The Czarist Russia had a secret police before the Soviet Union, and modern Russia still has intelligence services that may have been impacted by events during the Soviet period. While there were penetration accusations after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the great mass of large-scale accusations and purges, after Stalin consolidated power but before WWII, tend to blur into the
Great Terror. After Stalin's death,
Lavrenti Beria, heading state security, attempted to gain control, but was shot and his subordinates purged.
Anatoliy Golitsyn Yuri Nosenko Oleg Penkovsky Oleg Penkovsky was a UK-US defector in place, in an extremely key position in the Soviet system. His position was such that he not only was able to provide information about what the Soviets had learned about the West, but also about the real capabilities of the Soviets. A book,
The Penkovsky Papers, was prepared, posthumously, with assistance from US intelligence. A 1976 Senate commission stated that "the book was prepared and written by witting agency assets who drew on actual case materials." Much of the material provided by Penkovsky has been declassified.
Petr Popov Adolf Tolkachev Vladimir Vetrov One example of counter-intelligence in action involves the case of Soviet defector
Vladimir Vetrov, codenamed "Farewell," who gave several classified documents in 1981 to French Intelligence detailing
industrial espionage committed by the
Soviet Union in various western nations in a collection called the
Farewell Dossier. The information was passed on to the
Central Intelligence Agency, who exploited it by secretly preparing sabotaged "intelligence" for Soviet spies to collect. After the Soviet's incorporated the flawed industrial technology, it caused numerous technical failures in the
USSR including a massive
oil pipeline explosion which damaged the economy.
Igor Gouzenkov ==UK counterespionage failures==