Unidentified OGPU officer (United States, 1929)

A four-part series titled “По Тюрьмам Кавказа” (“Through the Prisons of the Caucasus”),[i] which appeared in the émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie in June 1932, told the story of a young Armenian who left the Soviet Union in 1924 and naively decided to return in 1929. His name is not given, but the series is signed M.Sh.G.

The young man had served in the GPU Secret Operational Section in Tbilisi, where he rose in the ranks even though he was the youngest person in his unit. He gave few details of the operations in which his section was involved, except a brief mention that nine members of his section were connected to the assassination of Turkish political leader Jemal Pasha in Tbilisi in 1922. He was sent on a temporary assignment to Vladivostok and then to Kharbin, China, traveling as a member of the railway union, which the Soviet Union planned to use to establish a Soviet presence in China. From Kharbin, he went to Shanghai, and then to Japan, and then to the United States in 1924.

He claimed his motivation for leaving the Soviet Union was not ideological, but rather he was attracted by a youthful longing to see Hollywood. He was mesmerized by the silver screen. He arrived in New York, and he wandered around the United States for several years, all the while retaining his communist convictions. Finally, he wrote a letter to Moscow requesting to be allowed to return home.

He knew that, as a former chekist, his sudden disappearance would not quickly be forgiven. But from what he saw of the communist movement in the United States, he convinced himself that the Cheka would not only forgive him but also give him his old job back.

He left France in March 1929 on a ship with a group of Armenian families who were returning from France and the United States believing the Soviet Union would welcome them home. He was arrested soon after disembarking from the ship in Batumi, Georgia, and was imprisoned in Tbilisi. He eventually learned that his arrest was for talking positively about America on the train from Batumi. Much of his story focuses on life and acquaintances in various prisons in Georgia.

After over nine months in prison, he was suddenly released and traveled to his hometown of Stepanavan, Armenia. He arrived at the height of dekulakization; his father had already disappeared as a kulak and there was nothing left of their land. So he left the village and went back to Tbilisi, this time not as a prisoner, but as a free man. What he found there—hunger and squalor—persuaded him to leave the Soviet Union again. He briefly describes his path through Baku, Azerbaijan, to Turkmenistan, from which he crossed the border into Persia, and then to Europe. He did not specify when he left the Soviet Union the second time, but it was likely in 1930 or 1931.

It is unclear whether he was ever debriefed in the West about his time as a Cheka/GPU officer. His duties appeared to include both domestic security and foreign influence operations, but he wrote little about those operations. Thus, although he can be described as an intelligence officer defector, he may not have revealed anything. He was a rare individual who escaped from the Soviet Union twice and could contrast life in the Soviet Union with life in the West from personal experience. He wrote his story primarily to illustrate the disenchantment that developed after realizing what had changed in the Soviet Union in his five-year absence.

[i] M.Sh.G, “По Тюрьмам Кавказа” (“Through the Prisons of the Caucasus”), Vozrozhdenie, 1, 5, 8, and 11 June 1932.