Stefens

In about August 1926, an individual named Stefens walked into the Paris office of Russian emigre newspaper Vozrozhdenie requesting to be interviewed. When the receptionist asked, “With whom do I have the honor of speaking?,” Stefens reportedly replied, “It is a small honor. I am a secret collaborator of the GPU.”[i] Whether he truly said those words is unknown, but a corresponding sense of dishonor about having served the GPU set the tone for the details he gave to his interviewers.

Stefens showed his Soviet passport issued in the pseudonym Ivan Vasilyevich Gavrilchenko. He had traveled from Rostov-na-Donu to Constantinople to Paris, and offered to tell everything he knew about the OGPU, stating that his motivation was to do as much harm to the OGPU as possible.

Stefens was a soldier in the Ukrainian Army in 1920 during the Polish-Soviet War, working as a courier for Ukrainian and Polish counterintelligence. When Poland and the RSFSR signed the Treaty of Riga and ended the Polish-Russian War, Ukrainian troops located on Polish territory were placed in internment camps awaiting repatriation to Soviet Ukraine. The officials sent by Moscow to administer repatriation were ChK counterintelligence officers who promised amnesty for returning troops. Many of the soldiers accepted the promises and voluntarily returned, only to be imprisoned when they arrived in Ukraine.

Stefens was more fortunate than most prisoners of war. Working as a courier between Ukrainian and Polish forces gave him freedom of movement between camps. He was couriering a package containing Ukrainian security seals when he met the repatriation officers, and they offered him full amnesty if he would allow them to inspect the contents of the package. He agreed, and they skillfully opened the package, copied the contents, and returned it to him the next day. Stefens’ willingness to cooperate, as well as his proficiency in both German and English, made him an attractive candidate for recruitment into the OGPU. When he was being transported home for repatriation, he was surprised to learn that he was not going to Ukraine as he had been promised, but to Moscow.

Stefens spent a month in an OGPU detention cell in Moscow, during which he was given barely enough rations to avoid starvation. Similar to Karpov (see separate entry in this database), when the OGPU Chief of Counterintelligence, Artur Khistyanovich Artuzov, finally interrogated him, Stefens was given an offer to either join the OGPU or await execution. He agreed to cooperate, and he received a new suit of clothes, good food, and a comfortable place to stay.

He began his career with the OGPU in Kharkov, Ukraine, where he worked against anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian nationalists and foreigners. He described an operation in 1922-1923 to capture and eventually co-opt the Ukrainian rebel commander, Yurko Tyutyunnik, a compatriot of the troublesome Ukrainian ataman Simon Petlyura. Tyutyunnik was eventually caught after the OGPU had captured his messenger and recruited him as a double agent. Stefens was also involved in a surreptitious entry into the office of the American Press Association in Kharkov, from which the OGPU obtained information about American perceptions of the economic and political situation in Ukraine and Russia, as well as a large amount of money. Further, Stefens described an OGPU-sponsored armed robbery of a train in which the Polish diplomatic emissary to Kharkov was returning to Warsaw.

Stefens later transferred to Rostov-na-Donu, the headquarters for OGPU operations in the North Caucasus. Rostov was the destination for numerous foreign delegations that came to the Soviet Union to see the Bolshevik regime’s accomplishments. The OGPU completely surrounded these delegations with intelligence sources, and Stefens worked as an interpreter, ensuring that visitors saw only the authorized sites. He also described the North Caucasus as a hotbed for anti-Bolshevik activities during the early 1920s, creating “no-go” zones where OGPU was not safe travel.

Stefens began as a “секретный сотрудник” (secret collaborator; often referred to by the acronym “seksot”), and he continued to call himself by that title after he defected. But because of his language proficiency he was given access to operations beyond the typical co-opted agent, and was treated more like a low-level officer. The need for language proficiency was a vulnerability for the OGPU and its successor organizations for many years, and numerous defectors, beginning with Karpov and Stefens, came from the ranks of translators and interpreters.

Also like Karpov, Stefens described a deep distrust that existed between the OGPU and the Soviet population in the 1920s. The OGPU believed that the Soviet people were ready to resist Bolshevik power at all times, supported by foreign anti-Bolshevik émigrés. A high priority for the OGPU was to identify those foreign links, and penetrate and neutralize them. Stefens also stated that the Soviet people avoided contact with the OGPU, considering them to be dangerous and uncouth. To call someone a “chekist” in the 1920s was highly offensive. If an OGPU officer arrived at a public gathering, the rest of the attendees would find reasons to leave.

A theme that ran through Stefens’ story, which Vozrozdenie titled “Нравы и Работа ГПУ” (“The Mores and Work of the OGPU”), was the corruption and immorality that permeated the OGPU. It was this factor that motivated him to break ties with the OGPU and escape. He described the abusive language used by all OGPU superiors to subordinates. Women were especially vulnerable to supervisors’ whims: he related a situation where one of his supervisors, a gloomy, brutal man named Evdokimov, would walk through the office, point to a female clerk, and say, “You are coming to my place today.” His view was that he OGPU attracted losers and dropouts into its ranks, and their behavior as officers reflected the unrefined nature of the recruits. Stefens never reached a high rank, and he portrayed a sense of being subjugated to a group of crude, boorish supervisors. Consequently, when he decided to defect, he was determined to do as much harm to the organization as he could.

Stefens’ break from the OGPU came when he was sent to Constantinople to locate and lure an anti-Bolshevik activist to Russia for execution. Knowing that the OGPU had a strong presence in Constantinople and could find him if he tried to hide there, he traveled to Paris. He reported to the Soviet embassy, where he was issued a train ticket back to Moscow. Instead of returning, however, he refunded the ticket and disappeared in Paris. He finally resurfaced when he walked into the Vozrozhdenie office, probably having run out of money. No further information is available about Stefens after his story was published.

[i] “Нравы и Работа ГПУ” (“The Mores and Work of the GPU”), Vozrozhdenie, 11 September 1926, p. 2. Vozrozhdenie published a 15-part series from 11 September to 6 October 1926, which is the only available information about Stefens’ career and defection.