We celebrated the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of the USSR. His descendant, the Russian Federation, continues to raise questions and questions and we cannot say that this is unjustified. How to understand a country, both so close and so far away? Also geographically monstrous and also weak in some ways? By delving into the history of its intelligence services.
Friends and jokes
For my birthday – in October – I made a list of what I wanted: geopolitical and historical atlases, two of which focused on Russia. I was particularly spoiled and in addition to my list, I received other gifts, including The KGB in the world 1919-1990, published in 1990.
The very story of the book’s writing and its co-author is fascinating and resembles a spy novel. His Wikipedia file summarizes the thing, but for the youngest, remember that the USSR still existed in 1990. Oleg Gordievsky literally fled in 1985 and when the book came out, his wife and daughters were still in the USSR . So he took enormous risks for himself and his family by revealing the complete instructions for use of the intelligence services of the USSR.
Apart from people who have an interest in military matters in the very broad sense of the term, this book may be of interest to people who are interested in encryption of communications and to those who work on disinformation.
Encrypt, decrypt, some hazards
The political police – in short – is not an invention of the USSR, but of the Tsarist era. Wanting to cut short any form of social revolt, the Tsar invents a police force responsible for monitoring revolutionaries, anarchists or even those who would say that the Tsar has a crooked mustache. This political police had an avatar abroad, with the intelligence services. It is up to them to spy on what was happening with their little European comrades.
Preferred target: the British Empire. Roughly speaking, until 1945 the present-day UK was the state to be infiltrated, spied on and monitored. The United States will not become a target until around 1940. France is pretty in the landscape, but nothing more. As for Germany, the gag of the Ribbentrop-Molotov or Molotov-Ribbentrop pact has meant that certain elements have largely gone under the radar, in particular Operation Barbarossa.
If, at the time of the Tsar, the Russian intelligence services had the best equipment and the best agents to encrypt and decipher diplomatic messages, the Revolution of 1917 destroyed the capacities of the services in this field. So much so that in the 1920s and 1930s, the British services managed to intercept communications and afford the luxury of publishing the messages in all British newspapers. To give the reader an idea, it would be the equivalent of a communication between the President of the French Republic and the British Prime Minister who would end up on Twitter.
On encryption, the book explains how messages were encrypted and decrypted, including using small notebooks and guides. We are far from current message encryption techniques, but the complexity was pushed to the point of changing the equivalent of the encryption algorithm systematically. For those who want to delve into the history of this technique, the book is quite interesting.
Disinformation: a cultural practice
It may sound rather crass to say that disinformation is a cultural practice in Russia. We will admit that it is reductive, but it is a way of synthesizing a practice that has been going on for centuries.
If Russia and then the USSR have had some setbacks in terms of the encryption of sensitive messages, it is clear that the disinformation has gone very far. It did not consist in infiltrating only part of the population, but the different spheres of influence. The workers, the bourgeoisie, the cultural, scientific and political elites, agents of influence have been scattered everywhere to carry the “good word”. The funniest thing – and it is still valid today – is that a number of its propaganda agents did so in a completely selfless manner.
Their effectiveness was formidable, both in making the USSR look like a paradise on earth and in making people believe that the country had indisputable military assets. This disinformation also passed through the media, including the most respectable ones like the BBC. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that some supporters of the Putin regime have found their napkin rings in our current mainstream media. When you have a century of successful practices in your baggage, you are necessarily better than those delighted in the nursery who suddenly wake up from a nap.
The major problem with disinformation, when you practice it, is that you become paranoid. Stalin was, to the point of not taking certain warnings seriously. Informed of the movements of the Wehrmacht troops thanks to his intelligence services, he attributed them to disinformation coming from the United Kingdom. When the German troops started firing, he finally realized that it was not disinformation. This is the limit of the system. Stalin’s paranoia is also very well illustrated in a very ironic film: Stalin’s death.
The KGB around the world does not appear to have been reissued. But you will be able to find it occasionally on the web and it will give you a consistent read for the end of the year holidays. Le Zapping Décrypté wishes you happy holidays and will meet you in January.