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The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West - Hardcover

Walker, Shaun

 
9780593319680: The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593319680 ISBN 13: 9780593319680
Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

The definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West.

More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as  “illegals.” During the Second World War, illegals were dispatched behind enemy lines to assassinate high-ranking Nazis. Later, in the Cold War, they were sent to assimilate and lie low as sleepers in the West. The greatest among them performed remarkable feats, while many others failed in their missions or cracked under the strain of living a double life.


Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, as well as archival research in more than a dozen countries, Shaun Walker brings this history to life in a page-turning tour de force that takes us into the heart of the KGB’s most secretive program. A riveting spy drama peopled with richly drawn characters, The Illegals also uncovers a hidden thread in the story of Russia itself. As Putin extols Soviet achievements and the KGB’s espionage prowess, and Moscow continues to infiltrate illegals across the globe, this timely narrative shines new light on the long arc of the Soviet experiment, its messy aftermath, and its influence on our world at large.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SHAUN WALKER is an international correspondent for The Guardian. He reported from Moscow for more than a decade and is the author of The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past. He currently divides his time between Warsaw, Kyiv, and London.

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1

Roots: The Bolshevik Underground

In the predawn gloom of a damp autumn morning in October 1902, a hansom cab drew up outside 30 Holford Street, one of a terrace of three-story houses not far from London’s St. Pancras Station. A man in his early twenties, his wiry frame wrapped in a dark cloak, sprang from the passenger compartment. In halting English, he told the driver to wait: he had no money. The man had reached the final destination of a long journey that had started in the isolated settlement of Verkholensk in deepest Siberia. He had traveled by sleigh, boat, and train, assuming several different identities at various points during the epic voyage via St. Petersburg, Munich, and Vienna. He found the door he was looking for and rapped out three loud knocks.

The lodgings, which comprised two shabby and sparsely furnished rooms, were rented from a widowed dressmaker by a German couple who had arrived in London a few months earlier. Dr. Jacob Richter was an intense man in his early thirties, prematurely bald and with a neatly clipped mustache and goatee beard. Richter noted the triple knock, code for a visitor on secret business, and his bleary-eyed wife jumped out of bed to answer the door. Faced with an evidently just-roused Mrs. Richter, the man on the doorstep apologized for not waiting until a more civilized hour. He explained, in excited bursts of quick-fire Russian, that he was still charged with energy due to his recent escape from Siberia and that he hoped the couple had been warned about his arrival. He also mentioned, rather sheepishly, that they would need to pay for his cab.

Dr. Richter, peering over his wife’s shoulder, quickly guessed the identity of the visitor.

“Aha!” he exclaimed with enthusiasm. “The Pen has arrived!”

Dr. Richter’s real name was Vladimir Ulyanov. He was a political theorist from the Social Democrats, a fringe party fighting the tsarist regime in Russia. “Richter” was just one of more than a hundred aliases he used during his long years in the underground. He later became known to the world under the assumed name with which he made his reputation as a Marxist theorist—Lenin.

Lev Bronstein, Lenin’s visitor that morning in October 1902, also went through dozens of aliases in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. Lenin knew him as the Pen because of the young firebrand’s ability to write impassioned, coruscating prose. Bronstein would become famous under the name he had used on some papers forged hastily for this most recent Siberian escape: Trotsky. It was the first meeting of two men who, fifteen years later, would dramatically alter the course of global history.

The Bolsheviks, Lenin’s wing of the Social Democrats, were a small but ruthlessly well-organized group. The tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, invested huge resources into tracking and infiltrating revolutionary movements. To keep the Okhrana off their scent, the Bolsheviks employed a code known as konspiratsiya, the meaning of which was closer to “subterfuge” than to the English “conspiracy.” A set of complex rules, a rigid behavioral code, and a way of life, the overarching aim of konspiratsiya was to keep party operatives undercover and undetected, and it was used by many groups of anti-tsarist revolutionaries.

By the time Trotsky met Lenin in London, both men were already well versed in the tenets of konspiratsiya. Over the next decade, false papers and pseudonyms became a matter of course among party operatives, and in sensitive correspondence they used code names or numbers to hide the real identities of comrades. Sometimes, letters containing secret plans were written in lemon juice or chlorine, transposed over a letter written in ink on an innocuous theme, and addressed to an invented recipient. The invisible writing could later be “developed” by treating the pages with chemicals to reveal the hidden text.

Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya (“Mrs. Richter”), oversaw day-to-day contact between those in the underground inside Russia and “the Center,” as Lenin and the party leadership in exile were known. She deciphered secret letters, developed new codes to stay ahead of the Okhrana, and briefed comrades who arrived in London.

Outside Russia, Lenin and Krupskaya could afford to relax the rules of konspiratsiya a little. His flimsy charade as Dr. Richter did not stand up to much scrutiny: He often addressed gatherings of workers in London in Russian, and meetings with comrades arriving from elsewhere in Europe were held under thin pretext—in one case disguised as a conference of foreign barbers in the upstairs room of a London pub. Police in most European countries largely left Russian émigrés alone.

Surviving undercover inside Russia was a different matter entirely, with the Okhrana an ever-present danger. In 1905, Lenin decided he should return to the country after a massacre by the tsar’s troops in St. Petersburg stirred revolutionary sentiment. He traveled back to his homeland using false British papers in the name of William Frey. Krupskaya joined him a few days later, trailed on the train into Russia by an Okhrana spy. In St. Petersburg, the couple tried to lie low in an apartment belonging to friends of Lenin’s sister, but they soon realized the Okhrana had the place under close surveillance. They slipped out of the apartment, evaded the watchers, and spent the next few days moving between a succession of Bolshevik safe houses. Fearful of being arrested and sent back to Siberia, Lenin only occasionally ventured outside.

One day in March 1906, Lenin noticed he was being followed, so he slipped his tail and scurried to the railway station. He jumped on a train to Finland, where he hid for a while. He returned in May, this time using Russian documents with the surname Chkheidze; Krupskaya had acquired a passport that identified her as Praskoviya Onegina. Despite their disguises and false papers, the couple soon had to flee again for the relative safety of Finland. There, Lenin assumed yet another identity—that of Professor Müller, a German geologist studying Finnish limestone deposits. From Finland, he sent couriers back into Russia with instructions and texts for dissemination. Toward the end of 1907, the Okhrana began to close in on his Finnish hideout, forcing him to make a dramatic escape: he jumped off a moving train, then sped across a barely frozen strip of water by sledge. Finally, he made it back to the safety of Geneva. Although he was still a marginal figure on the Russian political scene, Lenin was already too well known to stay at liberty inside the Russian Empire, even in disguise. He would not return to Russia until 1917, the year of the revolution.

Back in the safety of Western Europe, Lenin set about defining Bolshevik strategy in the new political environment. He divided activities into two different categories: “legal” and “illegal” party work. Legal work included everything the Bolsheviks could do openly, such as agitation among workers, taking part in public debates, or pushing to create labor unions and cooperatives. “Illegal” work included the distribution of radical literature and the coordination of the party underground. Not all “illegal” work was necessarily outside the law, just as not all “legal” work was fully compliant. A better rendering of the meaning of the Russian word nelegalnaya in this context is “clandestine” or “underground.” Legal party activists operated in the open, using their own name, while illegals disguised their real purpose and often their identities too. They employed the rules of konspiratsiya in their contacts...

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Verlag
Knopf Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593319680
ISBN 13 
9780593319680
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
433
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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