When spy mania ruled

THE FOE WITHIN: FANTASIES OF TREASON AND THE END OF IMPERIAL RUSSIA

By William C. Fuller Jr.

Cornell University Press, $39.95, 286 pages

On March 18, 1915, Lt. Col. Sergei Nicholaevich Miasoedov appeared before a special field court-martial that had been convened in Warsaw. Standing accused of espionage on behalf of Germany, the trial was swift, lasting only a matter of hours. By the next day, without having been permitted any defense, the 49-year-old former Separate Corps of Gendarmes (Russian militarized policeforce) officer was hanged.

“In the aftermath of [Miasoedov’s] barbaric execution,” William Fuller writes, “‘spy mania’ swept the Russian Empire. The tsarist police detained scores of people, searched hundreds of apartments and confiscated thousands of pages of documents.” These arrests eventually involved the upper echelons of the Russian Empire, including Gen. V.A. Sukhomlinov, the minister of war who was arrested for espionage the following year.

Though the narrative of “The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia” revolves around the trials of Miasoedov and Sukhomlinov, Mr. Fuller’s expansive and detailed book tells a more complex story.

Mr. Fuller writes that the Miasoedov affair in particular “helped lay the groundwork for the February Revolution of 1917.” He also shows that from that case — more details of which have been brought to light since the declassification of Russian archives in the 1990s — we can learn a great deal about prevailing “popular attitudes and mentalities.”

He writes, “One of the most interesting puzzles connected with the [Miasoedov] case is that extremely flimsy evidence was received with such mass credulity … The belief that traitorous conspirators were responsible for the bulk of Russia’s misfortunes obviously satisfied some deep psychological needs.

“But the particular form that spy mania assumed in Russia during the war years was conditioned by a profound ambivalence about capitalism, by both overt and latent anti-Semitism, and by certain cultural stereotypes about women.”

He also notes that the there are “features of the Miasoedov/Sukhomlinov cases that eerily foreshadow and anticipate the legal practices that would become common in the Stalin’s Soviet Union. However, he asserts that “it would be obscene to equate the abuses perpetrated in the Miasoedov case, bad as they were, with the terror and mass murder unleashed by Stalin in the 1930s.”

“The Foe Within” is a book of remarkable breadth and detail. Part military history, part Russian history, its greatest strength rests in Mr. Fuller’s observations about human nature in a particularly tense time and place. In its pages, readers meet spies and businessmen, innocent players with shady associates, tsarist generals, war profiteers, noblemen and peasants and a cross-section of individuals who were led to their undoing by their sexual appetites.

From every strata of society anecdotes abound, but among the most interesting are those that involve the Imperial family. The spy mania that engulfed Russia at the start of World War I, it is shown, had particular implications for the monarchy and its ultimate collapse:

“Rumor had it that the court was a hotbed of Germanophiles and defeatists. The court camarilla, which contained shady financiers, sclerotic generals, and the unspeakable Rasputin, was said to have the emperor and empress in thrall to its serpentine intrigues. Some saw it as particularly sinister that Alexandra was by origin a German and that she had blood relatives in Germany, including her brother Ernest, the reigning duke of Hesse-Darmstadt. A typical joke of the time turned on the extensive skepticism about Alexandra’s true loyalties:

Story Continues →