The Evolution of the Soviet Spy Bureaucracy

Abstract

Starting at the beginning of the 1930’s, the world was drastically changing politically, socially and economically. The 20th century already had one World War and a Great Depression which were direct contributors to the rise of nationalism (later Nazism) and Communism and the scrutiny of Liberalism and Capitalism, whose benefits were being questioned by the citizens of industrialized Europe and the United States. The state of Russia had additionally experienced a social revolution in 1917 and a civil war from 1918 to 1921 which resulted in the embracing of the Marxism-Leninism theory and its goal of a world revolution. In 1929, Joseph Stalin, who was a devout follower and the new Soviet leader, believed in the world revolution theory and understood there was an urgent need for an underground Communist organization in every country whose duty was to support Soviet Russia by all possible means. He believed that in order to facilitate this spread of Communism, the Soviet state needed to become great. It had to quickly become a bureaucratic, industrialized nation and thus began the period of Stalinism. The results from this type of implementation is that main planning efforts did not advance much beyond the development of techniques for short-run tenuous matching of ends and needs and the whole process proceeded by jerks and leaps, constantly plagued by inadequacy of resources and lack of reserves. Long term prospects, the main idea behind planning, always remained neglected. The NKVD, Soviet’s premier bureaucratic covert spy institution, was subjected to these issues and was constantly prodded, directed, and controlled causing it to experience major policy changes . Not only was it subjected to internal pressures, but external factors helped shape it too. By using the files from the KGB archives, it will be clearly conveyed that this bureaucracy was not rigidly structured like other Stalinist institutions and was capable of rapidly expanding to achieve a necessary level of effectiveness through the successes of its illegal apparatus but also, because of this apparatus’s failures, would ultimately cause a cataclysmic collapse of the spy network.