of intense training, starting in Leningrad. Artuzov was responsible for developing the Soviet spy training programme using veteran practitioners as teachers. Later he industrialised spy training by building a dedicated school in the woods outside Moscow. Some previous operations had proceeded with no training at all, even in basic foreign languages; intelligence operatives used the cover of being a foreigner to explain away their accents and lack of language proficiency. One Soviet agent deployed to England had to get blind drunk to avoid exposure when he discovered the ambassador of Hungary, the country he claimed to be from, while speaking not a word of the language, was arriving to join the house party. Luckily, his English aristocratic hosts were used to such eccentric behaviour.18
Later, KGB defector General Oleg Kalugin would describe attending large classes in the 1950s that trained hundreds of newly minted agents to operate both domestically and abroad.19 An heir of Shumovsky, Kalugin was to attend Columbia University to complete his assimilation into American life. By then, espionage training was conducted with military-style discipline, befitting those entrusted with protecting the Revolution. Shumovsky had no such formal training, but he received instruction from experienced officers in the skills of intelligence gathering, agent recruitment and how to avoid being followed. He also learned radio operations, working with codes and had a refresher on shooting a pistol. He was taught how to microfilm documents for ease of storage, concealment and transport.
Shumovsky was to operate as an intelligence officer without the benefit of diplomatic cover. As the USA was always his intended destination, he undertook a six-month intensive course in the English language, American customs and way of life. Intelligence officers, even novices, were well paid and, more important in a land of shortages, fed three hot meals a day. For recruits joining the NKVD, the experience was life-changing. One of them, Alexander Feklisov, described sleeping in a real bed for the first time in his life at the training school. The intelligence code included a vow of silence, which included never admitting to working for the organisation, even to one’s parents. A new recruit would need to develop a good cover story, for his friends and family.20
Shumovsky’s mission to enrol at MIT as a science student evolved into the perfect cover for a Soviet intelligence officer on a long-term S&T assignment in the USA. The plan was that he would enter the US concealed among a large party of students, thus attracting little attention. In 1930, the best of the ‘Party Thousand’, the crème de la crème, were chosen to study abroad. The Soviets used scarce foreign currency and gold reserves to give their elite the best education money could buy. With his exemplary academic record and political background, Shumovsky made the list with the help of the secret service. He resembled his fellow travellers in every respect. His background was identical to that of his companions, as he was a recent graduate of Moscow’s premier technical university. Crucially, as a student studying at a leading academic institution Shumovsky was granted a long-term visa by the US government without being asked probing questions, unlike an AMTORG employee.
As part of the plan, the Party Central Committee appointed a ‘plenipotentiary’ official to monitor the progress of the students abroad and send six-monthly reports back to Moscow.21 This official had the power to order back to the Soviet Union any student making unsatisfactory progress or proving to be politically unreliable. However, their main job was to coordinate the information gathering. Raisa (Ray) Bennett, a Military Intelligence officer, was appointed to this important role.
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Stalin’s final priority within the Five-Year Plans was improving worker education. Among the greatest achievements of the Revolution had been universal literacy and access to education. The Tsarist government had feared education; successive rulers took active measures to limit literacy levels in their subjects by taxing village schools. They came to believe that if they allowed their people to read, they would become revolutionaries. The prohibitive measures ensured precisely the outcome the government feared.
Ministers shook at the thought of what might happen if the fate of the reforming Tsar Alexander II, who had promised a modicum of universal education, was repeated. Alexander’s short-lived experiment with liberalisation had resulted in his assassination by anarchists. Lenin’s beloved older brother was hanged for his part in the plot. After that unhappy episode, the autocracy did everything it could to stifle education for the untrusted masses, from whom they demanded devotion. It was no surprise that adult literacy rates in Tsarist Russia were less than 30 per cent, while literacy among males was roughly double that of females. My own great-grandfather, a leading Communist in the Crimea, was unable to sign his name until he learned to read after the Revolution. (Today’s Russia has 99.7 per cent literacy.) As Professor Shumovsky, as he became, later told UNESCO, in 1917 only 9,656,000 students were in school out of a total population of around 175 million.22
The unenlightened policy held back the economic development of the country, as there was only a shallow pool of educated workers. Hundreds of thousands of Russia’s most literate individuals emigrated, primarily to the United States, taking their talent with them in a dramatic brain drain. With less than half the Tsar’s army able to read and write, the country was vulnerable to military attack. After the October Revolution, the idealist journalist John Reed (the only American to be interred after his death in the Kremlin Wall) wrote:
All Russia was learning to read, and reading – politics, economics, history because the people wanted to know … In every city, in most towns, along with the Front, each political faction had its newspaper – sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organizations and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts – but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol and Gorky.23
In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, education policy was overhauled with a tenfold increase in the expenditure on mass education. Lenin argued: ‘As long as there is such a thing in the country as illiteracy it is hard to talk about political education.’ Despite the utterly grim conditions, he launched national literacy campaigns. Victor Serge, a first-hand witness of the Communist Revolution, saw the tremendous odds facing educators and the miserable conditions that existed in the wake of the Russian Civil War. A typical school would have classes of hungry children in rags huddled in winter around a small stove planted in the middle of the classroom. The pupils shared one pencil between four of them, and their schoolmistress was hungry. In spite of this grotesque misery, such a thirst for knowledge sprang up all over the country that new schools, adult courses, universities and Workers’ Faculties were formed everywhere.24 In its first year of existence, the Communist literacy campaign reached an incredible five million people, of whom about half learned to read and write. In the Red Army, where literacy and education were deemed crucial, illiteracy was eradicated within seven years.
The Five-Year Plans and the Stalinist project to transform the Soviet economy were born of idealism as well as insecurity. The prospect of a great leap forward into a fully socialist economy kindled among a new generation of Party militants much the same messianic fervour as had inspired Lenin’s followers in the heady aftermath of the October Revolution and victory in the Civil War.
The young Communist idealists of the early 1930s, among them Soviet intelligence officers and other Russian students at MIT, believed in Stalin as well as in the coming ‘Triumph of Socialism’. Hailing from a generation who believed that the end justified the means, they would certainly not have recognised the prevailing view of Stalin among contemporary historians. The first group of elite Soviet students under the Politburo order was to be sent abroad in 1931. Individual Soviet specialists were already at many foreign universities, including a few in the US. The
