The Chekist Craft, Part VI: A Service Measures Its Success by the Other Side's Losses
07/26/26
Author: The Security Nexus, LLC.
Date: 26 July 26
Estimated read time: 11 min
Volume VI closes Istoriya rossiyskoy vneshney razvedki, covering 1966 to 2005 — détente, the second Cold War of the Reagan years, the Soviet collapse, and the SVR's own founding under Yevgeny Primakov, who also happens to be the chief editor of the six-volume history you are reading. At under 260 pages it is the shortest volume in the series and, tonally, the strangest: nearly a third of it is reprinted speeches and press interviews by SVR directors rather than narrative chapters, as if the institution wanted its own officials' words entered into the historical record verbatim rather than filtered through a chapter author. That choice is itself worth noting, and the volume's preface makes an argument that deserves to be read against the volume's own timeline rather than accepted on its face: that Soviet, then Russian, intelligence can point to its Cold War successes indirectly, by counting the American officials and officers who turned out to be its agents. The preface names them itself — the Walkers, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, Edward Lee Howard, Glenn Souther — as evidence of penetration into the CIA, FBI, NSA, and naval cryptographic services (Primakov 2014, 12–13). It is a genuinely remarkable list. It is also a strange way to measure the record of a service whose government collapsed anyway, in real time, while some of that penetration was ongoing.
This is the sixth and final installment in Security Nexus's series on Soviet and Russian intelligence tradecraft, following our reading of Volumes I through V. Where the earlier volumes traced a service built on ideological recruitment, gutted twice by purges of its own making, and repeatedly whiplashed by institutional reorganization, Volume VI shows that same service outliving the state that created it — and it does so candidly enough, in places, to let the reader draw conclusions the SVR's own editors do not quite draw themselves.
What Washington Actually Wrote Down
The volume's preface leans hard on a specific piece of declassified American doctrine: NSC-68, the 1950 Truman-era National Security Council directive that set Cold War strategy for decades and was declassified in 1975. The preface quotes its stated objective plainly — "achieving a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system" — and pairs it with the successor Reagan-era directive, NSC-75, signed in January 1983, arguing that Soviet intelligence had comprehensive documentary insight into both (Primakov 2014, 7–8). The volume adds a specific, verifiable detail: Reagan's SIOP-6 strategic nuclear targeting plan, signed in 1980, was the last such integrated plan Soviet intelligence is documented as having tracked (Primakov 2014, 9). It also quotes a declassified 1986 CIA report on Soviet hard-currency shortages, in which American analysts assessed that falling energy prices and declining oil production would constrain Soviet capacity to import Western equipment and materials through the end of the decade — and that Gorbachev's hoped-for currency gains to fund economic recovery were unlikely to materialize (Primakov 2014, 11). Whatever one makes of the volume's broader framing, this specific claim is falsifiable and, as far as it goes, checks out against the historical record: Soviet hard-currency income did collapse in exactly this way, and the economic strain did contribute materially to the pressures that ended the Soviet state five years later.
The Confession Inside the Afghanistan Chapter
The volume's sixth chapter, "Afghanistan, December 1979 (Through an Eyewitness's Eyes)," is unusual for an official service history: it reads as a genuine first-person reckoning rather than institutional narrative. The unnamed author — evidently a senior First Chief Directorate officer who spent December 1979 in Kabul under Vladimir Kryuchkov's direct instruction — opens by rejecting the now-standard verdict that the invasion itself was the mistake. His argument instead is that the ten-year occupation that followed was the actual catastrophe, and he attributes that judgment in real time to Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev and General Valentin Varennikov, both of whom he recalls saying, in hushed tones during Moscow briefings, "understand, the Soviet army is fighting the people, and there can be no victory in Afghanistan" (Primakov 2014, 79–80). He is equally direct that intelligence officers were ordered to destroy their operational records after the December 27 operation and that he personally burned notes documenting events "by the day and hour, even by the minute" (Primakov 2014, 79). Without re-litigating the operational details he says are already public — Hafizullah Amin's palace stormed, his predecessor Nur Muhammad Taraki strangled on Amin's own order, four of Amin's former allies smuggled out of the country in specially built coffins, Babrak Karmal eventually replaced by Najibullah — the author states plainly that he was sent to Kabul in November 1979 with instructions from Kryuchkov to help the Parcham faction "finish off" Amin, whom Moscow had assessed as both a brutal dictator and a man showing signs of reorienting toward Washington (Primakov 2014, 80–81). This is about as close to an unvarnished institutional confession as an official SVR history is likely to produce, and it sits inside the same volume that elsewhere counts Cold War penetration of American agencies as the measure of the service's success — without ever connecting the two facts into the obvious question: what good is winning the espionage war against a state whose own political leadership is losing the actual war it started.
Counting the Wrong Thing
Return to that list — the Walkers, Ames, Hanssen, Howard, Souther — and the preface's own logic collapses under a moment's scrutiny. These were Cold War-era assets, most of them run and exposed across the very two decades (1970s–1990s) this volume covers, and the preface offers them as indirect proof of the service's operational strength during exactly the period the state they served ceased to exist. Robert Hanssen was still active inside the FBI when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991; Aldrich Ames continued reporting from inside the CIA for two more years after that. The preface's own framing — "let the reader judge for himself how well intelligence was doing, and which of the adversary's targets it managed to penetrate" (Primakov 2014, 13) — invites exactly the comparison it does not make explicitly: a security service can be winning its own bureaucratic competition against a rival service while the government both serve is a lost cause. Volume VI documents, more clearly than any of its five predecessors, an intelligence apparatus that had gotten very good at exactly the wrong metric.
Continuity Preserved Deliberately
The volume's final act is the SVR's own founding, and here the personal stakes for the volume's chief editor become explicit: Yevgeny Primakov was appointed director of what was still, in September 1991, the KGB's First Chief Directorate, and it was under his direction that the service was pulled out of the KGB entirely in October 1991 and reconstituted as an independent Foreign Intelligence Service the following year, with its first dedicated legal charter in the service's history (Primakov 2014, 13–14). Primakov is quoted directly reframing the service's operating doctrine for the post-Soviet period: rather than a fixed "principal adversary," intelligence would now identify adversaries and allies case by case, "based on real actions that violate or may violate Russia's interests" (Primakov 2014, 14). The volume credits Primakov specifically with the deliberate choice to preserve institutional continuity — retaining personnel, tradecraft, and organizational memory — rather than treating the collapse of the state as an opportunity to rebuild from nothing (Primakov 2014, 14). Whatever else one makes of the volume's editorial choices, that continuity claim is the one an outside reader can actually verify: the same organizational lineage this six-volume history traces from Dzerzhinsky's Cheka through the purges, the war, and the Cold War did, in fact, survive 1991 intact enough to commission and publish its own official history two decades later.
What Six Volumes Actually Add Up To
Closing out this series, three threads run continuously from Volume I through this one, and Volume VI's own preface inadvertently reinforces all three. First, ideological recruitment was the service's genuine competitive advantage across every era — Philby's generation, Kummerov's generation, and (per this volume's own account) the ideologically driven American assets of the Cold War's final decades all outperformed anything the service bought with money. Second, every volume in this series documents the same organization inflicting serious, sometimes catastrophic damage on its own operational capacity through purges and factional score-settling — the Great Terror in Volume III, Kobulov's patronage appointment in Volume IV, Beria's 1953 purge in Volume V, and this volume's own account of Kryuchkov and Shebarshin managing the service through a state actively dissolving around them. Third, structural reorganization frequency tracks remarkably well with institutional vulnerability across all six volumes — the service performed best in the stretches where it was left alone to run itself, and worst in the years immediately following a reorganization imposed from above for political rather than operational reasons. A service history commissioned by the institution it describes will always tell its story as one of vindication. Read carefully, and read against its own timeline rather than its own framing, this one tells a more useful story instead: about the gap between winning an intelligence contest and winning the war your government is actually fighting, and about how often the second kind of failure gets absorbed into a service's institutional memory as someone else's problem.
SOURCES
Primakov, Yevgeny M., ed. 2014. Istoriya rossiyskoy vneshney razvedki: Ocherki v shesti tomakh, Tom VI: 1966–2005 gody. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya.
