Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam (review)

The Soviet intelligence and security services had a prominent voice within Soviet policymaking circles and were also powerful instruments at its disposal, no matter who the incumbent. What is interesting, though, is the degree to which scholarship has often concentrated on the domestic security dimension more than external operations. To an extent, this is because of the way foreign espionage and internal security were largely the duties of a single agency—known as the KGB during the final decades of its existence—and the former was often subordinated to the latter. For the Cheka, the first Bolshevik security agency, the primary operations abroad were focused on watching, suborning, and even killing émigrés and other political challengers, rather than the usual intelligence-gathering operations we might expect. The scant amount of scholarship on the Soviet foreign intelligence service has tended, not least given the arcane nature of the subject, to come from defectors or else authors with a connection to Western intelligence agencies who resist with varying degrees of success the temptation to become a stenographer of propaganda.

A book like Jonathan Haslam’s magisterial Near and Distant Neighbors is all the more welcome and necessary now because under Vladimir Putin—himself, after all, a proud veteran of the KGB, who spent almost his whole career there in the German Democratic Republic—Russia’s intelligence agencies have become not only increasingly active, but also increasingly central to a new style of geopolitical contestation that blends military force with subterfuge, corruption, economic penetration, and political manipulation. They may be agencies largely with new names—the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and Federal Security Service (FSB) succeeding the KGB’s external and domestic wings respectively, and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (GRU) remaining the military intelligence service—but they hold to their traditions proudly and are the inheritors of generations of tradecraft and geopolitical antagonism.

Haslam’s book, by telling us from whence they came, also has much to tell us about how these services think and work today. He tells this story well, admirably balancing readability and scholarship. The Cheka may have been able to draw on some converts and serve-or-suffer “specialists” from the Tsarist secret police, but in the main they had to start from scratch, and did so with a characteristic mix of ruthless zeal, unprofessional confusion, and revolutionary tradecraft. The Cheka’s external service, known as the Foreign Department, began almost as an afterthought, but figures such as Meer Trilisser turned it into a serious agency, and in due course and through myriad changes of name and subordination it became the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the self-consciously elite part of this self-consciously elite service.

The fraught and—notably under Iosif Stalin—murderous political environment sometimes pushed Soviet intelligence officials to extraordinary lengths and allowed them to focus resources on strategically vital projects, but it also proved to be a serious challenge. Capable officers were purged and patronage trumped professionalism. Haslam rightly savages Stalin’s secret police chief in the late 1930s and 1940s, Lavrentii Beria, as “utterly inexperienced but inebriated by overweening self-confidence ... the most disastrous head of intelligence the Soviet Union ever had” (p. 115).

The Cold War espionage struggle could, in many ways, be boiled down to Soviet human intelligence versus Western technical prowess—a simplification, but a useful one. After Stalin’s death, as the Soviet Union lost its capacity to inspire and attract and instead had to rely on those it could buy or suborn, KGB espionage suffered, but the agency still played the game well. On the other hand, Soviet intelligence officials suffered not only from the growing technological gap with the West but also from their enemies’ growing will and ability to mount human intelligence operations on their soil. The decay of the Stalinist security state after Stalin’s death allowed greater opportunities to work in what had once been...