Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Sobolev

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Sobolev spent most of career as a professional naval officer, not an intelligence officer. Similar to earlier defector Nesterovich, he was transferred into the Razvedupr and assigned intelligence duties when he served as a naval attaché, first in Turkey in 1925, and then in Sweden in 1928. He refused an order to return to Moscow in April 1930 and remained in the West, initially in Stockholm and later Brussels. He left a large quantity of written literature that gives autobiographical information and insights into his mindset and motivations.

Sobolev was born in February 1890 in Moscow, and from an early age he was interested in naval affairs. He joined the Imperial Navy in 1907, became midshipman in 1910, and later the same year passed the examination to become a warrant officer at the age of 20. His first naval ship was the battleship Imperator Pavel I, where he was received brilliant evaluations from his superior officers, who described him as a “decisive,” “very capable” young officer with a “phenomenal memory” and a great future. He was renowned for his knowledge of foreign naval vessels.[i]

In 1913 he entered naval artillery school and he was promoted to artillery officer second class upon graduation in July 1914. He returned to the Imperator Pavel I as a commissioned officer and quickly rose in position and responsibility, and was promoted to artillery officer first class in October 1916. Although his vessel did not see active combat action during World War I, he received a number of decorations and was promoted to senior lieutenant in July 1917.

The tsarist navy was formally disbanded on 3 April 1918, but Sobolev soon transferred to the newly created Red Navy, where he distinguished himself in naval actions during the civil war. His civil war service began in the Red Fleet general staff in Moscow, but he soon deployed as an artillery officer with the Volga-Caspian Flotilla, operating against White forces along the Volga River and in the south of Russia.[ii] He moved to the Caspian Fleet in 1920, and participated under the command of Fedor Fedorovich Raskolnikov during the naval assault on Bandar Anzali, Persia, which established the short-lived Persian Soviet Socialist Republic.[iii] From November 1920 until November 1922 he served on the staff of the Caspian Fleet, first for several months as acting Chief of Naval Forces, and then as Chief of Staff of the fleet. At some point during his civil war experience, he was injured and lost an eye.

After the civil war, he turned to studying naval strategy for the Soviet Navy staff, where he was a prolific writer on naval tactics and planning and Red Navy actions during the civil war. From 1923 to 1925 he worked in the Naval History Commission, serving as editor of naval history publications. He wrote a number of articles on Soviet naval activities in the civil war and in 1924 published a book titled Красный Флот в Гражданской Войне 1918-1920 гг. (The Red Navy in the Civil War, 1918-1920),[iv] which described heroic Soviet Navy operations that led to the defeat of White forces during the civil war. Sobolev himself had served in some of these operations, and he immersed himself in Soviet Navy data to develop the definitive work on the topic. He became known as one of the leading naval historians of the time. Sobolev showed his conformity to Soviet norms at the time the book was published, and it begins with a statement about the coming socialist victory over the belligerent bourgeois forces around the world.[v]

His career took a turn in 1925 when he was assigned as Soviet naval attaché in Turkey. Yevgeniy Vasilyevich Dumbadze, who defected two years before Sobolev, identified him in Turkey as a close associate of the Razvedupr rezident in Istanbul.[vi] According to later defector Samuel Gershovich Ginzberg (Walter Germanovich Krivitsky), all military attachés went through training in a special Razvedupr section that dealt with foreign intelligence before being sent abroad.[vii] In this training he would have received source handling and security instructions as well as political indoctrination to ensure loyalty while abroad. He served in Turkey until 1927, and his next assignment was as naval attaché in Sweden from early 1928. A Vozrozhdenie article dated from March 1928 identified Sobolev as the incoming naval attaché in Stockholm, replacing Paul Yuryevich Oras, who was expelled from Sweden for espionage in December 1927.[viii] Consequently, Sobolev was likely to attract special scrutiny from Swedish authorities to determine whether he would carry on his predecessor’s espionage activities.

Both Turkey and Sweden were important posts for monitoring the Black and Baltic Seas respectively, implying some level of confidence in Sobolev. However, Sobolev reportedly received instructions from Razvedupr chief Jan Karlovich Berzin, dated 6 April 1930, upbraiding him for unsuccessful collection operations during his assignment in Turkey and directing him to collect military intelligence and to obtain weapons plans, drawings, and manufacturing secrets in Sweden.[ix] Within a week of the arrival of this message he received another message recalling him to Moscow, ostensibly to take a new position in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.[x]

The reason for the sudden reversal of his assignment is unknown, as is his response to Berzin’s tasking message—the timing of the two messages could imply that the recall was somehow related to his response to the tasking. What is known is that on 15 April 1930, Sobolev suddenly, without warning, announced that he refused to return to the Soviet Union.

Within a few weeks of his refusal to return to Moscow, Sobolev wrote several articles in the Paris-based émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie, in which he explained his defection and issued manifestos against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He vigorously denied ever having joined the party himself and justified his participation in the Soviet military as serving Russia not the party. He described how various party чистки (“cleansings”) gradually stripped the party of sincere members and replaced them with “enviers, loafers, and grabbers, the party is more and more filled with people very low in moral terms.…who came to the party just for the ‘rank’.”[xi] He repeats several times the assertion that one of the consequences for those, including himself, who did not join the party was a prohibition against thinking—party members reserved for themselves the right to think for the whole country. Although the articles and books on naval strategy and history that he published before his defection somewhat contradict this assertion, he clearly expressed the feeling of having been a second-class citizen as a non-party member.

Sobolev’s life in Sweden did not go smoothly during his first year. The Soviet Supreme Court declared that him a traitor and sentenced him to death in absentia. The court further claimed that he had stolen money from the Soviet embassy when he defected, and in October 1930 the Swedish government froze his bank account.[xii] The Soviet Union took Sobolev to Court in Stockholm in November 1930, demanding $2,579 dollars. Sobolev admitted during the trial that he had access to Soviet money while serving as an attaché, some for official purposes, and other money to acquire secret information, which he expended based on special instructions. During the course of the trial Sobolev testified about sources in Sweden and claimed that an OGPU officer had come to Stockholm to kidnap him a return him to the Soviet Union.[xiii] He was eventually acquitted, but he left Sweden and settled in Belgium.

He began a new career as a prolific writer, publishing nearly 70 articles in a variety of Russian émigré periodicals between May 1930 and March 1935. Several topics dominated his His post-defection writings. As noted above, his first articles laid out his antipathy toward the Communist Party, and many of his subsequent articles continued on this anti-Communist theme. He wrote that communism in no way represents the view of the majority of the Russian people, and that party is constantly struggling to exert its dominance over a reluctant and resistant Russian people, many of whom hate the party.

Sobolev described what he called “intervention,” which entailed foreign communists from Finland, Sweden, Bulgaria, and China traveling to the Soviet Union for military training. His explanation for why these foreigners were being trained was that the Red Army was part of the “country” not the “party,” and was thus was increasingly considered unreliable. Consequently, loyal foreigners were needed to counterweigh internal opposition.[xiv] He explained that in the Communist interpretation of global class conflict, international borders were irrelevant, and Soviet remonstrations about foreign intervention onto Soviet territory were only for propaganda purposes. Although he did not use the specific name of the school, he was describing what was later to be known as the Comintern’s Lenin School, where foreign communists received training in revolutionary and espionage skills.

His anti-communist writings also contained several repeating themes, in which he took it upon himself to explain to an ignorant West the realities of communism. His writing implied that émigrés who had left Russia before or soon after the revolution could not understand what was happening inside the Soviet Union, and thus he had to explain it to them. His themes included:

· Russia has been taken over by an amoral, destroying power called communism.
· All party members are enlisted as informants. Party members are thieves and sycophants.
· The communist party has tried to establish government institutions that appear like those in other countries, but in reality it rules without need for these institutions and creates them only to appear normal.

In addition to his anti-communist writing, he also focused articles on several other topics. He continued his pre-defection expertise about military history and his services during the civil war, but from an anti-Communist perspective. He also wrote at least 23 articles between 1930 and 1933 on the military situation in China, providing commentary on Chang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang’s efforts to combat both Japanese aggression and communist forces in China. And published a series of articles giving details of the military and naval situation in Turkey, where he served as a naval attaché.

In 1935, Sobolev disappeared from public view. But Russian historian Igor Petrov noted in an interview with Radio Freedom that Sobolev was among anti-Soviet émigrés who saw in Nazi Germany an ally in the struggle to remove communist rule from Russia. German intelligence files contain extensive information about Soviet politics, economics, and military affairs, written by Sobolev while he was still living in Brussels. He also supplied German intelligence as late as 1943 with information about the Soviet mindset and how to fight on the eastern front.[xv] No more is known of Sobolev after 1943.