Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy

Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy PDF Author: Raymond Hutchings
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780389207542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The book provides a comprehensive description and analysis of Soviet secrecy: how national security differs from the private sort, and how this secrecy influences information policy, both domestic and international. What is kept secret is defined and the means by which secrets are kept are described at length. Also examined are the cause and origins of Soviet secrecy. Comparisons are also made with secrecy in other countries.

Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy

Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy PDF Author: Raymond Hutchings
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780389207542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The book provides a comprehensive description and analysis of Soviet secrecy: how national security differs from the private sort, and how this secrecy influences information policy, both domestic and international. What is kept secret is defined and the means by which secrets are kept are described at length. Also examined are the cause and origins of Soviet secrecy. Comparisons are also made with secrecy in other countries.

Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy

Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : National security
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Nonmilitary Secrecy Under Soviet Law

Nonmilitary Secrecy Under Soviet Law PDF Author: Peter B. Maggs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Censorship
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Smersh

Smersh PDF Author: Dr. Vadim Birstein
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1849546894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
SMERSH is the award-winning account of the top-secret counterintelligence organisation that dealt with Stalin's enemies from within the shadowy recesses of Soviet government. As James Bond's nemesis in Ian Fleming's novels, SMERSH and its operatives were depicted in exotic duels with 007, rather than fostering the bleak oppression and terror they actually spread in the name of their dictator. Stalin drew a veil of secrecy over SMERSH's operations in 1946, but that did not stop him using it to terrify Red Army dissenters in Leningrad and Moscow, or to abduct and execute suspected spooks - often without cause - across mainland Europe. Formed to mop up Nazi spy rings at the end of the Second World War, SMERSH gained its name from a combination of the Russian words for 'Death to Spies'. Successive Communist governments suppressed traces of Stalin's political hit squad; now Vadim Birstein lays bare the surgical brutality with which it exerted its influence as part of the paranoid regime, both within the Soviet Union and in the wider world. SMERSH was the most mysterious and secret of organisations - this definitive and magisterial history finally reveals truths that lay buried for nearly fifty years.

Secret Leviathan

Secret Leviathan PDF Author: Mark Harrison
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503635848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged: it raised transaction costs, incentivized indecision, compromised the effectiveness of government officials, eroded citizens' trust in institutions and in each other, and led to a secretive society and an uninformed elite. The result is what this book calls the secrecy/capacity tradeoff: a bargain in which the Soviet state accepted the reduction of state capacity as the cost of ensuring its own survival. This book is the first comprehensive, analytical, multi-faceted history of Soviet secrecy in the English language. Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Based on multiple years of research in once-secret Soviet-era archives, this book addresses two gaps in history and social science: one the core role of secrecy in building and stabilizing the communist states of the twentieth century; the other the corrosive effects of secrecy on the capabilities of authoritarian states.

Soviet Secrecy

Soviet Secrecy PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 39

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Book Description


Sacred Secrets

Sacred Secrets PDF Author: Jerrold L. Schecter
Publisher: Potomac Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
Analyzes how government secrets, such as President Truman??'s decision to make a sacred secret of the Venona intercepts, distort politics and our understanding of history

The Secret Police and the Soviet System

The Secret Police and the Soviet System PDF Author: Michael David-Fox
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822990180
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.

The Venona Secrets

The Venona Secrets PDF Author: Herbert Romerstein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1596987324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
The Venona Secretspresents one of the last great, untold stories of World War II and the Cold War. In 1995, secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s that the United States intercepted and eventually decrypted finally became available to American historians. Now, after spending more than five years researching all the available evidence, espionage experts Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel reveal the full, shocking story of the days when Soviet spies ran their fingers through America's atomic-age secrets. Included in The Venona Secrets are the details of the spying activities that reached from Harry Hopkins in Franklin Roosevelt s White House to Alger Hiss in the State Department to Harry Dexter White in the Treasury. More than that, The Venona Secrets exposes: • Information that links Albert Einstein to Soviet intelligence and conclusive evidence showing that J. Robert Oppenheimer gave Moscow our atomic secrets. • How Soviet espionage reached its height when the United States and the Soviet Union were supposedly allies in World War II. • The previously unsuspected vast network of Soviet spies in America. • How the Venona documents confirm the controversial revelations made in the 1940s by former Soviet agents Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. • The role of the American Communist Party in supporting and directing Soviet agents. • How Stalin s paranoia had him target Jews (code-named Rats ) and Trotskyites even after Trotsky’s death. • How the Soviets penetrated America’s own intelligence services. The Venona Secrets is a masterful compendium of spy versus spy that puts the Venona transcripts in context with secret FBI reports, congressional investigations, and documents recently uncovered in the former Soviet archives. Romerstein and Breindel cast a spotlight on one of the most shadowy episodes in recent American history - a past when by our very own government officials, whether wittingly or unwittingly, shielded treason infected Washington and Soviet agents.

Churchill's Secret War With Lenin

Churchill's Secret War With Lenin PDF Author: Damien Wright
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 1913118118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
An account of the little-known involvement of Royal Marines as they engaged the new Bolsheviks immediately after the Russian Revolution. After three years of great loss and suffering on the Eastern Front, Imperial Russia was in crisis and on the verge of revolution. In November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks (later known as “Soviets”) seized power, signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers and brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas (British King George’s first cousin) and his children so there could be no return to the old order. As Russia fractured into loyalist “White” and revolutionary “Red” factions, the British government became increasingly drawn into the escalating Russian Civil War after hundreds of thousands of German troops transferred from the Eastern Front to France were used in the 1918 “Spring Offensive” which threatened Paris. What began with the landing of a small number of Royal Marines at Murmansk in March 1918 to protect Allied-donated war stores quickly escalated with the British government actively pursuing an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks on several fronts in support of British trained and equipped “White Russian” Allies. At the height of British military intervention in mid-1919, British troops were fighting the Soviets far into the Russian interior in the Baltic, North Russia, Siberia, Caspian and Crimea simultaneously. The full range of weapons in the British arsenal were deployed including the most modern aircraft, tanks and even poison gas. British forces were also drawn into peripheral conflicts against “White” Finnish troops in North Russia and the German “Iron Division” in the Baltic. It remains a little-known fact that the last British troops killed by the German Army in the First World War were killed in the Baltic in late 1919, nor that the last Canadian and Australian soldiers to die in the First World War suffered their fate in North Russia in 1919 many months after the Armistice. Despite the award of five Victoria Crosses (including one posthumous) and the loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen, most of whom remain buried in Russia, the campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today. After withdrawal of all British forces in mid-1920, the British government attempted to cover up its military involvement in Russia by classifying all official documents. By the time files relating to the campaign were quietly released decades later there was little public interest. Few people in Britain today know that their nation ever fought a war against the Soviet Union. The culmination of more than 15 years of painstaking and exhaustive research with access to many previously classified official documents, unpublished diaries, manuscripts and personal accounts, author Damien Wright has written the first comprehensive campaign history of British and Commonwealth military intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-20. “Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War remains forgotten. Wright’s book addresses that oversight, interspersing the broader story with personal accounts of participants.” —Military History Magazine