This book is new in every aspect and not only because neither the
official history nor an unofficial history of the KGB, and its many
predecessors and successors, exists in any language. In this
volume, the author deals with the origins of the KGB from the
Tsarist Okhrana (the first Russians secret political police) to the
OGPU, Joint State Political Directorate, one of the KGB
predecessors between 1923 and 1934\. Based on documents from the
Russian archives, the author clearly demonstrates that the Cheka
and GPU/OPGU were initially created to defend the revolution and
not for espionage. The Okhrana operated in both the Russian Empire
and abroad against the revolutionaries and most of its operations,
presented in this book, are little known. The same is the case with
regards to the period after the Cheka was established in December
1917 until ten years later when Trotsky was expelled from the
Communist Party and exiled, and Stalin rose to power. For the long
period after the Revolution and up to the Second World War (and,
indeed, beyond until the death of Stalin) the Cheka's main weapon
was terror to create a general climate of fear in a population. In
the book, the work of the Cheka and its successors against the
enemies of the revolution is paralleled with British and American
operations against the Soviets inside and outside of Russia. For
the first time the creation of the Communist International
(Comintern) is shown as an alternative Soviet espionage
organization for wide-scale foreign propaganda and subversion
operations based on the new revelations from the Soviet archives
Here, the early Soviet intelligence operations in several countries
are presented and analysed for the first time, as are raids on the
Soviet missions abroad. The Bolshevik smuggling of the Russian
imperial treasures is shown based on the latest available archival
sources with misinterpretations and sometimes false interpretations
in existing literature revised. After the Bolshevik revolution,
Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the first chief of SIS, undertook to set
up an entirely new Secret Service organization in Russia'. During
those first ten years, events would develop as a non-stop struggle
between British intelligence, within Russia and abroad, and the
Cheka, later GPU/OGPU. Before several show spy trials' in 1927,
British intelligence networks successfully operated in Russia later
moving to the Baltic capitals, Finland and Sweden while young
Soviet intelligence officers moved to London, Paris, Berlin and
Constantinople. Many of those operations, from both sides, are
presented in the book for the first time in this ground-breaking
study of the dark world of the KGB.
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