From Lenin to Putin, via Beria

‘Hybrid war’ is often in the news these days. The papers use this term to describe the Russian strategy of combining military aggression with information warfare.

The impression an uninitiated reader may get is that this is a novelty developed by Putin’s strategists in the FSB. True, that attempt to rape and seduce the West alternately or even simultaneously was indeed concocted by that organisation.

But this happened not in the 2020s but in the 1920s, when that sinister setup was still called the Cheka. Since then that state within a state has undergone seven or eight name changes. But neither its evil essence nor its strategy has ever changed for over 100 years.

Both, however, have always displayed great elasticity in responding effectively to the vicissitudes of foreign and domestic politics. The core was immutable; the periphery wasn’t.

Outside observers who can’t trace this continuity or even realise it exists have no chance of understanding modern Russia. They are destined to remain for ever exactly what Lenin called them: useful idiots.

This breed reacts with enthusiasm to every zig and zag of Russia, accepting each at face value. Useful idiots don’t realise they are being duped – after all, no one has ever done it to them on such a scale for so long.

It all started in 1920, when the Bolsheviks felt they were already strong enough to KO the West with a quick punch. The Red cavalry yelling “On to Berlin and Paris!” rode west, but only got as far as Warsaw where Marshal Pilsudski’s horsemen chopped their historic enemies into mincemeat.

Clearly, the Red Army was too blunt a weapon for what was developing into a delicate task. More perfidious subtlety was required if what Sidney ‘the Ace of Spies’ Reilly called a “hideous cancer” was to spread. And perfidious subtlety was something only the Cheka had.

The first few years of the Bolshevik era saw the formulation of two policies which, mutatis mutandis, Russia has been following ever since: Military Communism and New Economic Policy (NEP).

The purpose of the former was to rape first the country and then the world into submission. The chief objectives of the latter were to mitigate the effects of the former, backpedal a bit, let some steam off, and set up the next round by presenting to the world a picture of ‘change’, ‘liberalisation’, Stalin’s ‘perestroika’ (let’s give that term its true provenance), Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ and so forth.

Sudden shifts in Russian policy can never surprise anyone familiar with this alternating pattern: the bloodthirsty collectivisation followed by Stalin’s caution against “vertigo from success”; post-war purges followed by ‘the Thaw’, which was bound to adumbrate Brezhnev’s reaction, which in turn set the stage for the on-going NEP-like binge. 

But it’s not enough to execute this policy of two steps forward, one step backwards domestically. The West’s support, or at least acquiescence, is a sine qua non. That means disinformation and strategic deception don’t just lie at the heart of Russia’s policy. They are Russia’s policy – and that’s what really makes the Cheka “the essence of Bolshevism”, in Lenin’s phrase.

This organisation has demonstrated its ability to string the West along. Its strategic debut in the early 20s was an auspicious event: Operation Trust. It was designed to neutralise the White emigration that remained a formidable force, especially with Western support.

The OGPU, as it was then, created a bogus anti-Bolshevik network inside Russia and dropped a few telling hints in the West that the ‘hideous cancer’ was about to go into remission – given inactivity on the West’s part and a little help with financing and technology.

The West swallowed the bait and was immobilised at a time when the ghouls were at their most vulnerable. OGPU ‘ops’ were being financed by their targets and, as an additional benefit, the Trust lured some prominent émigré leaders, Reilly among them, into Russia, where they were murdered.

The history of the Cheka is one continuous string of such successes. An extremely abbreviated list would include:

The post-war peace movement, as a result of which Western atomic scientists, such as Oppenheimer, Szilard, Fermi, Pontecorvo and Bohr, felt called upon to share their secrets with the Russians.

The bogus anti-communist guerrilla movements in the Baltics in the late 40s-early 50s, which pre-empted any real resistance.

The detente and SALT of the 70s, during which the Soviets embarked on an unprecedented military build-up.

The ‘Prague Spring’, a perestroika rehearsal possibly designed to test the West’s reaction.

The Polish Solidarity movement, infiltrated by the KGB from the start.

And even to a large extent the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s which too was infiltrated by the KGB, and many of whose leaders are now known to have been KGB plants. 

Secret police was the cutting edge of the Party, but the two were often at odds. The Party was committed to its ideological rigidity; its head was in the Marxist clouds. The Chekists, on the other hand, had their feet on the ground. They were pragmatists and as such always championed more flexible means to achieve the same end.   

The Cheka’s most outstanding figure was Lavrentiy Beria who in effect led that organisation from 1938 to 1953. In that capacity he displayed requisite monstrosity, but also certain administrative abilities. Beria ran not only the secret police and intelligence, but also the vast GULAG empire, where emaciated inmates supplied the country with vital commodities, from gold to uranium.

During the war, GULAG’s economic value increased no end, and so did Beria’s power. In addition, he was put in charge of the atomic project and brought it to a successful conclusion in 1949.  

After Stalin’s death, which Beria welcomed and, according to circumstantial evidence, might have accelerated, he proposed to his Politburo colleagues a glasnost and perestroika programme that anticipated the ‘op’ of the late 1980s in such details as the introduction of private enterprise, abolition of collective farms, withdrawal from Germany, a greater accent on the production of consumer goods, etc.

The objective was all-familiar: presenting a human face to the West, luring it into disarmament, blackmailing it into a massive transfer of funds and technology, finlandising first Europe and then the rest of the world.

While the rigid Party apparatchiks welcomed those objectives, the means made their heads spin, and Beria was knocked off in gangland style. But, as Bolshevik obituaries used to say, “Our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on.”

Beria’s people were purged from the organisation (just as Beria purged Yezhov’s people in 1938), but his plan survived. It was passed like a relay baton to subsequent KGB leaders, from Shelepin to Semichastnyi to Andropov.

When the latter became Secretary General in 1982, the secret police finally got to run the country unimpeded and put Beria’s designs into effect. A few years later the Russian language contributed the words ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ to the OED. It’s useful to remember that the principal players of that game, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, were closer to the KGB than most of their Party colleagues.

Gorbachev owed his ascent to Andropov who plucked him out of the wilderness of the Stavropol region, where Gorbachev was Party secretary. He moved to Moscow and jumped several steps up to a position in the Politburo. Andropov, the custodian of Beria’s plan, was dying and he needed a safe pair of hands to succeed him.

Before moving to Moscow, Yeltsyn had run the Sverdlovsk region, the site of numerous defence installations, including nuclear bomb factories. These were under the auspices of the KGB, whose massive presence made Yeltsyn’s leadership strictly nominal.

It was these two men who succeeded in realising Beria’s plan in broad strokes, if not in every detail. At some point their control might have slipped, and they allowed the Soviet Union to fall apart. But Beria’s overall design remained intact.

When Russian émigré writers tried to explain what was going on, their words fell on deaf ears. Western useful idiots sat behind the first line of defence: “What you are saying is groundless nonsense”.

When, in the spirit of glasnost, the Russian government itself released some of the relevant facts, the useful idiots fell back to the second line: “Yes, you were right in factual details, but there’s no sinister subtext there. Beria and his disciples Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsyn simply realised that the people wanted change.”

That version is now coming across in everything useful idiots are writing, including the book on Beria by the American writer Amy Knight. She actually argued that Beria (who, unlike Himmler, tortured and murdered his victims personally) cared for the people’s well-being. That shows a lapse not only in historical knowledge but also in understanding human nature.

What we are witnessing at the moment is the downswing of the Beria rollercoaster. The KGB/FSB fronted by Putin is trying to regain control partly relinquished by Gorbachev and Yeltsyn, and they are doing it by the same hybrid methods as those the Cheka devised a century ago.

This will doubtless be followed by an upswing. The war will stop, new people will take over, and a new round of perestroika will kick in – to the hosannas chanted by useful idiots unaware that they are being duped yet again. Another rude awakening will then come with a bang, for that cancer never stops metastasising.

Westerners find it hard to fathom a behavioural stereotype that’s dramatically different from their own. They think that if their leaders are benign ignoramuses whose idea of a long-term objective is a minuscule growth in GDP, then Russian chieftains must be like that too.

Well-meaning philistines are incapable of understanding unalloyed evil, which is why they’ll never understand modern Russia until it’s too late – just as they never understood Nazi Germany until it was too late.