of Moscow’s premier technical university. Crucially, as a student studying at a leading academic institution Shumovsky was granted a long-term visa by the US government without being asked probing questions, unlike an AMTORG employee.

As part of the plan, the Party Central Committee appointed a ‘plenipotentiary’ official to monitor the progress of the students abroad and send six-monthly reports back to Moscow.²¹ This official had the power to order back to the Soviet Union any student making unsatisfactory progress or proving to be politically unreliable. However, their main job was to coordinate the information gathering. Raisa (Ray) Bennett, a Military Intelligence officer, was appointed to this important role.

• • •

Stalin’s final priority within the Five-Year Plans was improving worker education. Among the greatest achievements of the Revolution had been universal literacy and access to education. The Tsarist government had feared education; successive rulers took active measures to limit literacy levels in their subjects by taxing village schools. They came to believe that if they allowed their people to read, they would become revolutionaries. The prohibitive measures ensured precisely the outcome the government feared.

Ministers shook at the thought of what might happen if the fate of the reforming Tsar Alexander II, who had promised a modicum of universal education, was repeated. Alexander’s short-lived experiment with liberalisation had resulted in his assassination by anarchists. Lenin’s beloved older brother was hanged for his part in the plot. After that unhappy episode, the autocracy did everything it could to stifle education for the untrusted masses, from whom they demanded devotion. It was no surprise that adult literacy rates in Tsarist Russia were less than 30 per cent, while literacy among males was roughly double that of females. My own great-grandfather, a leading Communist in the Crimea, was unable to sign his name until he learned to read after the Revolution. (Today’s Russia has 99.7 per cent literacy.) As Professor Shumovsky, as he became, later told UNESCO, in 1917 only 9,656,000 students were in school out of a total population of around 175 million.²²

The unenlightened policy held back the economic development of the country, as there was only a shallow pool of educated workers. Hundreds of thousands of Russia’s most literate individuals emigrated, primarily to the United States, taking their talent with them in a dramatic brain drain. With less than half the Tsar’s army able to read and write, the country was vulnerable to military attack. After the October Revolution, the idealist journalist John Reed (the only American to be interred after his death in the Kremlin Wall) wrote:

All Russia was learning to read, and reading – politics, economics, history because the people wanted to know … In every city, in most towns, along with the Front, each political faction had its newspaper – sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organizations and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts – but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol and Gorky.²³

In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, education policy was overhauled with a tenfold increase in the expenditure on mass education. Lenin argued: ‘As long as there is such a thing in the country as illiteracy it is hard to talk about political education.’ Despite the utterly grim conditions, he launched national literacy campaigns. Victor Serge, a first-hand witness of the Communist Revolution, saw the tremendous odds facing educators and the miserable conditions that existed in the wake of the Russian Civil War. A typical school would have classes of hungry children in rags huddled in winter around a small stove planted in the middle of the classroom. The pupils shared one pencil between four of them, and their schoolmistress was hungry. In spite of this grotesque misery, such a thirst for knowledge sprang up all over the country that new schools, adult courses, universities and Workers’ Faculties were formed everywhere.²⁴ In its first year of existence, the Communist literacy campaign reached an incredible five million people, of whom about half learned to read and write. In the Red Army, where literacy and education were deemed crucial, illiteracy was eradicated within seven years.

The Five-Year Plans and the Stalinist project to transform the Soviet economy were born of idealism as well as insecurity. The prospect of a great leap forward into a fully socialist economy kindled among a new generation of Party militants much the same messianic fervour as had inspired Lenin’s followers in the heady aftermath of the October Revolution and victory in the Civil War.

The young Communist idealists of the early 1930s, among them Soviet intelligence officers and other Russian students at MIT, believed in Stalin as well as in the coming ‘Triumph of Socialism’. Hailing from a generation who believed that the end justified the means, they would certainly not have recognised the prevailing view of Stalin among contemporary historians. The first group of elite Soviet students under the Politburo order was to be sent abroad in 1931. Individual Soviet specialists were already at many foreign universities, including a few in the US. The renowned Soviet atomic scientist Pyotr Kapitsa was number two in Ernest Rutherford’s team at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University,^fn6 while Dr Yakov Fishman learned about the chemistry of poison gases at the Italian university at Naples.

As Shumovsky and his party prepared to depart for the United States, US legal firm Simpson Thacher began the process of arranging the visas.²⁵ (According to the 1948 FBI investigation,^fn7 Shumovsky was a late addition to the roster. It is unclear if that was a decision taken in Moscow or one determined by the availability of places on courses.) Like Shumovsky, the students in his party were not fresh-faced teenagers just out of high school, but married ex-military men who had not been able to begin formal education until the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922 and had since been fast-tracked towards greatness. Many were from humble backgrounds and acutely aware that, but for the Communist Revolution, they would never have had any prospect of an education. Central to their motivation was the desire to enable Soviet industry and military technology to catch up with the West. The offices of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations facilitated finding places at appropriate universities to help foster better international relations.²⁶ Back in Moscow, the finance was organised. As with every decision in the Soviet system, the budget was decided centrally at a Politburo meeting in 1930. Several thousand gold roubles was allocated for the trip, amounting to a total fund of $1 million. Each student was assigned from a key industry and that industry’s management had the responsibility of paying.

The one tricky condition imposed by the American universities was that the students must demonstrate a high competence in English. Typically, the exam followed a two-year course, but this talented group was given just six months to reach the required standard.²⁷ There was a desperate need for teachers to give the Soviet students English lessons in Moscow before they went off to study at MIT and other US universities. Among those selected for the task was Military Intelligence officer, American Ray Bennett. Another was Gertrude Klivans, a young Radcliffe College-educated teacher from a family of Russian-Jewish jewellers in Ohio.

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Klivans had become bored with life as a high school teacher in the Midwest and started travelling adventurously around the world. She was first talent-spotted by General Vitaly Markovich Primakov while both were journeying from Japan to Vladivostok aboard a cargo vessel, described by Klivans as ‘an ancient hulk’, which forced its small group of passengers to cling together ‘as we pitched and tossed’.²⁸ Klivans’s letters to her family reveal that during the voyage she became quite friendly with Primakov.²⁹ They clearly began an affair on board. Primakov, Klivans gushed to her family, was ‘the youngest full general in the Red Army’, a man whose travels (in fact they were spying missions) had taken him as far afield as Afghanistan, China and Japan: he ‘fought throughout the Revolution and on every battlefront during the Civil War – wears three medals, is always armed to the teeth – an expert swordsman and a cavalryman from a Cossack family that have been horsemen for generations, and withal, his head is shaven. But his eyes, the real gray blue, Russian eyes and fair skin make you forget that military custom.’

Gertrude Klivans, Radcliffe College, Harvard – yearbook. The picture is captioned: ‘Her eyes were stars of twilight fair/Like twilight, too, her dusky hair’

Klivans reported to her family that, during the long trans-Siberian train journey from Vladivostok to Moscow, ‘I spent most of every day in Primakov’s compartment, so I enjoyed all the privileges of first class, even accepting the offer of taking a bath.’ She fell deeply in love. Although the train arrived a day late, ‘I didn’t care – I didn’t want it ever to end.’ She had intended to return to New York, but Primakov promised to help her find a teaching job in Moscow. Remarkably, she admitted to her family that he had suggested she work for Soviet intelligence: ‘Imagine – I was offered a job in the [O.] G. P. U.^fn8 as soon as I learned the [Russian] language.’

Primakov had enjoyed a glittering career in the Red Army and the intelligence service. He cut his teeth leading a squadron of troops in the attack on the Petrograd Winter Palace in 1917. The highlight of his espionage career came in 1929 when, disguised as a Turkish officer named Ragib-bey, he led a special operation of Soviet troops to try to reinstate Amanullah Khan as ruler of Afghanistan. He was arrested in 1936 and executed in the following year’s Great Purge.³⁰

Although in letters to her family Klivans complained that living conditions in Moscow had left her with ‘a few bedbug bites’, she declared herself ‘very happy with my work’. She worked diligently to teach her charges all about America:

You can’t imagine how well I know these boys, all of whom are at least five years older [than me] … They will do anything for me and believe me I do plenty for them, besides keeping them in cigarettes and informing them of certain Americanisms. I mean as far as deportment is concerned, I try to make each of them letter perfect in the President’s English and if you think it isn’t hard work you are mistaken. But there are always three at least who are making love to me outside of school hours so that I can never keep a straight face for at least five minutes going in class. If you would see them, all in their fur hats, high felt boots, and a week’s beard for nobody shaves more than once in five days you would laugh. But they are fun, and I certainly will always have 15 fast friends in Russia. Probably someday one of them will be another Stalin – they are all party men, active and so understanding of my distorted view of life as they can understand the limitations of my bourgeois environment, the only thing they can’t understand is why I haven’t already embraced Communism without any reservations.³¹

To celebrate the end of the examinations after her language course, Klivans threw a party for the students on 15 April 1931, for which she prepared the closest approximation she could manage to American sandwiches and salads. The only woman at the party, she wore a ‘Chinese suit’ acquired on her travels. It was an emotional occasion with many hours of dancing and singing. Klivans travelled to the United States ahead of her Russian students, describing them in her letter home:

Let me tell you who the boys are. They are all 27 or 28. One [Alexander Gramp] is half Georgian and half Armenian – speaks both of these languages and knows every place on the map of Russia with his eyes shut – has a disposition that even Russian conditions cannot spoil. Another is a White Russian [MIT-bound Eugene Bukley] – as clever as any three people I’ve met and had a sense of humor that works equally well in any language – the third [Peter Ivanov, a future student at Harvard] is a serious electrical engineer who served as a sort of lever in our hilarious spirits. Of the first two, one is a railway engineer, in fact, that got us tickets everywhere – something almost unheard of in Russia today. The other one is also an electrical engineer.³²

Alexander Gramp’s graduation, Purdue University,1933

Klivans’s closest relationship was with the railway engineer, Gramp, one of the five students with a place at Purdue University. He married her after his graduation, returning with her to Moscow following his appointment as Dean of the College of Railway Engineering.

Eager to ensure that her students made a good impression on their arrival at MIT and other US universities, Klivans pressed successfully for scarce foreign currency reserves. When they landed in New York, she wanted to buy them smart, well-cut suits.