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Similar but not the same In search of a methodology in the Cold- War communist intelligence studies
The main purpose of this paper is to consider whether the analytical techniques elaborated in Western research methodology regarding intelligence can be used in studies on communist intelligence services during the Cold War. In view of the serious deficit of what might be called " local " studies of this type, the point of departure of these reflections must begin with a summary of the existing scholarly knowledge – informational, interpretational and method-ological. The second part of the paper will describe and reinterpret the existing attempts to compare various aspects of activities of Soviet-type intelligence with the practices of analogous organisations in Western countries in reference to archival sources and post-Soviet literature.
Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research. Edited by Andrej Kotljarchuk & Olle Sundström. Stockholm , 2017
In Chapter 2, Andrey Savin turns the attention to the “ethnification” of Stalin’s terror. Seen from the perspective of recent studies and newly available archival sources, Savin argues that the NKVD directives and the documents of prosecutors’ inspections describe sweeping mass arrests of members of “Western” minorities without any evidence for any crimes. He also shows that the Stalinist leadership and the NKVD perceived certain national minorities as hostile and “counter-revolutionary” as early as the 1920s. In the mid-1930s, this concept was taken as the ideological basis of ethnic cleansing. The specificity of the national operations minimized Party and state control over the actions of the NKVD, which had the main influence on the magnitude of arrests and executions. Savin notes that on the one hand the determinant factor in the fate of the victims of the national operations was the outer signs of their belonging to a “malicious” ethnic group. On the other hand, his local study on the implementation of the German operation in Western Siberia casts doubt on the unambiguity of such an interpretation.
Western Allied Intelligence and the German Military Document Section, 1945-1946
In the year following the end of the second world war in Europe, various high-ranking Wehrmacht officers agreed to work for a co-ordinated US, British, and Canadian military intelligence operation called the ‘Hill Project’. This endeavor, which eventually expanded to almost 200 German prisoners of war, conducted research and analysis of the German Military Document Section at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and produced over 3600 pages of reports for the Western Allied governments. The Hill Project constitutes a little-known aspect of the interesting postwar relationship between the West and their former enemies. This article examines the main goals of this program and the kind of information these research projects provided to Western Allied military intelligence. It contends that during its operation at Camp Ritchie, the main body of work completed by the Hill Project studied Wehrmacht methods as a means to potentially improve the structure and procedures of the Western Allied armies. Moreover, a select group of the Hill Project prisoners later transferred to Fort Hunt, Virginia, and assisted in preparing a defense of Western Europe against a potential invasion by the Soviet Army.
The article discusses some of the theses presented in Rosyjski sztylet. Działalność wywiadu nielegalnego by Col. Andrzej Kowalski. The former director of the Polish Military Coun- terintelligence Service presents the most important aspects of the illegal intelligence of the former USSR. On that foundation, he analyzes media and news about the contem- porary intelligence activities of the Russian Federation. He concludes that the use of ille- gal intelligence is still an important element of the Russian strategy and poses an underap- preciated threat to the West. The book is not free of mistakes, namely that some statements cannot be confirmed by the sources. Nevertheless, it is a valuable research perspective; it’s greatest value being the practical knowledge and experience of the author.