WALTER G. KRIVITSKY: BRIDGING OCTOBER IDEALS WITH JANUARY REALITIES, 1917 – 1941. IAN S. WASSINK SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY NIPISSING UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES NORTH BAY, ONTARIO © IAN S. WASSINK NOVEMBER 2012 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION PAGE I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this Major Research Paper. I authorize Nipissing University to lend this Major Research Paper to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I further authorize Nipissing University to reproduce this Major Research Paper by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. ABSTRACT The historiographical debate concerning Walter Krivitsky and his debriefing with Britain’s MI5 in 1940 is controversial. The extent that Krivitsky provided clues on Cambridge Five members such as Kim Philby and Donald Maclean to MI5 and the ability of MI5 to counter the Soviet intelligence threat in the midst of the Second World War and into the Cold War remains to be settled. By incorporating memoir material that reveals Krivitsky’s early years as a dedicated Bolshevik revolutionary, this paper seeks to better understand Krivitsky’s Bolshevik ideals and pragmatic actions at his defection and debriefing with the ultimate goal of understanding the value that Krivitsky provided to MI5. Krivitsky’s MI5 personnel file, as released from The National Archives in Kew and categorized in the KV 2 series, is analyzed with the goal of understanding what Krivitsky was saying to MI5, and what he was shielding and withholding from them. By contesting Christopher Andrew’s narrow view of Krivitsky being confused, unknowing, and garbling information about Philby and Maclean, and arguing that Krivitsky revealed information on his own terms and for his own purposes, this paper presents a more nuanced view of Stalin’s defectors of conscience. Intelligence historiography and Anglo-Soviet historiography will certainly benefit from a study such as this one. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project began in 2011, when I decided to return to Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, Canada to further my studies at the graduate level. As the assignments began to build and conversations with colleagues continued, this paper took on a life of its own and was shaped by my own thoughts and the thoughts of others. It is the thoughts and helpful comments of others that certainly deserve my thanks and acknowledgement for, without them, this paper would never have been possible. First and foremost I want to thank my Research Supervisor Dr. Gordon Morrell. His helpful comments, insightful discussions, brain-wave stimulations, and eyes that looked afresh at each draft have enabled me to learn and gain further insight into the inner-workings of Britain’s intelligence services. I also thank him for providing to me the various KV series documents from The National Archives in Kew on which this paper is based. Second, I want to thank Dr. Stephen Connor, whose supportive role in this paper and in my other university courses has helped demonstrate to me the excitement that can be found in historical research. Third, I want to thank Dr. David Tabachnick for agreeing to serve as the external examiner on my examination committee. Each member of the History Department Faculty at Nipissing University in some way, shape, or form has contributed to the ideas presented in this paper. I also gratefully thank the staff at the Library at Nipissing University, North Bay Campus, for tolerating and sometimes embracing my persistent pestering, perpetual late-returning of materials, and general witticisms. Specifically, I want to thank Johanna Tapper and the Inter-Library Loans staff for helping me acquire excerpts of Kevin Quinlan’s doctoral dissertation from the University of Cambridge. I am also grateful to previous Master of Arts candidates for their submitted research works, and specifically Curtis Robinson, Greg Richardson, and Shane Cliff. I have enjoyed standing on the shoulders of these (sometimes literal) giants. v To my colleagues in the program this year – Andrea Gelinas, Grant Doherty, Chris Peemoeller, Dominic Mammola – and in a way Dr. Nestar Russell: you have taught me to approach primary source documents beyond the methodologies employed by that of a ‘typical historian’ and, before reading anything, to do so with clean glasses. I also want to thank Ms. Catherine Smith, my history teacher at Walkerton District Secondary School in Walkerton, Ontario, who in a sense started it all. Finally, I want to thank my family and friends. You know who you are. Your positivity and love have always encouraged me to try my very best. All of the paper’s mistakes and omissions, of course, are my own, but hopefully well hidden. I.S.W. November 2012 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………1 Debates Among Historians………………………………………………………………………4 Memoirs and the Communist Party……………………………………………………….…..19 Krivitsky in London………………………………………………………………………………25 Krivitsky and the Notion of Traitor/Defector…………………………………………...……44 Krivitsky’s Logic and Conclusions...………………………………………………………….52 Working Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………55 vii 1 Introduction The role of traitors/defectors has long held an important place in the study of Anglo- Soviet relations in the interwar period and Cold War era. In 1937 one such traitor, Walter Krivitsky, turned his back on Stalin and made himself available to French, American and ultimately British authorities. This study considers his importance to British intelligence. In early 1940, at a time when the British government was entertaining ideas of waging war against the Soviet Union, this Soviet spy turned traitor/defector was invited by Britain’s counter-intelligence service (MI5) to London for conversations the British hoped would shed light on Soviet intelligence operations and the wider threat of what historian Christopher Andrew has called the ‘Red Menace’.1 Over the past decade, historians who study Anglo- Soviet relations have increasingly turned to the recently declassified secret documents of the British state to examine what Richard Aldrich has identified as the “hidden hand”2 of intelligence operations. In the British case, in the first half of the twentieth century, documents released by The National Archives in Kew have permitted historians to revisit the inter-war period that ended with the Second World War and provided the foundation for much that would shape the Cold War. Historians are now able to analyze the British secret intelligence organizations in increasingly nuanced ways by utilizing these documents. Most of these files are the working files generated by intelligence officers and agents who were employed by British intelligence organizations. Britain’s MI5 and its foreign intelligence service (MI6), also known as Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), were two of the main intelligence organizations in the inter-war period that were tasked with assessing domestic threats (MI5) and pursuing 1 For ‘Red Menace’, see chapter titles in Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London, Penguin Books Ltd., 2009), 139 and 160; and Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking Press, 1986). 2 Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray Ltd., 2001). 2 foreign intelligence opportunities (MI6). These organizations generally dealt with various foreign threats, secret information, counter-subversion, and some of this information came from individuals who were employed by other states. Krivitsky, a Polish-Jew born in the borderlands of Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century in what is now modern-day Ukraine, was one of those individuals who worked for the Soviet Union under both Lenin and Stalin. For a brief period in the 1930s, Krivitsky oversaw Soviet spy networks throughout Western Europe and broke with Stalin in 1937. When he came to Britain in January 1940, MI5’s objective was to obtain as much information from Krivitsky as possible about Soviet operations against Britain. Krivitsky’s approximately two-decade long intelligence career came to an abrupt and violent end when he was found dead in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. in February 1941. By early 1940, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact had been signed and Poland was invaded and divided by Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Krivitsky’s debriefing has been fascinating for historians and others because of both the general interest in the role of traitors in intelligence history and the more specific contribution Krivitsky potentially made regarding the penetration agents collectively known as the Cambridge Five. By considering MI5 files released over the past decade by the British government, augmented with memoirs addressing the period of Krivitsky’s life, this reevaluation will enhance our current understanding of this important figure in Anglo-Soviet intelligence history. Of particular importance to this assessment is an evaluation of what Krivitsky chose to disclose to the British and what he appears to have understated or hidden from view. This material is evaluated within the context of two sets of motivations— revolutionary ideology and pragmatism. The former is considered within the wider context of his formative years in the East European borderlands, his relationship to close comrades such as Ignace Poretsky who shared Krivitsky’s commitment to the Revolution of 1917, and the politics of internationalism as against Stalinism. These contextual elements enhance an 3 understanding of Krivitsky’s worldview and consider the possibility that he did not completely abandon his revolutionary Bolshevik convictions. In the second type of motivation, pragmatism, there was the reality that Krivitsky was a man on the run, a man without a country, and a man who needed to fund his survival. These aspects have been considered by others, chiefly Earl M.