The Dark Lord of Mordor

Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service reminds us that the Soviet Union's battle with its capitalist enemies had important clandestine dimensions. The story of Cy Oggins, an American spy entangled (along with his wife) in the clash of ideologies, illuminates a great deal about interwar espionage, radical politics in America, and the ties that bound American and Soviet strands of communism together.



Oggins' story begins right before the First World War. At that time, many American workers as well as Ivy League intellectuals, immigrants, and pacifists were irresistibly drawn to radical politics. Cy Oggins' journey to the extreme left of American life wasn't all that unusual. Soviet Russia filled many of his countrymen with rapture. Wasn't it extraordinary that a regime had chosen land and peace over war and colonialism, chosen a red flag, the symbol of the workers' struggle, or selected a revolutionary national anthem, the Internationale? As Maier points out, many Americans were so inspired that they actually supported a new form of Russian tourism for those who wished to see what the future looked like. Or, to put matters the way Meier does, this was an epoch in which the theories behind great 19th century economic treatises were "spilling out onto the streets."



Oggins had plenty of reasons to be inspired by Russia, and plenty of other reasons to be repulsed by Russia's capitalist opponents. In addition to the general complaints about bourgeois exploitation of American workers (and indeed Cuban and Philippine ones), the Left had reason to complain about the way America's ruling class abused its power in undemocratic, illegal actions against worker-supported parties and movements. This was the age of the Wobblies, Emma Goldman and anarchists, Maurice Hindus, war resisters, Beard and Dewey, etc. And overseas, this was also the age of the Comintern, when the Soviet Union was, at least theoretically, only the nexus of an international strategy to liberate working people everywhere. Indeed, Meier reminds us that even in Russia ordinary Communists waited from one day to the next for the German Revolution that Marx had promised.



And all this Left-wing excitement existed even before the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed be collapsing even from the perspective of its greatest proponents in Washington and on Wall Street.



The Lost Spy does a wonderful job of showing readers why communism was so exciting. It also explains how international spy networks functioned, and how valuable so-called "traitors" could be to Moscow, euphemistically called The Center by its various agents abroad. Oggins ended up tracking White Russians and Trotskyites in France, and Japanese militarism in Shanghai and the Far East puppet state of Manchukuo. The book also tracks the hazards of working for Stalin. Many of the Oggins' friends were executed in Stalin's Great Purges. Most others were at least forced to confront some bitter truths about the Great Leader, as Stalin was sometimes known, including the fact that he eventually chose to ally himself with Nazi Germany. Oggins himself ended up in Lubyanka, one of the most infamous prisons in Russia, before being sent to a concentration camp in the distant north, where he inevitably died.



Ultimately, The Lost Spy elucidates the strange interplay between the ordinary and extraordinary in the secret life of spies. One minute the book is about a traveling man's sad inability to spend time with his seven year son; the next minute the book is about how a single spy could be of value to the Generalissimo as he sought to come to grips with Trotsky's Fourth Internationale or indeed the Empire of Japan. But as interesting as Meier makes his spies seem, Stalin is even more interesting. In this book, Stalin is Souron from the Lord of the Rings, searching out resisters across the world with a roving eye, no matter how small or seemingly innocuous. In this world, Trotsky's apparently futile resistance, takes on new significance. Even as his son and closest supporters fall to the rising tide of evil, Trotsky's hobbit-like opposition continued to occupy the thoughts of the Dark Lord of Mordor right up until an ice pick put an end to him.

Postscript: Cy Oggins was survived by his wife by 50 years. Ms. Oggins died at the age of 97, a fervent believer in the Communist ideal until the end. Cy died at the hands of Russian Mengelee, a mad Soviet scientist who performed medical experiments on gulag prisoners for Beria and his henchmen. Cy was killed by means of an insidious poison which paralyzed him even as he remained conscious. In the end, the author concluded that Cy was imprisoned because his spymaster had attempted to flee from the Soviet underground. Whenever a spy attempted to defect, it was a routine matter to "roll up" anybody connected to him. In these circumstances, Cy couldn't be released. It wasn't that he would betray the secrets of the gulag. Many in the West already knew about then. It was that he had the ability to betray the entire Soviet system of espionage. Oggins' case came up again the Yeltsin era, with the historian Volkogonov wrongly insisting that Oggins was an innocent man, unconnected with any underground activity for either side, who had been killed in cold blood by the criminal Soviet regime.

Red Army

As late as 1988, the Soviet Union was churning out anti-imperialist propaganda, including deputy chief of the Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Navy, Alexei Sorokin’s, short tract on the virtues of the Red Army entitled “The Soviet Army—The Army of the People.” Sorokin’s pamphlet gives readers a concise history of the accomplishments of the USSR’s armed forces, but the pamphlet’s cover photo of a Russian soldier being given flowers by a peasant woman a kiss by a little peasant girl.



At bottom, the author contends that the Red Army was better than its Western counterparts in that it was an instrument of popular sovereignty and revolutionary morality rather than one of imperialism and capitalist aggression. While ignoring Trotsky’s colossal contributions to its formation, the author notes that Lenin called upon the people to defend the Revolution against German militarists, foreign interventionists, and counter-revolutionaries. (Marx and Engels had already given theoretical justification to Lenin’s resolve to suppress inevitable counter-attacks of the landlord class and its international allies).



Political enlightenment lay at the heart of Red Army successes: Communist Party members stiffened the resolve of ordinary soldiers and ensured the loyalty of former tsarist officers whose expertise, the author admits, proved invaluable to the inexperienced Red Army officer class. At first, the author claims that the military strategy was decided by Lenin and a small group of senior Party officials, although this gave way to a unified command system in the middle of the 1920s. As literacy expanded dramatically as a result of communist educational ideals, the Soviet Army became increasingly efficient. The 1920s also saw the Army implementing a system of formal bigotry against anyone who was not fortunate enough to hail from the working classes (although this principle of exclusion was later revoked when class differences had been “ended”).



The growing power of the Soviet army eventually led to the country’s greatest triumph, the defeat of the mighty NAZI war machine. Interestingly, Sorokin notes that the Germany armed forces had grown strong as a result of the investment by America and its allies in the German economy during the interwar years, but skips over Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Germany, as well as the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or indeed the Russian invasion of Poland and other Eastern European states before operation Barbarossa. However, the author’s adjective for the premeditated attack by German is “perfidious,” a term that at least hints at the embarrassing fact that Communist Russia had some reason to expect cooperation from Hitler.

At any rate, Sorokin rightly attests to the heroism of the Soviet Army, and the brutality of the invading forces that can be linked to the deaths of 20 million Soviet citizens. Clearly, the Revolution—indeed all revolutions—need defending. Witness the unfortunate demise of the interwar experiments with communism such as that of Hungary and Bavaria.

Sorokin is rightly proud of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War and battles such as Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad, and the role the Red Army played in the liberation of 13 different European and Asian nations. One of his ongoing themes is that Communist Party members were particularly heroic in such battles and suffered disproportionate losses relative to ordinary Russian citizens, a theme that must have been appealing to old line Bolsheviks in the age of glasnost and perestroika.

Soviet successes were also predicated on the superiority of Communist principles. Collectivized farms even produced more food for the army than would have otherwise been the case. The author acknowledges allied assistance but notes that Russia was responsible for the great bulk of German losses. Of course, Sorokin says very little about American leadership in the Pacific War, and says nothing about the Lend-Lease program. In fact, Sorokin insists that the Soviets played a large role in the Japanese capitulation owing to the Soviet route of its one million man Kwangtung army. Moreover, he says that the American decision to drop the bomb was meant to intimidate Russian and the world rather than to win the war against Japan. Needless to say, Sorokin says nothing at all is said about Stalin’s disastrous military decisions in the opening phases of the war.



Coming to the present, the author underscores that the Soviet armed forces are distinct from those of the West. They are peaceful, popular with ordinary people, scientifically managed, inseparably linked to the Communist Party, and supportive of revolutionary aspirations in the developing world. Under Gorbachev, the armed forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan (which he asserts, with some defensiveness, they were right to aid), making significant efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, and maintaining the “shield of socialism,” i.e., the Warsaw Pact.

Russian Power in the 1920s

At the moment, I'm reading a lot of Bruce Lincoln's excellent books on modern Russian history. Three of these books focus on the Revolution, or the time immediately preceding it or following it. That is to say, I'm immersed in Russia's experience with World War I, the February and October revolutions, and the Civil War. I suppose one of the questions that these books provoke is how Russia could possibly have remained a great power in the 1920s and 1930s after having survived these devastating experiences.

I suppose the same question could be asked of any of the main belligerents in World War I, since they all squandered so much property, so many lives, so much wealth. But Russia obviously suffered most, and suffered most by an order of magnitude. And this of course was well before the Revolution itself destroyed what was left of the economy, before Germany robbed Russia of some of its border states, and before the Civil War re-duced the standard of living even further.

There was a time when contemporaries believed Communism was responsible for raising Russia out of this desolation, but even acknowledging that slave labor and iron discipline and targeted investment might well have rescued targeted sectors of the economy, it seems that Communism could only have further retarded Russia's efforts to re-claim its Great Power status in the 1920s.

Admittedly, there is a precedent here, insofar as Russia overcome the Napoleonic invasions and seemed, in most observable ways, stronger than ever despite the dislocation and destruction and death that the French brought. Even so, I find it hard to explain Russia's reemergence in the 1920s. One might even wonder a related question: how is it that Russia could lose a war to the still-emerging Japan in 1904-05 but then fight both Austria and Germany, with some notable successes, during World War I.