Why are Russians such good spies?

Factual Questions
1

Title condensed for space, what I’m asking is why the intelligence services of the Soviet Union and Russian Federation are so effective. I’m not saying that Russians are sneaky bastards.

So, the two biggest Allied secrets in WWII were the Ultra decryption services - Magic for the Pacific - and the Manhattan Project, both of which arguably shaved years off the conflict. If the Axis had any detail knowledge of either we’d have been in deep shit.

Joseph Stalin knew about both. When Truman told him about the bomb he thought Stalin didn’t understand the significance as he showed no reaction, Uncle Joe must have had a chuckle at that. They were no slackers in spying on the actual enemy, either.

How did they manage to become so effective in espionage? They weren’t rolling in riches and things were kind of crappy all round. Stalin pretty much embodied paranoia and saw plots everywhere - was it the equivalent of a blind pig finding an acorn?

2

From the founding of the Soviet Union until Khrushchev’s “secret speech”, there had been almost imbecilically pro-Soviet factions within the left-wing in the west. The 1930s were ripe times for Soviet intelligence to recruit agents from those who actually believed that the USSR had anything in common with their utopian dreams. Not until the “party liners” were discredited and replaced by the New Left in the 1960s did the supply of “useful idiots” as Lenin termed them run dry. By that time the Soviet Union had had decades of practice in both internal and external espionage, and with ruthless pragmatism knew what worked from long experience.

3

Good spies compared to who? Compared the US, UK, Canada and such?

Well, open societies are more vulnerable to being spied on than totalitarian states that terrify their populace and terrify their own officials* even more.
Also, there was a time when a fair few gits were taken in by communism and were ready to serve that cause.
*The NKVD tortured and killed a lot of people but it seems that it was even more dangerous to be an NKVD man than not. E.g.: 3 out of 3 NKVD chiefs were showtrialed and executed.

4

Stalin ignored all his spies that told him the Germans were going to invade in the summer of 1941.

5

They were a very large country, and so had a great deal of resources even after accounting for their low efficiency, and they placed a high priority on espionage. I’m pretty sure it’s just as simple as that.

6

Stalin was certainly an idiot for ignoring them, but his spies did their jobs and told him exactly what was going on.

Do we know if Lenin used that term? Thought it was a misattribution. Good point about the '30s, there were a fair few…well, idiots, who believed the USSR was the ‘workers paradise’ it proclaimed itself to be.

Yeah, in that our intelligence services completely failed to keep top-secret stuff out of Soviet hands. On the NKVD, the chiefs for a lack of a better term definitely ‘had it coming’, they were all murderous shits. Their work is best summed up in a joke; Stalin loses his favourite pipe and mentions it to Beria. The next day, Stalin calls off the search as he finds it behind a sofa. Beria exclaims ‘Impossible - three men have already confessed to this crime!’ This is what I mean about the pig finding an acorn, they seemed to be constantly on the look for imagined spies and conspiracies.

7

Practice? the Soviets did not consider it a matter of diplomacy not to practice espionage techniques on unimportant foreigners. As a result, when my family was there on academic visas while my father was on sabbatical and working openly on a book for use in US universities, we were often followed and spied on by very new and amateurish recruits whom we could spot in a second. They were out of a Austin Powers movie sometimes. I remember one guy who, when we turned around and looked right at him, reached up and pulled tree branches over his face.

Also, we knew our hotel was bugged, and so my parents defeated it by writing notes on those magnetic erase boards that you could buy as erasable doodle pads for kids. Not that my parents had anything to say, they just liked the idea of using something so lo-tech to defeat the empire.

And the KGB used regular people, non agents, as informants, and gave them stipends. We knew who was informing on us, because again, we were practice targets. In the Soviet Union, they didn’t have merit pay raises. You got paid what everyone got paid for a job. But people who were very conscientious workers might get selected for informant work, and pick up extra money, and maybe luxuries, like use of a dacha that belonged to the government, or vacation time, or travel visas to resort areas.

The civilian informants left the hard core work for the full-time agents, and the extra practice, as well as the ability to integrate full-time agents into daily lives went a long way. That was another thing. With the different nationalities involved in the Soviet Union, plus the bloc countries, someone having a not-immediately-identifiable accent wasn’t a drawback. Someone whose Russian wasn’t perfect might be Estonian, or Georgian, or Czech, and so no one blinked. Someone in the US claiming to work for the CIA evoked suspicion if he had a French accent, or a Mexican accent.

The KGB got over sexism (albeit, not many other -isms) before the US did, and used women agents to great advantage, back when the US thought putting women in dangerous situations was barbaric.

The KGB was good at recruiting, because the earning potential of a job was not a selling point, but its status was, much more so than in not Marxist-aspiring countries. A lot more people wanted to work for the KGB in the USSR than wanted to work for the CIA in the US.

8

I suspect that part of the issue is that many of the Russian spy successes have been published, while those in the West have not.

9

They never really had a homogenous opponent, western governments ran the gamut of republics, parliamentary govt’s, facists, socialists and so forth. Which meant that every country that they penetrated, they were able to do so with disenfranchised people, folks who liked their system, and others who thought that they were no worse than the US.

The same in the non aligned nations, south america, and basically the rest of the world, they could always find someone to do stuff for them. I think that we can attribute the penetration of the nuke program, to the fact that some folks thought that, a one sided nuclear armed hemogeny would not be a good thing, and information got sent to moscow.

Another thing to bear in mind, is that when espionage and russia are mentioned, the diva’s at the KGB are usually the first thing that comes to mind, for most people, or the FIS, for the newer generations. No one really thinks of the GRU, or the military intel agency. The ones that are thought to have the best track record for all the soviet successes.

Declan

10

Communism seemed like a good idea to a lot of people back when it was just a theory. So the Soviets inherited a lot of good will around the world when they supposedly were establishing a real world communist society. Granted, what they ended up doing was revealing the deficiencies of communism. But Stalin was in power during the sweet spot when there were still true believers who were willing to help the Soviet Union because they believed in a communist future. (It helped that Stalin was often opposing Hitler, which would make anyone look better in comparison.)

11

Definitely. Stalin was our ally. Why not share a little knowledge with our bud, who is dying and fighting just as hard as we are, even if it is stretching the law a little bit?
I remember reading a book in a Diplomatic History of the US class, that one of the players in the US government, in 1945, (I can’t remember the name, but, they had no small amount of power) was quoted as saying “Why don’t we share the Atomic Bomb with Stalin, so he won’t think that we don’t trust him?”

12

They were a large vulnerable power with enemies who hated them and with exposed frontiers. They dont’t have the channel or oceans to protect them.

Vulnerable countries invest a lot more in intelligence.

13

Apparently, the era of “useful idiots” is not over.
A few years ago I read the autobiography of the chief Russian spy in the USA who defected when Russia collapsed. (Unfortunately, I forget the title of the book, and the guy’s name, so no cite.)
He said that whenever he wanted to know anything in a hurry, he would fly up to Ottawa. He found it ridiculously easy to find people embedded deep in the Canadian defense establishment who would willingly give him anything he wanted; usually for free.
In addition, he said it was not uncommon for people to walk into the Russian embassy in Ottawa and leave boxes of top secret documents at the front counter.
Similarly, he said it was easy to find willing informants in Washington, although it usually took a little longer.
As a consequence, he said that the Russians were always well informed as to the capabilities and characteristics of most of the west’s weapons systems. Most of the designs were in Russian hands as they were being developed as works in progress; the final designs were delivered in due course.
Also, the Russians were well informed about both the political and military strategies of most of the western nations.
There is no reason to believe that anything has changed to this day.

14

Probably because the Russians didn’t waste time and resources collecting baby photos.

15

I don’t know what the mystery is here; they had good spies because they put an enormous amount of resources and effort into their intelligence service. They also had a great many BAD spies, of course, because the point is they had, and have, a huge number of spies. Espionage and deception is a central tenet of Russian statecraft. Russia is inherently a distrusting polity; they expect the worst of everyone else and are looking for it.

Why does the UK punch above ITS weight in spycraft? Same reason. They’ve been reliant on spies, moles and informants since the days of Elizabeth I, and they’ve generally been good at it, which motivates them to continue using it as a method of self defense. That can’t be because of Communism, or really any sort of ideological bent, since the UK isn’t a particularly ideological country. They just put a lot of value into spying.

16

I recall reading an interview with one of the old defectors when the Berlin Wall fell. Basically, his co-opting into the Soviet spy apparatus started in college.

As mentioned, a lot of the western left-wing idealists thought the Soviet was a worker’s paradise well on the way to being heaven on earth. It was founded by like-minded left-wing idealists in 1917, before Lenin and then Stalin had them arrested and killed for being too idealistic. For several of the deep moles in the British government, the fellow said they were attracted by the Soviet declarations of human rights, specifically that gays were not to be persecuted. A large number of these Oxbridge upper-crust types were attracted by this, and by the time Stalin’s prudish homophobia became law in the early 30’s it was too late, they were already committing treason and too deep to get out. That was his quote, that their decision to spy was influenced primarily by the tolerance of homosexuality.

Remember that even after WWII, Turing was a prominent figure in helping the British war effort - yet still prosecuted / persecuted by the British authorities for homosexuality until he committed suicide. It’s not hard to imagine people thinking a tolerant society was far more progressive, to the point of being blind to its other flaws.

But yes, a lot of the communist parties of the west were Soviet sympathizers, they could do no wrong in the same way that adherents of Democrats and Republicans in the USA will parrot their party’s talking points and refuse to criticize their won politicians while demonizing the other side.

17

It turns out some of those “useful idiots” were much less useful than originally believed. Of course, Kim Philby was arguably the most productive spy ever, but his intelligence was largely unused.

18

Other than our own stolen information what were we supposed to learn from spies in Stalin’s Russia?

19

Knowing about your own stolen information is every bit as important as stealing other peoples’. How do you think you catch spies?

20

Let’s not go overboard. I’m willing to bet the Soviets were collecting baby photos and far more. Take all the paranoia in the American spy system and multiple it by ten.