In Moscow's Shadows 169: The GUSP, the most secret of Russia's secret services
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There's that one Russian security service that no one ever really talks about. Well, today I'm going to talk about it. Hello, I'm Mark Gagliotti and welcome to my view of Russia in Moscow's shadows.

This podcast of varying length, frequency and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the crisis exercise software company Conductor. So, as I mentioned in last week's Gavarit Moskva, the new most weekly quickfire news update mini-podcast going out to my paying patrons, and yes, that is indeed a

painfully thinly disguised advert. But anyway, as I mentioned on that, Alexander Liniets, the head of the main directorate of special programs of the President of the Russian Federation, less jaw-breakingly GUSP, G-U-S-P. Anyway, Liniets has just been made a member of the Security Council, so this is a good opportunity to dig into a little bit about who he is, and more to the point, just what this rather secretive organization happens to be.

Now, Alexander Leonidovich Linyets himself has a very, very threadbare official bio. He was born in 1963 in Krasnodar region in the south. In 1984, he graduated from the Ordzhonikidze Higher Military Command School of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In other words, he was an officer within the interior troops. In 1986, though, two years in, he transferred across to the KGB and then retired.

We hear almost nothing about him. He crops up in the early 2000s as deputy head of the, what is now FSB, Department of the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army. In other words, he is there as part of one of the special sections watching the soldiers. So basically he is, I don't really want to call him a commissar, but nonetheless that kind of a role.

Then, well, he begins to show the signs of being someone on the fast track. In 2006, for example, he graduates from the Areol Regional Academy of Public Administration, which is the usual sort of sign of, well, not necessarily that particular, but, you know, taking a public administration higher degree, you know, is a usual sign of an official on the rise. Next year, 2007, he submits his Candidate of Technical Science dissertation.

Oh boy, it's called Models for Risk Analysis and Organisational and Legal Support for Managing Counteraction to Destructive Operations and Attacks in the Regional Information Space. I'm sure it's a thrilling page-turner. I mean, essentially it is about how you model potential disinformation and the like within the regional information space and do something about it. In 2014, he becomes head of the FSB Directorate of the whole Southern Military District,

But then the year after that, 2015, he becomes the head of the main directorate of special programs, replacing Vladislav Minchikov, who was transferred to head up the FSB's counterintelligence service. And shortly thereafter, he's also added as a member of the Military Industrial Commission of the Russian Federation, which is the body that basically oversees the whole defense industrial complex.

Pretty threadbare as I say, and that basic information is all one finds repeated time and time again in the Russian media with no additional personalia, no embellishments, no little anecdotes about something he did at some point or whatever. Very clearly that is all that is out there, or the state wants that to be out there. And in some ways there is a similar information, if not blackout, but control about GUSP itself.

Now this is a formally, it's a federal executive body that quote "carries out functions to ensure the execution by the President of the Russian Federation of powers in the sphere of mobilization preparation and mobilization in the Russian Federation to develop and implement state policy and legal regulation in this sphere."

All incredibly bland. But it's worth noting, first of all, this does count as a military service. I mean, indeed, in July, Goose proposed new everyday and field uniforms.

It has the right to acquire small arms and even rather more serious weapons. And indeed in 2015, a new law gave GUSP officers the right not only to detain people who violate areas under their control, but actually to open fire on them if necessary, including opening fire without giving warning.

In his December 2023 speech to the Security Agency Workers' Day, yes, I mean, pretty much every profession in Russia holding on from the Soviet Union has its own professional day. So, for example, last Monday was Day of Metro Workers. Anyway, yes, so, you know, Spook's Day. Putin himself said, Today, when we face serious challenges, the personnel of special services act competently and promptly.

I thank the employees of the FSB, SVR, FSO, Federal Protection Service, and the Main Directorate of Special Programs for their high professionalism in carrying out assigned tasks, for their courage and determination, for their clear and coordinated work. So in other words, GUSP was bracketed with the other intelligence and security agencies.

I should mention, by the way, there's no significance to the lack of any mention of military intelligence. It's just that they have their own professional holiday. So, what is GUSP? Formally, it was established in 1996, but really it's just another continuation from Soviet security agencies.

In 1969, the 15th Directorate of the KGB was formed on the basis of a number of units from what had been the 9th, well, what was the 9th Directorate, which is responsible for VIP protection, the Kremlin Guard and such like.

And the official statement was that the main task of the Directorate is to ensure constant readiness for the immediate reception of those being sheltered in protected points and the creation of conditions in them necessary for normal work during a special period. In other words, it was basically about nuclear bunkers.

It was about ensuring that, you know, in a time of war, or at least the threat of nuclear war, then party leaders and other officials could be hurriedly sheltered and could continue to do their job. And in 1974, this actually became the 15th main directorate of the KGB, with a headquarters on Mosvilmovskaya Street in Moscow.

And, well, what do we know about it? Well, there was Directorate No. 3, which was responsible for the closed military town of Chekhovtu in the Moscow region, which was founded in 1954 south of Moscow, and the so-called Sharapova facilities.

were basically a duplicate of the nearby Central General Staff Command post in another closed town, Chekhov 3. So Directorate No. 3 was basically responsible for a military alternative command centre.

Then there was Directorate No. 4 in the city of Kuznetsk-12 in the Penza region, again another closed military city, which is another alternative command post of the General Staff. And it also had a special purpose battalion, which was later transformed into a separate battalion, which is, in other words, a specialised military unit to provide guard facilities for all the rest. But then in 1977...

I know, it's a bit confusing throwing all this stuff out, but it all comes together. There was also created the Fifth Directorate of the Administration of the Council of Ministers, which seemed to have an essentially overlapping role in that it was basically behind the construction and the modernisation of various Council of Ministers control points, in other words, bunkers and similar activities.

So, again, there's this sense of trying to create a whole structure able to protect the key figures and ensure continuation of governance. Now, in 1991, that fifth directorate of the administration becomes part of the presidential administration. In 1992...

Along with that former KGB 15th Main Directorate, it becomes the Directorate for Planning and Implementing Special Programs. And then in due course, they all get rolled together into GUSP. So what does it do? Well, as I say, formally it maintains various bunkers and secure command centers and it's a whole network around the country.

and also prepares for continuity of government in the case of war or similar catastrophic conditions, which means not just protecting the senior personnel and their command centres, but also, for example, communications between them.

And in 2022, Prime Minister Mishustin signed an order establishing the GUSP's Mobilisation Training Centre, formerly devoted to educational activities and additional professional programmes in the field of mobilisation training and mobilisation.

But mainly this is actually an executive service and that mention about education is important because essentially what it is also doing is trying to ensure that the figures who will be protected by GUSP's activities also have been trained up in where they need to go and how they need to act at crucial moments. But still we knew very very little about actually what was inside the GUSP box. In 2006 so,

though, the open source center of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And I must admit, I think in this day and age, open source has such an extraordinary role to play in intelligence activity. I mean, it's not that it has made real spooky work redundant. But on the other hand, I do feel that, I don't know, 90 plus percent of what's

highly expensive, complex, secret channels can provide. Open source can. But anyway. So someone spotted that a catalogue of Russian military memorabilia for sale showed a whole bunch of unit medals from GUSP. And this helped flesh out the units within GUSP's arguably most secretive element, the so-called Special Facilities Service, the SSO.

And so there was Military Unit 52581. Don't worry, there will be no test. You don't have to know the numbers. Which seems to be responsible for operations and security of leadership facilities in and around the Kremlin itself. Military Unit 26116.

which seems to be responsible for facilities in Moscow city and region but also in Kursk region which is curious because I must admit what's there? I really don't know I couldn't find one of the known command centers or the like in Kursk region Military unit 52583 which is responsible for Chekhov 2 which I've already mentioned likewise Kuznetsk 12 is the responsibility of military unit 45108

and then military unit 68542 and yes I have got these written down I have not memorized them myself which is in charge of Salnichnogorsk 30 another closed city and that presumably means the so-called 820th main center for missile attack warning so it's not just the bunkers but also at least some element of the advanced warning systems

that, it's still very little to go of and therefore inevitably there's so many rumours and myths that are swirling around GUSP. For example that of Metro 2. So what is Metro 2? Well look, it became very clear after World War 2 and as Russia and well the rest of the world came into the nuclear age that the guards and the walls of the Kremlin offered no protection against this new threat.

So part of the answer was to build downwards, to dig bunkers and a whole network of escape routes. And so there is this meant to be this Metro 2 secret government transport system under Moscow, which as I said has been massively overplayed. In particular the idea was that at Ramenki, a suburb of Moscow,

In the 1960s and 1970s, the rumour was that the Soviets had actually built a whole massive underground city, able to house up to 15,000 people with enough food to last them for 30 years. So again, all very kind of survivalist fantasy. The truth, of course, is rather less dramatic than the stories, but nonetheless does demonstrate to the extent to which the Kremlin did indeed become this hub of quite a substantial subterranean network.

So although there are details obviously that are still classified, there have been lots of leaks about Metro 2. And indeed, actual evidence comes from these members of the intrepid Diggers of the Underground Planet, who are a kind of urban exploration group. And particularly back in the 1990s, they came across an entrance to it when they were looking in the civilian Metro network.

And it's worth noting that this has certain risks. In 2014, for example, digger and blogger Andrei Push was sentenced to five years in prison for inadvertently entering a restricted area. And although they didn't say specifically what, I mean, it seems fairly clear that it's because he'd wandered into Metro 2. So this was this underground network begun in Stalin's times, although only actually sort of formally commissioned in 1967.

and originally it was just a simple one line, an evacuation route that ran southwest from the Kremlin to the government airport of Nukovu-2 via a stop at Ramenki near Moscow State University. Then there was a KGB facility there and also the General Staff Academy. Now at Ramenki, and this is according to the former Moscow mayor Gavril Popov, there was no fabled underground city.

which in any case would have created a massive subsidence risk in the city above. But anyway, instead there was a depot and a maintenance station, so there was something Rameen Kee, but not this city. Later, at least two other lines were built. One of them, which was completed in 1987, was codenamed D6.

and runs from the Kremlin all the way, apparently, to a command bunker at Voronezh, which is 56km south of Moscow. So, you know, there's some doubt about whether they'll have anything that long, but anyway, that's the idea. And the third, that was finished around the same time, is rather shorter. It stretches from the Kremlin to the old KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square, now still one of the FSB's headquarters.

thence to the deep command bunker of the Moscow air defence network on Mishnitskaya Street and then it was extended to the newer more extensive air defence command centre at Zarya east of Moscow. So while the regular Moscow metro is an undoubted triumph of mass transit and is in fact relatively deep in part for geological reasons in part because well the stations and tunnels were also envisaged as potential bomb shelters

It runs about 35 to 55 meters underground. If you think of this D6 line though, I mean that's even deeper. That runs between 50 and 210 meters underground. Now for comparison, the world's deepest metro system is the Pyongyang Metro. Surprise, surprise! In North Korea, which is 110 meters deep. Again, because it was built to be an underground military facility.

whereas the world's deepest individual metro station is Arsenaulna on the Kyiv metro in Ukraine and that's 107 meters deep so D6 at its deepest is 210 meters so double the depth of that now this is not quite the same as your actual metro with its glorious chandeliered stations and everything else it's very spartan in fact there's not even a live rail inside metro 2

I suspect simply, well, A, because it involves more maintenance, B also because then it's hostage to power supply. I mean, instead there are tracks which can then be used with battery electric or diesel electric trains, but the tracks are actually recessed into the reinforced concrete floors so that they can also use little minibuses, if need be, just to sort of zoom your VIPs down to their safety.

Now, these secret lines basically fell into disuse in the 1990s, along with so much, after all, of the Soviet strategic infrastructure. In part, the Cold War was over, but mainly it was about budgetary pressures.

Now Putin seems to use motorcades or if need be helicopters so that may also be a factor. So what they did is look they fitted surveillance cameras on various platforms and entry points in the 1980s then later on more modern access control systems but basically this still exists and it is indeed part of GUSP's empire.

Goosp actually has a much, much wider role than just simply a bunch of physical facilities. Back in February, Lapsha Media, which is an interesting site that covers frauds and fakes, debunked a letter during the rounds on Russian social media, allegedly issued by Goosp.

and talking about preparations for drawing up lists of employees of companies who could indeed be summoned for military service, hinting at the beginning of a general mobilisation, not the limited mobilisation wave we saw in August 2022, but one that actually would basically sweep across the country. And as you can imagine, the sort of thing which is basically everybody's nightmare.

And there was even an accompanying video claiming to show someone from GUSP wanting someone's name taken off the lists. Now, what was quite noteworthy was that Lapsha Media called foul on the basis of the wording of the letter, the signature and so forth, not on GUSP's capacity to actually start such a process. So it is clear that GUSP actually, in theory, has a lot of power.

and would be the central element in mobilising, not specifically the military, but kind of a whole-of-state apparatus in time of war. And then there's also persistent claims that GUSP does rather more than all this. Claims now obviously magnified by Linnets' elevation to the Security Council, and there's a certain amount of social media chatter about that. The idea is that actually GUSP could act, or maybe even does act, as a kind of shadow administration agency,

or else that it conducts special missions on the personal behalf of the President. Because after all, it does exist in a rather anomalous space. I mean, for example, if Unit 52581 is responsible for Kremlin security, how does it connect to the main protection director of the FSO, which runs the Kremlin Guard, as well as Putin's own security service?

If it is true as some claim that GUSP has a team of officers watching the FSO while the FSO watches the rest of the security agencies, this is a kind of matryoshka paranoia, well, actually, does that mean that it has ultimate control over the security apparatus, or the security agencies, rather? This even claims that it has a paranormal department devoted to protecting the president from psychic attack.

So what's the truth behind that? Well here's the answer: I don't know. Although I do feel moderately confident in discounting the paranormal bit. But this is the whole point, this is what makes GUSP so interesting. We have an agency that is not huge in manpower terms, though again, we have no solid information as to quite what its establishment strength is. It does have substantial budgets, well if you're building and maintaining bunkers and underground railways and so forth, then that's inevitable.

It seems to have very, very little kind of connection in terms of oversight from the parliamentary bodies. It very rarely meets the news. It is clear that it is not just about bunkers and underground railways, however cool they are, because these in some ways are simply reflections of a much wider security state.

Incidentally, I mean, it's just not directly relevant, but just very cool. Moscow State University has one of these great Stalin Gothic, Stalin Baroque, whatever, edifices, the so-called Seven Sisters, these great huge tower buildings which stud the Moscow skyline. And each one is subtly different in terms of the size, layout, detailing and such like.

What's interesting about Moscow State University, the MGU tower, is that the spire at the top of the main university building is actually a vital part of Russia's nuclear command system. Because on that spire, there's these kind of metal rods that sort of sprout from it. The description is like needles of a pine tree, particularly from the great big star above it. They're actually the antennae for Kavkaz-7.

which is the nuclear command and communication system. If Putin decides that he has to go to nuclear war, his aide, who's always carrying the nuclear briefcase, the so-called Cheget system,

would basically allow him then to send out the message to the other elements of the command system. I mean, he doesn't have a metaphorical button. He doesn't actually launch missiles. He gives the instructions to others to launch the missiles. But the point is, Kavkar 7 is the system, and one of the various relays is indeed on top of the Moscow State University Tower. Just thought I'd mention that.

So, it's got all these things. It's not just involved in post-apocalyptic scenarios, but increasingly in the potential, maybe even likely, future mobilizations of Russia, which is a pretty fundamental process in today's wartime Russia. So I think in some ways it is war that has brought GUS both a little bit more into the limelight, but more to the point, a little bit more into the sort of center of governance.

part of that does indeed mean selecting and training a future official mobilization cadre. In other words, the elite who are going to be running Russia after such an apocalypse. Now, that's significant because some of the more recent news about GUSP may, again, I'm just going off some chatter on social media, but chatter which struck me as potentially convincing or certainly plausible,

means in some ways it runs against the processes being created by Kiryenka, deputy head of the presidential administration, who has these leaders of Russia training programs essentially all designed to build the next generation of Russian officialdom, a kind of retread of the old Soviet nomenclatura program.

Well, in some ways it would be interesting to find out, is GUSP working together with Kyrianka in this? Or is this actually a rival program for trying to sort of headhunt the next generation? GUSP has massive powers and budgets. The former are very broad, and the latter very opaque.

Often, I think, GUSP's funds are actually hidden within budgets of various state construction firms and elsewhere. So it's actually a very, very opaque structure. It is apparently heavily recruited from within the FSB, and, you know, as the transfer of former head Menshikov shows, there's a degree of interoperability, interpenetrability, shall we say, within it. It hasn't been swallowed up by the FSB, which I suppose is probably represented by the fact it has these massive budgets.

FSB is powerful enough already without giving it these. But no one seems to have any responsibility for watching GUSP. Not formally the FSO, which as I said does have a certain watching brief over the other agencies. Not the FSB's Military Counterintelligence Directorate, even though GUSP technically counts as a militarised service. So beyond that, is this a shadow government? Is this a private presidential security service? Is this a final watcher over the watchers?

I really don't know, even though I spent a lot of my time trying to look at this intelligence community. And that is both interesting and frustrating all in itself. Now, part of me is thinking that I've wasted your time, that it would be so much nicer if I could tell you something definitive and exhaustive. However, look, the essence, and this is interesting because actually there's going to be released quite soon a conversation that I had with the philosopher Vlad Vexler,

in which we talk about this whole issue of operating in an environment in which we're expected to know answers but may well not, and how important it is to be willing to say when we don't know. But anyway, I just thought it was worth flagging it up. People tend to forget this agency, precisely because so little is known about it, and that's a mistake. It's clearly there. It clearly has a role that is more than just bunkers and railways. It has significant budgets.

It now has a chief who is not only on the Military Industrial Commission but also on the Security Council. It is still under-discussed but a little bit more visible in the last year or so than in the past. There is the potential for it to have conflicts not just with other security agencies but also the government and indeed the presidential administration and yet we know so little about it.

So sometimes it's just somebody pointing to a blank space on the map, which we might want to have a little dragon or a griffin on it. But nonetheless, a blank space on the map is important data in and of itself. Just the usual mid-episode reminder that you're listening to the In Moscow Shadows podcast.

Its corporate partner and sponsor is Conducto, which provides software for crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and the like. But you can also support the podcast yourself by going to patreon.com slash inmoscoshadows.

And remember that patrons get a variety of additional perks depending on their tier, as well as knowing that they're supporting this peerless source on all things Russian. And you can also follow me on Twitter at Mark Gagliotti, or on Facebook, Mark Gagliotti on Russia. Now, back to the episode. Continuing on the theme of talking about the security state, I want to use a rather shorter second part to look at a couple of books, recent books that I've been reading that I think have something interesting to say.

The first one is Kevin Reel's The Russian FSB, which came out this year, 2024, in Georgetown University Press's Concise Histories of Intelligence series. Now, the formal bio says that Kevin P. Reel is a lecturer in intelligence and security studies at Brunel University, London. He also spent over 30 years in the U.S. government as a counterintelligence analyst.

Which is a rather bland way of describing a career with tours in the FBI, the National Counterintelligence Center, U.S. European Commands, Joint Analysis Center, DOD, etc., etc. Anyway, but he retired in 2014 as a U.S. Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer and is now in the U.K. at Brunel.

So this book, it describes itself as a concise history of the Federal Security Service and it certainly is a compact book and at first I sort of looked at its relatively small dimensions and thought that it was potentially a bit lightweight but it's actually very, very dense with information and I should also mention that Real gets bonus points for putting Putin's quote about the degree to which the collapse of the USSR was a great, one of the great geopolitical catastrophes of the 20th century

in its proper context, not mobilising it to say "that's why Putin wants to recreate the USSR" but to appreciate that he was actually using it in a very, very specific context. In other words, talking about the fact that huge numbers of people who regard themselves as ethnically and culturally Russian found themselves in some way stranded in other new countries. So, kudos for that. It's one of my real pet peeves, the misuse of that quote.

Anyway, it's a very good book. It's aimed at being a primer for students and those who are just generally interested. Very comprehensive, lots and lots of detail that otherwise only specialists would generally know, from sub-elements of various FSB directorates to biographies of senior figures.

And it covers not just the structure and activities of the service, but also how it evolved and how the FSB tries to link itself with its Soviet and Tsarist predecessors, which is a very big thing. And again, reflects the essentially sort of

I don't know, comprehensive buffet approach to history that Putin has adopted, in which he just goes and picks the bits of Russia's history, whether czarist, Soviet, medieval or whatever, that please him and ignores the rest. So the FSB is following in the same lines. But also talks about, in the final chapter, the wider cultural representations it fosters. It essentially tries to burnish its brand.

The one gripe I have is that at times it is a little bloodless. It's about an institution more than a cohort of people. I was going to call them human beings, but in some cases that's maybe a bit of a stretch.

There are a few pages on the so-called Chekist mindset in Chapter 1. Chekists coming from the Cheka, the first Bolshevik political police force. But while Chapter 2 is titled Organisation and Culture, it's almost all about organisation rather than culture.

And to me, I mean, I think that really matters because the roles, the duties, the operations, the activities, all the institutional stuff of the FSB are filtered through its worldview and its culture. And indeed, that worldview and culture isn't just a sort of a single common overarching FSB one.

But also there are variations between different elements of the service and indeed different generations. I mean, if one looks, for example, at the Economic Security Service, which, let's be perfectly honest, is really closer to a network of criminal enterprises these days, it has a very strong dirty cops vibe.

Whereas if you look at the DVKR, the aforementioned military counterintelligence department, which as I say is less actually about counterintelligence and more about politically monitoring the armed services to make sure they don't launch a coup or similar, well there I can't help feeling that the culture is much more political commissar. Oh, actually that reminds me, indulge me for a moment with a little sidebar.

I have in the odd podcast thrown out little references to the science fiction miniatures game Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer 40k, which is set in this grim, dark, vicious, almost medieval future. In the future there is only war.

and the cultishly militaristic future human empire has commissars to maintain discipline and orthodoxy within the ranks of their massive armies. Very turbo-Soviet in their big peaked cap, long greatcoats, gun in one hand, ready to put a bullet through the back of the head of any potential deserter, chainsawed, imagine chainsaw meets sword,

in the other. Now, this may be just apocryphal, but I did hear that, in fact, a senior FSB DVKR officer got one of his officers who was serving a temporary posting in an embassy in Europe. This is a couple of years back. Presumably he was watching the defence attaches at a time when there were still defence attaches in Russian embassies.

Anyway, he got this subordinate to raid the local Warhammer shops in the city in question to assemble a complete collection of every available commissar variety ready to ship back to Moscow. Now that's a use of the Defence Attaché Network that I could get behind. Anyway, back to the culture. I think, I mean, if I'm honest, it's the one element that I would have liked to have seen given more of an emphasis in this otherwise admirably complete book.

it's not so much of unfair a criticism as frankly just how the book would have been different had I written it so nonetheless if you really want to have you know a nice neat book that covers all or everything that you need to know about the FSB except for the things that I would tell you well then Kevin Reels the Russian FSB from Georgetown University Press strongly recommended

However, when it comes to the point about culture, this also came up for me when I was reading One Man in His Time by Nikolai Borodin, which came out also in 2024 with Pushkin Press. Now, this is the memoir of an eminent Russian microbiologist from Stalin's time, I should add. So it runs through his childhood in late imperial times in the Don Basin. I mean, this guy is actually technically a Don Cossack.

through the revolution, through starvation in the Civil War, and there's a particularly gruesome cannibalism case mentioned there. Then university, service as a cavalryman in the Red Army, and then his career as a microbiologist. Interestingly, instead of presenting himself as a sort of a dissident from the get-go who always was critical of and saw through the regime,

Actually, Barodin presents himself as an essentially pretty pragmatic individual, dedicated to his work, but even willing to work with the secret police as an informant and consultant from time to time. And let me give a particular quote. By the way, this is from a pre-production proof. How's that for a tongue twister? So it's possible that in the actual final version, the words are ever so slightly different. I don't really know.

Anyway, I mean, he talks about the fact that, in his chapter 10, Consulting the Political Police, he says, Being deeply interested in the methods and activities of the political police, I always tried to learn more about this interesting state institution. At that time, it was called, for short, the GPU, an abbreviation for State Political Administration. To me, it wore a romantic halo, although it is true that the romance smelt of blood, terror, and power over all flesh.

but do not power and blood often enhance romance? I mean, as I say, I think that considering that he knows what Stalinist political police were up to, I think it's quite interesting that he's honest enough to admit it. And he continues about that basically sometimes he did actually have to provide them with information on his subordinates and what they were doing and saying and thinking and so forth. I well understood that these directions were part of my duty as one who was in charge of other people.

duty is duty and it must be carried out but to be honest i did not see any shame in this nor did i consider that it was wrong i have been educated to regard the political police as the guardians of the security of the state of which i was a citizen whose power was expressing the will of the toiling masses i was rather proud to be a person who was confidentially entrusted by this power to keep a vigilant eye on my subordinate souls power and influence are always attractive no matter from what source they are derived

Now, I mean, I think that's actually, again, I think sort of interesting in what it says, not about this particular individual just, but generally speaking about where a political police force in a repressive authoritarian state derives so much of its power.

Not simply its ability to terrify the masses in line, but also to create some kind of sense of legitimacy for the very means it is using to oppress and terrify and regiment them. He goes on later on, when talking about the political police officers he's working for and with: "There were no fanatics, dreamers or sadists among the political police officials.

They were like well-trained soldiers, professional workers at a grim life-and-death task, men trained in the belief that their duty was the extermination of enemies of all kinds, in accordance with directions and orders from above. These orders were true and right, and all other considerations were bad and wrong. And who could expect humanity from a soldier, trained to capture and destroy the enemy by any means at his disposal? Only a fool, or so my experience had taught me.

Now, first of all, it is absolutely clear that there were all kinds of fanatics, dreamers, and above all, sadists within Stalin's political police force. And it would be quite understandable if you as a listener feel your hackles rise at this sort of sugarcoating, frankly, of a collection of vicious bastards. But again, I think it is really important to understand the sort of culture of the spooks

which is clearly nowhere near as noble as this suggests, but also, again, how society related to them. Again, I repeat, this is how repressive regimes can survive. Not just by the knout, but by colonising the minds of the repressed. Even so, look, realistically, of course, it's only ever going to be partly successful.

and indeed humour, which is not just, I think, one of the most powerful weapons to undermine these kind of pompous, vicious regimes, but also a fascinating...

indicator and reservoir of the real feelings of people does keep coming up, even in this account, as precisely a sign of the fact that not everything was quite as regimented and indeed indoctrinated as might be suggested. For example, in chapter 15, he tells about this joke that he indeed was told by his actual superior, who incidentally was also a party member.

And the joke is that a drowning man is saved by a collective farm peasant. And then the drowning man gratefully says, look, I'm Stalin. You can ask for anything you want from me. And what is it that the peasant wants? Peasant says, you know, what he wants is for Stalin not to tell anybody in the countryside that he saved him.

Now, Barodin himself says that he thought that Vilyakin was a fool for actually telling that joke, and indeed, that very night, Vilyakin was arrested, along with various other senior colleagues of his. I don't think there was any direct connection. But again, it shows the degree to which, in extreme circumstances, Russians are essentially forced to

live two lives or hold two truths in their head at once the official one and the real one and they will often just simply move almost seamlessly from from one to the other so you know even now as i've warned in the past we need to be careful about putting too much weight on expressed opinions because we have to think about okay but why are they expressing them to whom and in what circumstances

Anyway, as Borodin tells it, it's only really in 1948, while he's on a state-sponsored trip to the UK to report on the bulk manufacture of antibiotics, that he really is forced to actually come to terms with his own growing awareness of the totalitarianism at home, especially where, obviously, his love of science is concerned.

And in particular, he talks about the degree to which politics was clearly trumping the objective truths of science. He talks about a conversation he had with his minister, Tretyakov. I would advise you to be more careful in stating your scientific views, the minister said warningly at the end of the discussions we had had. I suppose I look surprised.

You expressed considerable admiration for foreign scientific achievements. For example, you declared that it was silly to call Soviet penicillin a scientific discovery because it is the same chemical substance as in all other countries in the world. I suggest that in all your scientific reports and lectures you showed yourself a great friend of the West.

And it is worth mentioning, after all, that praising Western technology was indeed a crime under Stalinism. So here you have a man who's actually being sent to the UK precisely because of British advances in antibiotics, trying to send back as much information as possible, and yet being denounced by his own minister for daring to say that, in fact, penicillin was not some kind of Soviet breakthrough.

So in some ways, again, one can wonder whether or not that really ought to have been the last straw. But nonetheless, as a result of this, when he's in the UK, he jumps ship and he writes to the Soviet ambassador to renounce its citizenship. And actually, in some ways more interesting is a second letter that he sends to the head of the Soviet trade delegation.

in which he writes, By this letter I inform you of my decision not to return to the USSR for reasons I have set out in my letter of the 27th, inst. to the Ambassador of the USSR in the United Kingdom. A postal order for the sum of £3.186, the amount given to me by the Trade Delegation for Travelling Expenses to Leningrad. Goodbye. I think I have to say I found that, after a book in which I wasn't quite sure if I particularly liked Barodin,

But nonetheless, I thought that was a particularly classy little closing snub. So overall, I have to say that I thought this was a fascinating story. And as I say, without much of the retrospective self-justification and self-flagellation that we sometimes find in these memoirs, and which actually make them suspect and turgid all at once, because one...

Well, certainly I tend to have the suspicion that a lot of the self-flagellation is kind of retrospectively applied to make the person look like a good person. But Audin, I mean, presumably he regarded himself as a good person. But nonetheless, I can't say I particularly liked him. But the book is well worth a read, as much as anything, not just for his story, but for the backdrop details.

because I think this is something that we too often miss. You know, we have a tendency to default to either secondary sources or kind of official primary sources, and a really good memoir can be absolutely fascinating in painting a picture of what were after all often deeply and extraordinary times, and extraordinary usually in the worst possible sense.

So anyway, so that was N. M. Barodin, Nikolai Barodin's One Man in His Time, a memoir from Pushkin Press. And on that note, I think I have reached a conclusion of what I wanted to talk about today. And, of course...

You know why I'm saying this. If you're a patron, then I suspect that the next Gavarit Moskva will probably drop on Tuesday rather than actually Wednesday because of travel plans. But anyway, there definitely will be one next week. Thanks very much. Bye. Well, that's the end of another episode of the In Moscow Shadow podcast. Just as a reminder, beyond this, you can follow my blog, also called In Moscow Shadows.

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