In Stalin's Secret Service: Memoirs of the First Soviet Master Spy to Defect

by W.G. Krivitsky

Walter Krivitsky was the first Soviet spymaster to defect to the West in 1937. He sought safety in the United States and found time to write his account of his defection and knowledge of Stalin’s many crimes. A classic text of espionage history last published in 1939.

Genres: Russia, History, Espionage, Nonfiction, Politics, Memoir

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Drew]

Pretty captivating read. Well written. Through most of it you feel as if you are right in the middle of the Purge yourself. Complete insanity as witnessed firsthand. This was also published right on the eve of WWII, giving his insight added significance for those of us who know what came next...

[Charles Goodwell]

A military intelligence officer of Soviet Union defected in 1939 and revealed the inside Stalin grinding machine. A very important witness of the Moscow process and concentration camps.

[Monica Perez]

Fascinating and sad.

[György]

Nehány publikus dokumentum az FBI honlapjan W.G. Krivitsky-ről: http://vault.fbi.gov/Walter%20Krivitsky

[Brent L.]

A defector's account of his time working for the Russian KGB.

[Fingon]

This book was the first I read on the subject written by someone who was on the inside, and not a victim of the purge or a historian. So, a plus there for new perspective.

Now, this is a memoir, and one written by a person who had many reasons to hate Stalin (not to mention characters like Yezhov), so the facts from the book shouldn't be taken for granted and merit further research, if the reader is interested in the history of USSR in the 1930s.

Krivitsky writes mostly about the stuff happening in 1936 and 1937 (he defected in the summer of 1937, soon after Tukhachevsky and his 'group' were executed in Moscow), with mentions of collectivization and Party's war against peasants. Some parts are very interesting (Spanish civil war, Comintern and foreign communists in USSR, confessions of the Old Bolsheviks) and some less so, but what can be clearly read is the atmosphere that pervaded Moscow and USSR as the purge began and got wider and wider, especially when reading about the period that Krivitsky spent in Moscow in the spring of 1937, when every single person is aware that they may end up in prison (and subsequently shot) at literally any moment, no matter if they are a people's commissar, Central Committee member, NKVD agent or ordinary worker. So, another plus.

Finally, final chapter can be taken as a basis for a spy blockbuster scenario. One more plus.

And I would very much like to know what would Krivitsky's take be on the German attack on the USSR, since he didn't live to hear about it. And whether he would fight in the US army against Germany or go back to Europe.

[Pam]

18 months after publishing this book, Krivitsky was murdered in the USA.