Not surprisingly, internal German foreign ministry records indicate that of the approximately 1,100 German nationals who would be arrested for intelligence operations in the USSR from 1936 to 1941, just two had any such involvement, and one vanished without trace.305 The head of the security agency for the Wehrmacht admitted internally in 1938 that he lacked a firm idea of how Soviet military intelligence worked.306
The number of accused Polish spies was even greater than the number of German ones. In fact, Polish sabotage activities on Soviet territory had not suddenly increased; they had been going on, closely watched and interdicted, for a long time. Until 1937, Poland maintained consulates in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Minsk, and Tiflis, but Poland managed to hold on to just two (Kiev, Minsk), in exchange for which the Soviet Union kept one in Poland (Lwów) and one in the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk).307 Stalin’s counterintelligence measures apparently induced the Polish embassy and consulates on Soviet territory to desist from recruiting agents among Soviet ethnic Poles (who mostly did not live in Moscow, Kiev, or Minsk in any case).308 But the arrest of Polish “spies” among Soviet inhabitants continued, exceeding 101,000 by the end of 1938, a spectacularly improbable workload for one embassy and two consulates.
Despite the mass arrests, Stalin had no idea whether he was catching any real foreign spies or, if he was, what harm they might have caused—and what is more, he made virtually no effort to find out. Japanese army intelligence did send small numbers of White Russian émigrés and Koreans across the barely marked frontiers to recruit or bribe the disaffected among the Soviet population.309 But the NKVD arrested nearly 53,000 Soviet inhabitants as agents of Japan in 1937–38. All “testimony” about their espionage and sabotage was either suggested or outright written by their interrogators, in the pursuit of arrest quotas. “Spies” and “terrorists” captured at or near border crossings were lumped together with contrabandists (ordinary people engaged in petty trade).310 Dubiously, the country for which an arrested Soviet inhabitant was allegedly engaged in acts of espionage and sabotage was often altered at the very last minute. If a person had an ethnic Polish wife or relative, he or she would usually be charged as a Polish spy, unless all of a sudden the accused was needed for a “case” involving German spies (or Japanese, or Romanian, and so on).311 To be sure, an excuse for such sloppiness was at the ready: better to chop off some innocent heads than to let even one spy go free. War was coming. But then, as we shall see, in 1939 and 1940—after a new world war had commenced—the NKVD would arrest a measly 7,620 spies, a quarter million fewer than in 1937–38.312
The NKVD’s egregious violation of elementary rules of counterintelligence craft in the treatment of alleged spies in 1937–38 mattered only if Stalin was primarily pursuing foreign agents in the conventional sense, meaning people who committed specific acts. But he had called every foreigner in the Soviet Union ipso facto a spy, beginning with humanitarian relief workers during the first Soviet famine of 1921–23.313 For him, “spying” seems to have encompassed an extraordinarily wide variety of activities, including clipping newspapers.314 At closed party meetings and sessions in the Little Corner, he mostly insisted that those arrested were actual spies engaged in specific acts.315 He would tell minions that penetration by foreign spies was increasing, such information would then duly appear in intelligence reports sent to him, and he would cite the reports. At meetings, he scribbled notes about saboteurs, spies, and the like.316 Did Stalin, at some level, convince himself that the USSR was crawling with spies and would-be spies ready to act when the opportunity presented itself? Perhaps he did, but his charges of espionage were based not on facts but on a political equation. Kaganovich absorbed Stalin’s way of thinking, remarking at the February–March 1937 plenum that “if they stand for defeat [of the Soviet Union], it’s clear they are spies.”317
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