Vadim Ivanovich Shelaputin

Vadim Ivanovich Shelaputin was a student at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages from 1945 to 1948 and graduated with the rank of lieutenant. He was posted to the Central Group of Forces in Vienna in October 1948 translating Czech newspapers and GRU agent reports from Czech into Russian for communication to Moscow. He was only 22 years old when crossed into the U.S. sector of Vienna in March 1949.

Shelaputin was raised in Moscow. When he was 14-15 years old, he worked in a railway car repair shop as an apprentice electrician. He attended an art school for a brief time in 1944, but realized he did not have the talent for it. Just before he entered language school he worked for a short time with his father in the theater and played a few minor roles in plays that this father directed. Shelaputin himself was not interested in becoming an actor, but was more interested in being a journalist.

Shelaputin told an HPSSS interviewer that his young years were influenced most by his love for his mother and father. His father had been a junior officer in the tsarist army. He became an actor, and that career shaped his political thinking.[i] Shelaputin described him as “a little bohemian.”[ii] Shelaputin was sympathetic to the acting career and, probably channeling his father, discussed the dissonance that an actor feels when he is forced to perform propaganda roles just to earn a living. He described himself as anti-Soviet already when he started working for the GRU.[iii]

He also recalled several instances from the Yezhovshchina in which his neighbors disappeared and were sent to labor camps. He did not understand the ramifications of the disappearances initially because he was young, but as he got older they began to sink in. He particularly criticized the Soviet law that punishes family members of those declared “enemies of the people.”[iv]

He entered the Military Language School in 1945 and graduated in 1948. He indicated that he was fortunate to have been selected to study Czech because it was a high demand language that few Soviets knew. In 1946, he spent 1 1/2 months in Transcarpathian Ukraine, where he practiced his Czech among native linguists. He was initially encouraged to read Czechoslovakian newspapers at school, but the rules became stricter when newspapers published stories of Czechoslovakians escaping Soviet control and taking refuge in Germany.[v]

His job as a translator and report editor was in the Agents Section of the second department of the GRU. The GRU also lent his as a translator to the MGB, for whom he translated documents about the British SIS and U.S. CIC.[vi] His GRU translation work was intended to train him in agent handling and to prepare him for clandestine work, and he received orders to go to Czechoslovakia in a cover assignment for that purpose. He decided to defect to avoid it. Although in the abstract he was attracted to intelligence work, he was not looking forward to being an agent handler because he doubted the Soviet system and was not interested in working for its benefit.[vii]

Shelaputin described the role that the MGB played in the GRU. One or two MGB officers were embedded in the GRU unit to monitor officers’ loyalty. Although the identity of the embedded officer was not publicly known, Shelaputin and his close confidants believed they knew who it was. The individual they suspected of being the MGB officer would try to provoke people by telling anti-Soviet jokes and then asking others if they knew any, or he would drop by another officer’s home and ask what he was reading. They simply avoided him.[viii]

Shelaputin’s HPSSS interviewer drilled down into his anti-Soviet views and the views of other officers in his unit. His time in the Military Language Institute was a time of political awakening. He said he had developed anti-Soviet views and discussed them with his close friends at the language institute. He was invited to join the Komsomol, but avoided it for over a year until the Komsomol secretary told him to fill out an application immediately. By the time he left the institute he had been accepted as a full party member, but he claimed it was only to show superficial obedience and that he had become an “accomplished double thinker” and careerist.[ix] When he arrived in Vienna, he, along with other GRU officers were encouraged to read foreign newspapers, giving them access to news that most Soviet citizens never had, such as information about the defections of Soviet Air Force pilots Anatoliy Barsov and Petr Pirogov to the U.S. zone of Austria in October 1948, or the trial of Viktor Kravchenko in Paris that ran from January to April 1949. GRU officers could read these stories and even mention them in the office, but would carefully avoid making any commentary on them.[x] Nevertheless, they reinforced Shelaputin’s existing views about the Soviet Union.

He accepted a job abroad hoping to have the opportunity to escape. But when he first arrived in Vienna, all he knew was that American forces return deserters to Soviet control. He learned differently during his five months working in Vienna and took the opportunity when it arose.[xi] He approached a CIC office in Vienna in March 1949, and the CIC exfiltrated him to Germany. He was extensively debriefed and revealed the names of fellow language institute students and GRU operations in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Soviet writers ascribe a purely materialistic motive to Shelaputin’s defection. In June 1984, an article in the Soviet journal Aviatsia i Kosmonavtika described Shelaputin as “an indefatigable lover of pop music and foreign rags,” an example of the type of people who were employed by Western radio propaganda organizations.[xii] Retired GRU officer Vitaliy Nikolskiy, who was working in Vienna at the same time as Shelaputin, claims that American intelligence had recruited Shelaputin several weeks before his defection when he got into a drunken brawl with an American soldier, and American intelligence officers threatened to press assault charges if Shelaputin refused to cooperate.[xiii] Karavashkin gives a similar account, and adds that it later became clear that Shelaputin was “enamored with the Western way of life. He was especially fascinated by the accessibility of women and the opportunities to have a good time.”[xiv] Prokhorov claims that Shelaputin was a clear example of those who defected to the West “exclusively in search of an easy and beautiful life.”[xv]

Shelaputin was interviewed for the HPSSS in November 1950. He remarked to his interviewer that he was disappointed when he first arrived in the West because he thought the Americans would use him to fight Bolshevism. He was hoping to employ what he considered his journalistic talents in that fight. But during his first two years in the West he felt he was not put to use, and he considered simply taking the offer to be resettled in Brazil and start a new life. But he sensed a shift in U.S. policy and did not lose hope.[xvi]

He eventually got his wish of working against the Soviet Union. He emigrated to the UK in 1952 and was granted British citizenship in April 1958.[xvii] He worked for the SIS in the early 1950s and U.S. intelligence tried to use him in to recruit one of his former institute classmates who was working at the Soviet embassy in the Netherlands; the attempt was not successful.[xviii] He got a job at the BBC Russian Service using the name Victor Gregory, where he worked until 1972. He then moved back to Germany to work for Radio Liberty and retired in 1990.

The Soviet Union showed interest in Shelaputin for many years after his defection. He was listed in the 1969 “KGB Wanted List,” which erroneously indicated he was “supposedly living in Chile”; he was actually living in the UK at the time. He was sentenced to execution in absentia in 1950.[xix]