How many state security agents are in the Russian opposition?

There are two extremes regarding the question of the number of state security agents in the Russian opposition. One is to suspect everyone whose position does not suit you personally or out of personal animosity of “working for the Kremlin”. The second is to declare any suspicion of working for state security as paranoia and conspiracy theory, as if there were no such agents in the Russian opposition at all. In between them lies a multitude of different levels. What degree of caution is justified?

A Brief History of State Security Agents in the Russian Opposition

To begin with, let us point out that the presence of agents, snitches, and informants of the political police among the Russian opposition is by no means a myth. Already in the Russian Empire, the Okhrana planted a considerable number of its people in the opposition. Moreover, many of them held leadership positions among protest figures. Perhaps the most striking example is Yevno Azef, the “king of provocateurs”. He was the head (!) of the Combat Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and even organized and successfully carried out terrorist acts, including the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Being a secret employee of the Police Department, he at the same time uncovered and handed over numerous revolutionaries to the police. The Central Committee of the SR Party also had its own informant — Nikolai Tatarov, who was a childhood friend of Boris Savinkov, one of the leaders of the party and the Combat Organization.

Member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, leader of the Bolshevik faction in the State Duma Roman Malinovsky was also a secret employee of the Okhrana, which was revealed only after the revolution (as a result of which he was executed in 1918). Moreover, Vladimir Lenin for a long time refused to believe in Malinovsky’s betrayal and demanded an end to the attacks on him. Agents of the Okhrana also included Yakov Zhitomirsky, a member of the foreign bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, and Anna Serebryakova, in whose house the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP met in 1898. All of them actively helped the revolutionaries, and at the same time actively “turned them in” to the Okhrana. The work “Documents on the History of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1916 of the Former Moscow Okhrana Department” mentions 12 “internal surveillance agents” in the Bolshevik Party: M.I. Brandinsky, Ya.A. Zhitomirsky, M.G. Krivov, A.I. Lobov, R.V. Malinovsky, A.K. Marakushev, A.A. Polyakov, A.S. Romanov, I.P. Sesitsky, M.E. Chernomazov, and an unmasked agent codenamed “Vasily”².

Bolshevik Sergei Gusev recalled that in 1908–1909 the St. Petersburg Bolshevik organization had almost completely collapsed: “This period saw an extraordinary development of provocation. Sverdlov was in the Leningrad committee with four other committee members, and he suspected back then that one of them was a provocateur. But after the February Revolution, when the archives of the Police Department were opened, it turned out that all four were provocateurs, and Sverdlov was the only Bolshevik on that committee”³.

Sergei Degaev, who headed the central group of “Narodnaya Volya”, was recruited by secret police inspector Lieutenant Colonel of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes Georgy Sudeikin in the early 1880s (and played a significant role in the liquidation of “Narodnaya Volya”). An entire system of workers’ organizations was created by Sergei Zubatov, head of the Special Section of the Police Department. Neither exceptional closeness to revolutionaries (Ivan Okladsky was an orphan who joined “Narodnaya Volya” at age 13, whose members helped him start a normal life, but later he “turned them in”) nor the fact of suffering inflicted by the regime (prison took the 20 best years of Nikolai Starodvorsky’s life, and after his release he became an informant) served as a guarantee against cooperation with the Okhrana.

In Soviet times, the intelligence services also actively built up their agent network. As candidate of historical sciences Alexei Teplyakov notes, Chekists then massively liquidated their agents and snitches as “spent material”⁵ and unnecessary witnesses. Some sources report that in Soviet times, personal surveillance over a member of anti-Soviet groups ranged from two to four agents⁶. Snitches were planted in printing enterprises and entertainment establishments, reporting on the moods of workers and visitors. As follows from a report by the Kostroma Provincial Department of the OGPU on the Menshevik Party for January 1925, during this period and in this region, 77 people were under surveillance. It noted with satisfaction that the Mensheviks “have no organized connection among themselves… the mood is depressed, and no signs of resuming work were observed”. This information was obtained “by means of internal and external surveillance and interception of correspondence”.

Chekists were planted into all types of opposition — from Ukrainian nationalists to Moscow intellectuals. For instance, OGPU employee Pavel Sudoplatov recalled how he gained the trust of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Yevhen Konovalets. The NKVD also had its own people surrounding Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated by agent Ramón Mercader.

During our stay in Paris, Konovalets invited me to visit Petliura’s grave with him. We walked through the entire cemetery and stopped in front of a modest tombstone on Petliura’s grave. Konovalets crossed himself — I followed his example. For a while we stood in silence, then I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket and wrapped a handful of earth from the grave in it.

— What are you doing?! — Konovalets exclaimed.

— I will take this earth from Petliura’s grave back to Ukraine, — I replied, — in his memory we will plant a tree and take care of it.

Konovalets was delighted. He embraced me, kissed me, and warmly praised me for the wonderful idea. As a result, our friendship and his trust in me grew even stronger⁷.

Shortly after this, Sudoplatov assassinated Konovalets. In 1935, NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov wrote to Joseph Stalin:

In total across the Union, according to insufficiently accurate data, there are 270,777 informers. In addition to this number, the Operational Department has informers among the unorganized population, the so-called courtyard informers; then a special network of informers for the Army and transport. There is no accounting of informers in this category. In any case, the total number of informers across the Union as a whole will be approximately 500 thousand people⁸.

In the late Soviet Union, intelligence agents were also actively infiltrated into the ranks of dissidents. Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky mentioned in an interview that they had managed to steal an undercover operation manual from the KGB⁹. According to this manual, an agent was forbidden from engaging in provocative conversations, participating in anti-government actions (and signing public protests). This helped dissidents identify agents.

Naturally, state security agents are actively infiltrated today as well. Yabloko activist Dmitry Barkovsky spoke about how he was recruited in the early 2000s:

On May 24, 2000, I was summoned to the 3rd Department of BSTU “Voenmeh”. Two men were waiting for me in the office, introducing themselves as FSB officers. They began asking me questions regarding political activity, the internal structure of the Yabloko party, as well as the party’s funding and election campaign methods. I tried to refuse to answer their questions. In response, threats of expulsion from the university, “being sent to Chechnya”, etc., were voiced against me, as well as threats against my relatives and friends. Under threat, a pledge of cooperation was taken from me, obligating me to provide information about the “espionage” activities of Yabloko and “methods of sending information abroad”¹⁰.

In 2022, Meduza published the revelations of one of the recruits — Vsevolod Osipov, a member of the Libertarian Party of Russia, who was even sent to Georgia to spy on emigrants from Russia¹¹. After a search of his apartment and a conversation at the police station, he was recruited by a provocateur previously infiltrated into the LPR, who introduced himself as Roman Korkh and was a party member (in reality, he was a police major from Center “E”). Osipov was given various tasks — gathering information on Roman Yuneman’s headquarters, LPR conventions, the activities of Russian emigrants in Georgia, and so on. This is far from the only case of recruiting people from the LPR — even the secretary of this organization spoke about how rather well-known officers “Lyosha Ulybka” and Alexei Okopny tried to recruit him right on the street¹². Another person recruited by the FSB spoke about how this process unfolded:

The FSB officer was very interested in how funding was structured, whether employees of foreign intelligence services or diplomats came to us. I replied that I was a technical employee and did not meet with any diplomats. I told him what qualitative sociology is and how it differs from quantitative sociology. He told me about Brzezinski, asking if I had read his book “The Grand Chessboard”. I said: “No, I haven’t read it”.

He briefly summarized its contents for me, saying that back in the mid-1990s Brzezinski wrote that by the mid-2000s Ukraine would become an agent of the West, and that everything is happening just like that. That they want to break us up so that Chechnya would be separate, Karelia separate, and so on. The conversation was generally friendly, although a few times he casually mentioned, you know there is a law on espionage, there is a law on high treason¹³.

Here we see that the FSB officer tried to “pump” his charge with imperial anti-Western information, from which it is logical to conclude that state security agents will use similar methods of mind manipulation. This is also confirmed by many other recruitment stories. An example from Ilya Yashin from 2006:

The essence of the lecture was that young Russian democracy was facing the threat of losing its sovereignty. The threat comes from Western intelligence services and oligarchs. To eliminate this threat, a coalition of “honest Chekists” and a patriotically oriented civil society is needed. Only then, according to him, will Russia become free and independent. “We have much more in common than it seems. You are a patriot of Russia, just like me”, the senior lieutenant instilled in me in a theatrical whisper¹⁴.

It would not be amiss to recall the story of Konstantin Lebedev — a provocateur infiltrated into the “Left Front” who later extensively gave testimony in court against many protest participants¹⁵. This happened when the author of this text was a participant in the “Left Front”, and it was very good luck that Lebedev was one of the few well-known people in the movement with whom he did not communicate. However, this was not the only case of coming into contact “one handshake away” with the working methods of intelligence services. One of the author’s acquaintances privately described the mechanism used to try to recruit him. Everything is insultingly prosaic: a case is simply “fabricated” against the person, and during the interrogation blackmail takes place: either we put you in prison, or you work for us. Of course, some choose freedom with snitching. Another acquaintance described another method: a person is simply offered a high-paying job, and they only need to work a couple of days a week there. But there can be even more recruitment methods. In official KGB documents, the following are highlighted as primary methods:

Recruitment of agents is carried out both by gradually involving the recruit in carrying out assignments of the KGB organs, and by means of a direct recruitment offer¹⁶.

Overall, we can draw the following conclusion: it is undeniable that state security agents exist in the opposition. There are likely quite a few of them (and among them is a significant number of opposition leaders). But approximately how many?

Approximate number of agents

We do not possess contemporary data, however, we have approximate data from other historical periods of authoritarian regimes in Russia — we have tentative data on how many agents of the Tsarist “Okhrana” were in opposition political parties prior to 1917; furthermore, we know how many Stasi agents and informers were in the GDR, which was largely controlled by the Soviet regime. Percentage ratios can give us an approximate range.

Former employee of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs Eduard Khlystalov claimed that “according to statements by top police officials, in the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party every second person was a paid informer, and among the Social Democrats (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) — every third. And this was not an exaggeration”¹⁷. Former editor-in-chief of “Svobodnaya Pressa” Pavel Pryanikov claimed that “by 1917, the Okhrana had only about 10 thousand staff agents among revolutionary parties. Taking into account temporary, non-staff agents (“shtuchniki”) — over 50 thousand. For example, among the Bolsheviks, including the party leadership, there were more than 2 thousand of them… Of the 10 thousand exposed agents, about 5 thousand were part of the SRs. Approximately the same number as among the Bolsheviks was the number of agents in Jewish (Bund and Poale Zion) and Polish left-wing parties (2-2.2 thousand)”¹⁸. According to the estimate of Candidate of Historical Sciences Olga Edelman, who gave an interview to “Echo of Moscow”, we are indeed talking about similar figures:

What is the revolutionary movement, especially in the Caucasus? Well, when the Okhrana archives were opened, after all, in 1917 the revolutionaries themselves, having come to power, tried to organize certain show trials, there was talk of identifying Okhrana agents, a special commission was created to identify and prosecute these very agents, headed by the very famous historian Shchegolev. Do you know how the work of this commission ended? It ended abruptly. The number of Okhrana agents was such, so indecent… That is, somewhere around, you know, well, there, 3 out of 7 revolutionaries¹⁹.

However, all of these are extremely conditional and approximate estimates. We still have very little data on the scale of provocations in Russia. But data from the GDR is better revealed. This is all the more useful to us, since the current “leader” of the RF comes precisely from the Stasi, and the working methods of this organization are known to him firsthand. But the GDR security services themselves were built with an eye toward Russian/Soviet security services and with the active participation of their personnel.

In total, in October 1989, the MfS staff listed 91,015 official employees and 189,000 informers²⁰. The total number of non-staff employees was about 2.5% of the entire population of the GDR. Since many personal files were destroyed, it is not possible to establish the exact number of non-staff informers. However, experts agree that 500,000 people is a completely realistic figure. Former MfS GDR employee Reiner Wiegand, who served in the counterintelligence department, believed that together with those who “snitched” episodically, this number could reach up to two million²¹. More than a third of the country’s population was under the control of the secret services²².

At least one Stasi officer was mandatory at every industrial enterprise (in all small towns). It could turn out to be any worker standing at a machine tool reporting “where appropriate” about manifestations of opposition sentiment. Stasi members were present in all apartment buildings (pensioners often became informers), in schools (almost all teachers were recruited), universities, hospitals, and other institutions. Even waiters and hotel maids were recruited. Sometimes the informers turned out to be the most unexpected people, for example, Heinrich Fink, professor of theology and vice president of Humboldt University of Berlin.

The GDR secret services viewed the institution of informership as a key tool in exercising social control and combating dissent. Thus, the 1958 MfS GDR directive, in particular, contained the statement that “unofficial collaborators are the most important factor in the struggle against the secret activity of the class enemy”²³. And a later directive from 1979 stated: “The desired political and social impact of our political operational work must be achieved by improving the quality and effectiveness of the work of unofficial collaborators — the main weapon in the fight against the enemy”²⁴.

The Stasi had an extensive network of agents not only inside the country, but also beyond its borders: according to some sources, the network of Stasi informers and agents in neighboring FRG reached 38 thousand people at its peak²⁵, including in the highest circles: thus, the assistant to FRG Chancellor Willy Brandt, Günter Guillaume, turned out to be an agent of the GDR security services.

In the 1960s – 1980s, MfS officers thoroughly perfected methods of “operational psychology” — the so-called measures of demoralization or decomposition (Zersetzung) of “enemies” of the regime. With the help of these measures, state security organs caused or provoked conflicts between members of various groups, attempted to weaken or disrupt interaction between church organizations, limit or destroy the activity (or rather, potential activity) of opposition groups through interference in the personal and professional lives of their members²⁶.

There is also some information about other Communist Party regimes — thus, the commission for declassifying archives, which worked after the fall of Todor Zhivkov’s regime, showed that up to 10 percent of officials and entrepreneurs in post-communist Bulgaria were among the employees and informers of local secret services²⁷. That is, we can assume that in a more politically dangerous environment there were more employees than among the population as a whole. Which means that among oppositionists there will be even more of them, which is quite consistent with the data given above.

Overall, we have grounds to believe that today’s Russian regime, in terms of its level of authoritarianism, is hardly inferior to the GDR or Bulgaria, but surpasses the late tsarist regime. In existing democracy indices, it occupies one of the last places, and paranoid laws on “foreign agents” and “discrediting the army” are already present. According to estimates by the publication “Proekt”, every 57th Russian is a security official quite openly²⁸, and this is without taking informers into account. However, most of them are military or police officers. The FSB staff was approximately 200 thousand people in 2020. If the strength of the Stasi in 1989 was about 90 thousand people (with a population of 17 million²⁹), then 200 thousand FSB officers for 143 million seems not such a large figure. However, the full personnel of the FSB is a state secret, and some cite, for example, a figure of 350,000 people³⁰.

It will be difficult to name the total figure of informers among the population, however, most likely we are talking about at least hundreds of thousands of people. And if we take into account mass facts of recruitment and the general scale of provocateurs and “snitches” in the “handwriting” of Russian security services, we can assume that the number of such people in opposition structures is roughly comparable to the estimates that were cited above regarding pre-revolutionary Russia. Even if we significantly lighten this estimate, it turns out to be a quarter or a third. But one cannot rule out completely crazy figures either — 50, 60% (the pre-revolutionary opposition was much larger in numbers than today’s, accordingly, the agency was much larger quantitatively, and if the budget for the agency is at least the same, then in percentage terms its share today will be significantly larger). Some movements, such as Stalinist ones, may be completely KGB-run.

Is it possible to identify a KGB officer?

We have not yet managed to obtain internal instructions of the FSB (perhaps other movements succeeded). There are some documents of its direct predecessor (KGB) — for example, Order of the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR No. 00140 “On the Implementation of the Regulations on the Secret Network and Confidential Contacts of the State Security Organs of the USSR”, but they do not contain the full breadth of information. Therefore, we do not have a technique to identify an agent with 100% certainty. All that remains for us is to evaluate the probability of this. What can affect the probability? Many factors. None of them is a guarantee that a person is a provocateur or an agent.

First of all, an agent may be given away by the fact that they are not particularly interested in politics. And, being in a political organization surrounded by political people, they may talk more about food, beer, women, while keeping quiet or almost quiet about politics. Sometimes, when joining, for example, a social democratic organization, they may not understand the simplest things clear to every social democrat, and cannot give a coherent answer as to why they chose social democracy in particular. They are a complete zero in theory. Later, of course, they may catch up on knowledge. When a person has no political views, but joins a political organization — this is suspicious. Especially under authoritarianism, when participating in politics can threaten serious consequences, a person usually joins a political organization either when they have firmly decided on the organization in which they want to participate, or through an acquaintance/kinship with someone. However, there are also cases where a person chose an organization for aesthetic reasons — for example, they liked the symbolism, so there will be nothing strange or blameworthy if they do not know theory at first.

Sometimes intelligence agents throw money around in matters not related to politics. It is one thing to spend money on the party’s cause, and quite another to buy trust. If a person invests a lot of money in a political action — hiring employees for the party, paying for media expenses, printing propaganda materials, and so on — there can be no questions about such actions, they are completely right. But if they pay for everyone at a restaurant, give various gifts, give money for no reason — this is suspicious, this may be an act of buying trust and authority. According to KGB internal instructions, “the intelligence services of socialist countries in certain cases, when deemed expedient, may provide secret material or moral support to public figures, political parties and groups, press organs, cultural, religious, national, and other organizations”³¹.

If a person was under arrest and after that noticeably changed their behavior in certain aspects (became very reserved, became very nervous) — this is suspicious. Many oppositionists who worked for secret services, for example Narodnaya Volya member Fyodor Kuritsyn, were recruited precisely during arrest. A change in behavior after recruitment was observed in Vsevolod Osipov:

Osipov’s behavior after the interrogation also influenced the general opinion, his friend is convinced. “When I tried to communicate with him [by phone] after the search, he was very, very… I understand everything, that he was scared and all that, but he communicated very coldly, as if he had something to hide”, Ivan explains. “I tried to find out what he had managed to tell [the police]³².

In the secret service documents themselves, it is mentioned that the recruitment and blackmail of oppositionists, even the most radical ones, are permitted:

Where required, agents are acquired from among persons who fell under the influence of anti-Soviet propaganda, harbored intentions to commit criminal acts, were convicted in the past for participation in anti-Soviet activity, from among nationalist, reactionary clerical-sectarian, and other hostile elements. In their recruitment, compromising materials, material or personal interest may be used… It is permitted to recruit persons who have committed state or other crimes³³.

It is not the most optimistic signal if a person devotes more time to criticizing the opposition than to criticizing the authorities. It is absolutely logical if an oppositionist constantly criticizes the authorities. They may also speak out against part of the opposition. However, if they speak out against the authorities only the slightest bit, or do not speak out at all, while devoting considerable time to criticizing the opposition — this is suspicious behavior for an oppositionist. Particular attention should be paid to a person if, in addition to this, they also express praise for “pocket oppositionists” of the authorities and recommend materials of such “oppositionists”, for example, sending videos of Stas “Ai, Kak Prosto” Vasilyev.

Also, behavior in which a person does not work for the development of the opposition movement, makes no contribution in terms of the simplest party activity — does not campaign for people to join the organization, does not carry out work on spreading the organization’s ideology, does not perform any organizational work, and so on — cannot be a positive signal. Of course, most often this is simply connected with laziness or lack of time. However, in combination with other factors, this can be an additional reason for reflection. Perhaps the person does not want to get a “scolding” from their handler?

A potential sign may be a person taking the positions of the Kremlin and its resources on the “agenda”. For example, if a loud conflict breaks out tomorrow between Nigeria and Cameroon, and a person suddenly displays activity in supporting Cameroon (in which they were not overly interested before) at the very same time when Kremlin media also suddenly display an interest in this topic (also on the side of Cameroon) — this is suspicious behavior. Or if, for instance, Kremlin media suddenly began en masse to attack conditional singer Henri Sladkokhlebrov, and our “suspect” also initiated “five minutes of hate” regarding him — this is quite a reason to be on guard. In secret service training manuals, it is stated that one of the tasks of “active measures” is “to carry out the compromise of centers and organs involved in organizing ideological sabotage and other hostile operations against the countries of the socialist community”³⁴. They contain a separate subsection “Compromising reactionary political parties, organizations, and groups, as well as individual political figures”:

Compromise can be carried out by various methods. This depends on specific conditions, capabilities, and operational ingenuity. One can, for example, publish in the press or bring to the attention of certain circles data on unsightly acts, from a moral point of view, of a particular person, on political, monetary, or other machinations of the leadership of a particular party, one can send exposure letters by mail, etc.³⁵

Also, KGB documents directly prescribed giving preference in recruitment precisely to people with a “patriotic” position:

The patriotism of Soviet people, their active life position in ensuring the security of the socialist state is an inexhaustible reserve for further increasing the combat capability of the KGB organs.

<…>

Soviet citizens — patriots of our Motherland, possessing a high sense of responsibility for the security of the Soviet state, capable by their personal and professional qualities, occupied position, and other possibilities of successfully fulfilling assignments of the KGB organs, are recruited into the secret network of counterintelligence mainly. They are acquired on an ideological and political basis, subject to the principle of voluntariness.

<…>

Confidential relations, which are one of the forms of reliance of KGB organs on the assistance of working people, are established with honest Soviet citizens devoted to the Motherland strictly on a voluntary basis, mainly for informational purposes and for carrying out operational assignments of KGB organs³⁶.

Infiltrated KGB officers will likely spread statist disinformation. “Carrying out active measures” (that is, spreading disinformation) is listed first among the “main tasks solved with the help of agents” in the KGB manual³⁷. They will hate America, talk about the struggle being useless, that “grandfathers fought”, that lustration is not needed, will criticize color revolutions. One needs to understand the main points of the statist worldview in order to understand what these theses are. KGB officers stimulate apathy, claim that “this is not our protest”, and so on. Their main goal today is to cultivate hostility toward the “West”, which is one of the main directions of work of the Russian government. Another important goal is attacks on democracy. Their task is not to make people in your organization believe 100% of what they say. Their task is to make them believe at least 20%. Then constant, regular disinformation will allow, after a year or two, to already seriously change the opinions of most of the organization. Indeed, if a person holds statist views — it is suspicious if they joined a social democratic or liberal organization at the same time, and not, say, a conservative or Stalinist one. Usually imperialists gravitate toward imperialist organizations themselves.

Accordingly, it is suspicious if a person has a social circle consisting of statists — various kinds of National Bolsheviks, Stalinists, far-right figures. It is possible that they are linked to them not by friendly relations or a desire to persuade them, but by cooperation along a certain line or a desire to stick together with people whose views they actually share. It is also known that intelligence services work on the ideological “education” of their agents:

The personal qualities of agents necessary for successful cooperation with KGB organs are perfected and formed through political, legal, and moral education… The primary task of educating agents recruited using compromising materials or on the basis of personal interest consists in transferring their cooperation to an ideological and political basis³⁸.

Such a person may quite “head-on” manipulate you. A typical example of manipulation: “I like your party, and you have a good program, and economic views, but if only you stood on patriotic positions, then I would sympathize with you…” If they try to sway you to statist positions, promising material assistance, joining the organization, all-Russian popularity, and so on for this — this is rather cheap manipulation, and regarding the person who uses it, there should be an extreme degree of vigilance. One of the manuals of secret services states that a KGB officer must conduct constant ideological “work” with their “charges”:

In work on the ideological and political education of a recruiter agent who is close to us in ideological terms, the case officer needs to direct his efforts toward strengthening his convictions. Along with this, often a recruiter has to be taught techniques of masking true political views from those around him. All this requires from the case officer constant observation of the possible evolution of the recruiter agent’s worldview and exerting an appropriate influence on him in the direction we need.

When organizing the ideological and political education of a recruiter agent who does not fully share our political views and was drawn into cooperation with Soviet intelligence on a material or moral-psychological basis, the intelligence officer needs to carefully study his political profile, in particular to find out how his convictions were formed. Depending on the results of the analysis, one should determine the possibilities and expediency of ideological and political re-education of the recruiter agent, transferring him to our ideological positions…

The possibilities of ideological influence are diverse, and the application of one method or another depends on the preparedness of the case officer, his ability to exert influence on another person. Explanatory talks need to be planned in advance, built on concrete examples, sharp contrasts that allow drawing a conclusion about the justice of the USSR’s policy, the necessity of its support, and, consequently, about the moral justification of cooperation with representatives of the Soviet state…

A characteristic mistake of some case officers is that they pay attention to ideological and political education only at the initial stages of work with a recruiter agent. The weakening of ideological and educational work at subsequent stages can sometimes lead to undesirable consequences, especially during periods of aggravation of the operational situation in the country and intensification of anti-Soviet propaganda. It should be remembered that if targeted and systematic ideological and educational work is not conducted with recruiters, they may make serious blunders and even lose interest in cooperation³⁹.

It is suspicious if a person starts inviting into the organization people with views of one specific direction that differ from the ideology of the organization. This may be part of an activity to establish control over the organization. The principle here is simple — if, for example, a liberal pro-Western organization recruits many people with liberal-conservative views, it ceases to have a fundamental cultural confrontation with the government, and, accordingly, the level of its threat to the current government of the RF is significantly reduced. “Pumping” the organization with various “anti-Westerners” allows decomposing the organization, reorienting it from the struggle against the government to the struggle against governments of “Western” countries, which is beneficial to the government.

It should be alarming if a person often writes denunciations and complaints to state organs against other people, or threatens to do so. Oppositionists rarely trust the system they fight against to resolve legal issues. Snitches are evaluated by secret services as people favorable for recruitment:

An important task of operational personnel is the daily, targeted search for individuals from among whom valuable and particularly valuable agents can be recruited and, in the process of active activity, education, and training, prepared. The category of such agents includes: from among Soviet citizens — individuals taking effective part in the prevention and suppression of especially dangerous state crimes, exposing enemy agents and emissaries, obtaining information about the plans and designs of enemy intelligence services and foreign anti-Soviet centers, actively participating in compromising and decomposing hostile formations⁴⁰.

Attention should be paid if a person agitates against certain methods of fighting the regime. For example, this may include revolutionary defencism — when a person declares that peaceful methods of struggle are useless and unnecessary, and that only revolution is needed. The other extreme here is “immaculate defencism”, when a person declares that any revolutionary methods are unacceptable, regardless of their outcome. Or if they, for example, declare that creating a large number of accounts on social networks to promote opposition accounts is unacceptable, covering it up with demagogic pseudo-moralizing like “this is deception”.

It is very suspicious if a person is untrainable — that is, if a situation often occurs in which they cannot prove the thesis they are spreading, obviously lose in a discussion, but do not stop spreading this thesis. Quite often this is how people who have a specific assignment work, and they must carry it out (they are not interested in arriving at the truth). However, most often these are just ordinary stubborn people, of whom there are quite a few in Russia, and for whom their own well-being is not as important as creating the appearance of being right. Particularly skillful provocateurs know how to prove almost anything with the help of demagogic techniques and gaps in the interlocutor’s knowledge.

Most likely, secret service agents will instigate enmity between oppositionists in Russia and oppositionists in emigration. They understand that one group cannot exist without the other — those in Russia have the opportunity to influence citizens directly on the territory, while those outside Russia can boldly say the most uncomfortable things for the authorities. They are also taught by the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1917, in which emigrants played a significant role. It is not surprising that special attention is paid to this in their instructional manuals. Thus, one of the tasks of disinformation measures, according to these manuals, is to “contribute to the decomposition of emigrant centers”⁴¹. They clearly state that “measures to compromise are used quite actively by the intelligence services of socialist countries in their work against the reactionary emigration and its leaders”⁴². Therefore, one should expect phrases from them like “it’s easy for you to talk in your America”, designed to undermine trust between groups of oppositionists in Russia and in emigration.

KGB officers are often distinguished by certain characteristic traits — a sense of elitism, excessive rudeness, vindictiveness, a craving for conspiracy theories, sadism. They judge the modern world primitively — as a Stone Age-style struggle for resources. They believe that there is no democracy anywhere, that everywhere is actually run by some hidden “uncles”. They believe that morality, principles, and values are tinsel, just a superstructure that everyone sacrifices, which means they are allowed to sacrifice it too. All this can be distinguishing features of a KGB officer. This can also manifest in wild, inappropriate humor — for example, in jokes about 1937, regarding the repressed, and so on.

Finally, such people will extremely actively resist any of your actions aimed at the development and popularization of the democratic movement. If you buy advertising, they will shout that you are sponsored by some rich people. If you engage in mass following, they will shout that you are creating bots. If you raise money for political campaigns, they will say that for you, politics is a business. And so on. They will incline oppositionists to apathy, to the idea that “it is useless to fight”, that their activities meet a negative reaction among the masses. And any action that leads to the strengthening of opposition democratic forces, they will try to present in a negative light. And this is highly suspicious behavior.

Conclusion

Agents of Russian secret services are definitely present in the Russian opposition. Most likely, they make up a tangible percentage, and they are present at all levels, even the highest ones. What this percentage is, and how to identify them — we cannot say with precision. We are unlikely to succeed in building work without their presence, so we should be aware of the following: if we engage in politics in Russia, then there will definitely be secret service agents and informers in our organizations. This leads to the conclusion about the need to observe secrecy to the extent possible. One possible form of work: combining opposition activity completely within the framework of the law under one’s real identity and radical opposition activity on the Internet under a pseudonym and in compliance with cybersecurity rules.

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31. Main Directions and Objects of Intelligence Work Abroad, 1970. – 105 p.
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33. Order of the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR No. 00140 “On the Implementation of the Regulations on the Secret Network and Confidential Contacts of the State Security Organs of the USSR” – 32 p. – M.: 1983. – p. 8.
34. Main Directions and Objects of Intelligence Work Abroad, 1970. – 105 p.
35. Ibid.
36. Order of the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR No. 00140 “On the Implementation of the Regulations on the Secret Network and Confidential Contacts of the State Security Organs of the USSR” – 32 p. – M.: 1983. – p. 3-23.
37. Ibid, p. 5.
38. Ibid, p. 18.
39. Acquisition and Training of Recruiter Agents for the Purpose of Intelligence Infiltration into US Institutions (On the Example of a Number of North African Countries), 1988. – 54 p.
40. Order of the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR No. 00140 “On the Implementation of the Regulations on the Secret Network and Confidential Contacts of the State Security Organs of the USSR” – 32 p. – M.: 1983. – p. 9.
41. Main Directions and Objects of Intelligence Work Abroad, 1970. – 105 p.
42. Ibid.