OGPU: The Russian Secret Terror – Georges Agabekov, former chief of the Eastern Section, and secret resident of Ogpu at Constantinople (translated from French by Henry W. Bunn) – New York, 1931
Preface:
Lenin once said one day that every Bolshevist should make himself a Chekist; in other words, every Communist, every adept of the new Evangel, should be a spy. It is implicit that no means, however unsavoury, that might be useful towards safeguarding the Soviet State, beset as it is on every side by innumerable enemies, should be rejected. It is a corollary that the machinery for safeguarding the State (secret service, police, etc.) should be efficient in the highest degree.
Let us begin by asserting that such efficiency has been attained. That machinery is a marvel, a model, scarcely examined in history, even during the great Terrorisms. Capping all, and redoubtable indeed, is the institution called the Cheka or Ogpu.
For ten years, 1920-1930, I was attached to that terrible institution formerly called the Cheka, of late the Ogpu. I worked in its principal centres; in the sections which direct the struggle against the domestic enemy, and in the Foreign Section. Meanwhile I read, and I listened to infinite talk on the affairs of several sections; I kept in close touch with the foreign press; I perused the reports addressed by foreign representatives in Russia to their respective Governments which the Ogpu agents succeeded in intercepting. But never in any of these documents did I come upon a picture even remotely approximating the truth of the Ogpu machinery, Ogpu activities, or the Ogpu personnel. These documents were empty or misinforming in a positively amazing degree, and it made us hot in the collar, no less, to con the perfectly puerile outpourings of the émigré publications respecting us.
I have made myself familiar from the ground up with the mechanism of the Soviet power. I have been well placed for observing the transformation, the degeneration, of that mechanism. I lost faith in it and therefore voluntarily severed my connection with it.
I am convinced that the Soviet Government will never realize the ideals which so many of us have cherished; nay, au contraire. I can no longer be its faithful servant as of old. I must fight it; I see my duty in that. That Government must disappear, must give place to another. And, since the main pillar of its edifice of power is the Ogpu, I propose to shake that pillar to its base, to topple it. Not to run the metaphor to death, I propose to discredit Ogpu by telling what I have seen and learned of it during ten years.
G. Agabekov
I. In the Urals
At the end of 1920, the Communist Party Committee of the Province of the Urals ordered me to join the local Cheka at Ekaterinburg (on the eastern edge of the Urals, south by east of Perm).
I was then twenty-four years old. I had suffered much from hunger and cold in the Red Army, in which I had been serving; whether or not in the Cheka service I should be bettering my condition, it remained to be seen.
The Cheka at Ekaterinburg was quartered at No.7 Pushkin Street; a two-story building of no great size, with a deep cellar into which prisoners were stuffed. Leaving that crypt, the prisoners condemned to death passed across a court towards a stable, and en route they were shot.
The sailor Toungouskoff was director in chief of the local Cheka and of the “Special Bureau” of the Third Army, cantoned there. Terrible stories are current about that man, of second-rate intelligence, but ferocious and morbidly vain. His colleague Hromtsoff, chief of the Secret Section, a petty official of the old regime, is more literate and a good deal more intelligent. The Lett woman Staalberg was the third member of the trinity (popularly called “The Troika”) who drowned in blood the erstwhile quiet town of Ekaterinburg. That terrible woman was not content with pronouncing death sentences; she loved the work, she was always there at the kill.
At the time of which I speak this trinity had so terrorized the townfolk that they dared not pass along Pushkin Street.
How time flies! That was ten years ago. Now, in 1930, Toungouskoff owns a little plot of Russian ground, but it is a very little one; he was picked off by bandits. Hromtsoff, ejected from the Communist Party, leads an obscure life in the slums of Moscow. Of the Troika, Staaleberg alone has prospered. She is a magistrate serving the CCC in a special commission. Ah! if there is such a thing as justice, if there be an avenging Providence, surely a special punishment waits upon these Sadists who have caused so many innocent persons to perish in the name of the Revolution and the proletariat.
I was appointed agent of liaison between the higher officials and the secret agents charged with repression of banditry and of the counter-revolutionary movement in the Urals. My chief was a certain Koriakoff, a simple peasant from Perm, illiterate but honest. For the latter reason he did not make a complete clean-up of all those charged with counter-revolutionary taint, and therefore the hierarchs were not satisfied with him.
I remained under Koriakoff until January 1921. After that, because of my military experience, I was appointed sub-chief of the “Special Section” of the Third Army. The first assistant to the famous Toungouskoff was one Startseff, a very intelligent and cultivated man, but an inveterate boozer. I had for immediate superior Ivanoff, an old workman and a drunkard.
p.15
I arrived in Tashkent early in January, 1922, and presented myself to Peters. He examined my personal dossier – for you must know that every agent has a dossier which gives his biography, his experience, his exploits, with efficiency reports from his several superiors. Peters seemed satisfied and called in his chief of the political section, one Reysih, whom he directed to make me acquainted with the political situation in Bukhara, whither I was to go.
The existing political situation at Bukhara was very complicated. Insurrectionary bands – the “Basmatchi” – infested Turkestan, attaching the towns, massacring the Europeans. Their number and importance increased from day to day.
Lenin’s plan had completely fallen through. He had made an agreement with Enver Pasha by which the latter, after the first Congress of the Peoples of the East, held at Baku, was to betake himself to Turkestan to effect a pacification. Pursuant to that agreement, Enver Pasha was to unite all these bands into one body and then at the head thereof burst into India by way of Afghanistan. His rallying cry should be: “The liberation of the peoples of the East.”
Lenin banked on the enormous popularity of Enver Pasha among the Turkomans and he proposed to himself two objects: first, to dissipate the hitherto abiding menace of uprising among the people of the Orient against the Soviet Government; and, in the second place, to divert the attention of Europe from the U.S.S.R. to Enver Pasha.
For Lenin the proposed move represented the first step toward the realization of a grand plan which contemplated the liberation of the peoples of the East from the imperialist yoke and proclamation of their independence; thereafter their absorption into the Bolshevist system. This was more readily envisaged as a consummation in that way than otherwise. Lenin’s plan was successful in respect of the Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara; not otherwise.
We shall see in what follows how the representatives of the Soviet power or, to be more precise, of the Ogpu, caused the imprisonment of the ministers, denominated “popular”, who refused to accept the Bolshevist credo and incited their compatriots to revolt against it.
At Khiva, the minister for the U.S.S.R., named Byck, furnished a pretty specimen of that high-handed mode of dealing. A congress of Soviets being in session at Khiva, he had the place of assembly surrounded by Soviet soldiery, and then, addressing the delegates, he coolly put to them this question: “Do you recognize the Soviet power? Or do you not?” The delegates, hearing the noise of arms in the street, unanimously declared complete adhesion to that power.
Enver Pasha did not keep his word. After the Congress of Baku, Enver went to Bukhara. Just what happened at this juncture is not clear. It would seem that he came into contact with Russian officers who had been prisoners of Turkey. One day he left the town ostensibly to hunt, and didn’t return. At Karki he began to organize insurrectionary bands. Then he moved to Bukhara, approaching very close to the town. The besieged troops were hard put to it. The defence was rendered dubious by the fact that Enver had ardent sympathizers in the Bukharan Government. They sent him reports concerning the Red troops of the garrison and even found a way to furnish him supplies.
I was ordered to proceed to Bukhara as chief of counter-espionage. I was accompanied by Okotoff, chief of the special subdivision of Ferghana, who brought with him his chief of bureau. Our mission was to be secret, having for object to recruit agents qualified to spy on the Government and to identify, among its members, the accomplices of Enver Pasha.
p.207
XXII. TURKEY
Prior to 1929, Ogpu had in Turkey only a legal Resident who officially was attaché of the Consulate General of Constantinople. In those days this Resident was Minsky. He had formerly worked in China, at Shanghai, where officially he was Vice Consul but his real job was that of Ogpu Resident. “Leaks” developed in his organization and in consequence the Chinese police charged him with espionage and searched the Consulate, and he was constrained to leave China. He was then appointed to Constantinople, where he had for assistant a certain Grichine. The latter was especially charged with the work of infiltration among the anti-Soviet parties of the Caucasus: Dachnaks, Moussavatists, Uplanders, etc.
Minsky’s wife worked in the Constantinople group as cipher expert. There were also two other women known as “Elsa” and “Lydia”; they translated and acted as liaison agents between Minsky and the spies.
In 1929 Minsky, sick, returned to Moscow, and he was replaced at Constantinople by Etingon. The latter was nominally attached to the Embassy under the name of Naoumoff.
Preface:
Lenin once said one day that every Bolshevist should make himself a Chekist; in other words, every Communist, every adept of the new Evangel, should be a spy. It is implicit that no means, however unsavoury, that might be useful towards safeguarding the Soviet State, beset as it is on every side by innumerable enemies, should be rejected. It is a corollary that the machinery for safeguarding the State (secret service, police, etc.) should be efficient in the highest degree.
Let us begin by asserting that such efficiency has been attained. That machinery is a marvel, a model, scarcely examined in history, even during the great Terrorisms. Capping all, and redoubtable indeed, is the institution called the Cheka or Ogpu.
For ten years, 1920-1930, I was attached to that terrible institution formerly called the Cheka, of late the Ogpu. I worked in its principal centres; in the sections which direct the struggle against the domestic enemy, and in the Foreign Section. Meanwhile I read, and I listened to infinite talk on the affairs of several sections; I kept in close touch with the foreign press; I perused the reports addressed by foreign representatives in Russia to their respective Governments which the Ogpu agents succeeded in intercepting. But never in any of these documents did I come upon a picture even remotely approximating the truth of the Ogpu machinery, Ogpu activities, or the Ogpu personnel. These documents were empty or misinforming in a positively amazing degree, and it made us hot in the collar, no less, to con the perfectly puerile outpourings of the émigré publications respecting us.
I have made myself familiar from the ground up with the mechanism of the Soviet power. I have been well placed for observing the transformation, the degeneration, of that mechanism. I lost faith in it and therefore voluntarily severed my connection with it.
I am convinced that the Soviet Government will never realize the ideals which so many of us have cherished; nay, au contraire. I can no longer be its faithful servant as of old. I must fight it; I see my duty in that. That Government must disappear, must give place to another. And, since the main pillar of its edifice of power is the Ogpu, I propose to shake that pillar to its base, to topple it. Not to run the metaphor to death, I propose to discredit Ogpu by telling what I have seen and learned of it during ten years.
G. Agabekov
I. In the Urals
At the end of 1920, the Communist Party Committee of the Province of the Urals ordered me to join the local Cheka at Ekaterinburg (on the eastern edge of the Urals, south by east of Perm).
I was then twenty-four years old. I had suffered much from hunger and cold in the Red Army, in which I had been serving; whether or not in the Cheka service I should be bettering my condition, it remained to be seen.
The Cheka at Ekaterinburg was quartered at No.7 Pushkin Street; a two-story building of no great size, with a deep cellar into which prisoners were stuffed. Leaving that crypt, the prisoners condemned to death passed across a court towards a stable, and en route they were shot.
The sailor Toungouskoff was director in chief of the local Cheka and of the “Special Bureau” of the Third Army, cantoned there. Terrible stories are current about that man, of second-rate intelligence, but ferocious and morbidly vain. His colleague Hromtsoff, chief of the Secret Section, a petty official of the old regime, is more literate and a good deal more intelligent. The Lett woman Staalberg was the third member of the trinity (popularly called “The Troika”) who drowned in blood the erstwhile quiet town of Ekaterinburg. That terrible woman was not content with pronouncing death sentences; she loved the work, she was always there at the kill.
At the time of which I speak this trinity had so terrorized the townfolk that they dared not pass along Pushkin Street.
How time flies! That was ten years ago. Now, in 1930, Toungouskoff owns a little plot of Russian ground, but it is a very little one; he was picked off by bandits. Hromtsoff, ejected from the Communist Party, leads an obscure life in the slums of Moscow. Of the Troika, Staaleberg alone has prospered. She is a magistrate serving the CCC in a special commission. Ah! if there is such a thing as justice, if there be an avenging Providence, surely a special punishment waits upon these Sadists who have caused so many innocent persons to perish in the name of the Revolution and the proletariat.
I was appointed agent of liaison between the higher officials and the secret agents charged with repression of banditry and of the counter-revolutionary movement in the Urals. My chief was a certain Koriakoff, a simple peasant from Perm, illiterate but honest. For the latter reason he did not make a complete clean-up of all those charged with counter-revolutionary taint, and therefore the hierarchs were not satisfied with him.
I remained under Koriakoff until January 1921. After that, because of my military experience, I was appointed sub-chief of the “Special Section” of the Third Army. The first assistant to the famous Toungouskoff was one Startseff, a very intelligent and cultivated man, but an inveterate boozer. I had for immediate superior Ivanoff, an old workman and a drunkard.
p.15
I arrived in Tashkent early in January, 1922, and presented myself to Peters. He examined my personal dossier – for you must know that every agent has a dossier which gives his biography, his experience, his exploits, with efficiency reports from his several superiors. Peters seemed satisfied and called in his chief of the political section, one Reysih, whom he directed to make me acquainted with the political situation in Bukhara, whither I was to go.
The existing political situation at Bukhara was very complicated. Insurrectionary bands – the “Basmatchi” – infested Turkestan, attaching the towns, massacring the Europeans. Their number and importance increased from day to day.
Lenin’s plan had completely fallen through. He had made an agreement with Enver Pasha by which the latter, after the first Congress of the Peoples of the East, held at Baku, was to betake himself to Turkestan to effect a pacification. Pursuant to that agreement, Enver Pasha was to unite all these bands into one body and then at the head thereof burst into India by way of Afghanistan. His rallying cry should be: “The liberation of the peoples of the East.”
Lenin banked on the enormous popularity of Enver Pasha among the Turkomans and he proposed to himself two objects: first, to dissipate the hitherto abiding menace of uprising among the people of the Orient against the Soviet Government; and, in the second place, to divert the attention of Europe from the U.S.S.R. to Enver Pasha.
For Lenin the proposed move represented the first step toward the realization of a grand plan which contemplated the liberation of the peoples of the East from the imperialist yoke and proclamation of their independence; thereafter their absorption into the Bolshevist system. This was more readily envisaged as a consummation in that way than otherwise. Lenin’s plan was successful in respect of the Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara; not otherwise.
We shall see in what follows how the representatives of the Soviet power or, to be more precise, of the Ogpu, caused the imprisonment of the ministers, denominated “popular”, who refused to accept the Bolshevist credo and incited their compatriots to revolt against it.
At Khiva, the minister for the U.S.S.R., named Byck, furnished a pretty specimen of that high-handed mode of dealing. A congress of Soviets being in session at Khiva, he had the place of assembly surrounded by Soviet soldiery, and then, addressing the delegates, he coolly put to them this question: “Do you recognize the Soviet power? Or do you not?” The delegates, hearing the noise of arms in the street, unanimously declared complete adhesion to that power.
Enver Pasha did not keep his word. After the Congress of Baku, Enver went to Bukhara. Just what happened at this juncture is not clear. It would seem that he came into contact with Russian officers who had been prisoners of Turkey. One day he left the town ostensibly to hunt, and didn’t return. At Karki he began to organize insurrectionary bands. Then he moved to Bukhara, approaching very close to the town. The besieged troops were hard put to it. The defence was rendered dubious by the fact that Enver had ardent sympathizers in the Bukharan Government. They sent him reports concerning the Red troops of the garrison and even found a way to furnish him supplies.
I was ordered to proceed to Bukhara as chief of counter-espionage. I was accompanied by Okotoff, chief of the special subdivision of Ferghana, who brought with him his chief of bureau. Our mission was to be secret, having for object to recruit agents qualified to spy on the Government and to identify, among its members, the accomplices of Enver Pasha.
p.207
XXII. TURKEY
Prior to 1929, Ogpu had in Turkey only a legal Resident who officially was attaché of the Consulate General of Constantinople. In those days this Resident was Minsky. He had formerly worked in China, at Shanghai, where officially he was Vice Consul but his real job was that of Ogpu Resident. “Leaks” developed in his organization and in consequence the Chinese police charged him with espionage and searched the Consulate, and he was constrained to leave China. He was then appointed to Constantinople, where he had for assistant a certain Grichine. The latter was especially charged with the work of infiltration among the anti-Soviet parties of the Caucasus: Dachnaks, Moussavatists, Uplanders, etc.
Minsky’s wife worked in the Constantinople group as cipher expert. There were also two other women known as “Elsa” and “Lydia”; they translated and acted as liaison agents between Minsky and the spies.
In 1929 Minsky, sick, returned to Moscow, and he was replaced at Constantinople by Etingon. The latter was nominally attached to the Embassy under the name of Naoumoff.