Sipelgas, Aleksandr Yanovich

Aleksandr Yanovich Sipelgas worked for Soviet intelligence from 1920 until late 1924. He published the account of his intelligence career and defection in 1930 in a series of articles titled “Записки агента Разведупра“ (“Notes of a Razvedupr Agent”) in the Paris-based Russian émigré newspaper Возрождение (Vozrozhdenie) under the pseudonym Andrey Pavlovich Smirnov.[i] The articles, published later the same year in book form with the same title under a different pseudonym, A. Olshanskiy,[ii] weaves a tale of high society espionage, of which Finnish police at the time of its publication estimated approximately 75% was fiction.[iii] Sipelgas was a poet, translator, and publisher whose works received lukewarm reviews throughout his life, and whom literary historian Ben Hellman describes as a person who strived with all his might to achieve fame, but who could never overcome his own insignificance.[iv] His story of espionage gained him more attention from readers than almost any other work.

Some writers of Soviet intelligence history, such as Prokhorov, have taken Sipelgas’ story published under the names “Smirnov” and “Olshanskiy” at face value.[v] The skeleton of the story probably corresponds with reality, although significant elements, names, and the sequence of some events do not. “Smirnov,” as Sipelgas refers to himself in the story, was arrested in the fall of 1919 in Russia for anti-Bolshevik activities. While he was in prison, a ChK officer approached him and presented him with an offer that was hard to refuse: work as a Soviet agent in Finland or be executed. Smirnov had served briefly as an officer in the Imperial Russian army, stationed at the Russian naval port of Sveaborg near Helsinki, and spoke Finnish, so he was an attractive candidate for intelligence work; he accepted the ChK offer. After several months of training, “Smirnov” and a female intelligence agent named Zalkevich assigned to him as his “wife” were kitted with expensive clothing and jewelry, which the Bolsheviks had confiscated from rich Russians and stored in ChK warehouses for use by intelligence agents. They were escorted across Russian-Finnish border in early 1920 by Russian border guards and handed over to Finnish communists, who provided them safe transit to Helsinki, where they established themselves as wealthy Russian émigrés.[vi]

Sipelgas began his work in Finland as an agent recruited under coercion rather than as a staff intelligence officer. However, his responsibilities in Finland grew over the following several years, to include identifying and tracking anti-Bolshevik émigrés, recruiting Finnish military members, and conducting counterintelligence investigations. “Smirnov” claims that after nine months in Finland, he became “his own man,” eventually being assigned increased responsibility for agent handling, recruiting, and operational financing.[vii] In relation to the latter, he was tasked with selling a bag of diamonds to a Helsinki gem dealer, the proceeds of which were to be used for ChK and Razvedupr operations. The diamonds had been confiscated from church property in a scenario that comports closely with Karpov’s description of ChK financing.[viii]

By 1923 “Smirnov” was the Razvedupr illegal rezident in Finland, directly involved in planning a failed Bolshevik uprising that occurred in Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, in December 1924. After the failure in Estonia, he was tasked with conducting a financial inspection of underground cells of the Bolshevik-sponsored International Society for Aid to Revolutionary Fighters in Estonia, Sweden, and Denmark, through which money had been funneled for the uprising.[ix]

According to “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” sometime in 1923 or 1924 “Smirnov” came to the attention of the Finnish political police, and he returned to Finland after his inspection tour to find that several of his agents had been arrested and were talking under interrogation. In March 1925, “Smirnov” turned himself in to the Finnish political police and began to give information about his operations. His published narrative ends with his eventual release from Finnish prison and emigration to Brazil to join his mother and brother, who had escaped from the Soviet Union previously.[ x] The Brazil portion of the story appears to be a complete fiction.

While the general framework of this story is probably close to reality, Hellman provides a much fuller picture of Sipelgas’ activities, correcting some of the details leading up to and after his defection from the Razvedupr. Sipelgas was born in 1885 to an Estonian father and a Finnish mother. He began a career as a writer as a young man, and, thanks to his knowledge of Finnish language became a literary translator in 1912. After a number of attempts at publishing poetry, his first documentable published work was a collection of poems, Предзакатные Огни: Стихотврорения (Sunset Fires: Poems), published in 1917 in Helsinki.[xi]

He was called into military service at the outbreak of World War I and assigned to the naval base at Sveaborg, Finland, where he worked in the counterintelligence department of the Imperial Baltic Fleet. His duties included collecting information about German infiltration into the Russian army and about revolutionary attitudes of Russian sailors and soldiers.[xii] He welcomed the February Revolution in 1917; however, he was less enthusiastic about the Bolshevik Revolution, and soon after October 1917 he began to publish articles criticizing the Bolsheviks and the increasing radicalization of Russian politics. He was in Helsinki when the Finnish civil war broke out in January 1918, working as a correspondent for the Menshevik newspaper Новая Жизнь (New Life). No details are available about Sipelgas’ activities between the end of the Finnish civil war in May 1918 and fall of 1919, when “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent” states he was arrested in Russia. His active support for the Menshevik, anti-Bolshevik cause landed him in ChK custody, where he was recruited into ChK cooperation, probably because of his Finnish language proficiency. Finnish police records confirm that he crossed the Russian-Finnish border in the spring of 1920, corresponding with “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent.”[xiii]

Not mentioned in his published story, however, is the fact that he continued his literary and translation career, posing as a Russian émigré writer after he arrived in Helsinki. He published at least six books between 1920 and 1922, most of which were published under his real name. Even during this period of intelligence employment, his writings contained strong anti-Bolshevik sentiment, criticizing the Communist Party elite for living in luxury while the Russian intelligentsia was starving.[xiv] However, he may have had ChK approval for these publications, which deepened his bona fides as a White émigré who could be trusted by the anti-Bolshevik Russians and Finns.[xv]

Also unlike “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” Finnish police summoned Sipelgas in the fall of 1921 for questioning about the activities of other Bolsheviks in Finland. Based on this and other contacts with the Finnish police, he appears to have become a double agent, cooperating with the Finnish political police against his Soviet intelligence employer. Information he revealed to the Finnish authorities led to the expulsions in 1923 of a number of Bolshevik officials from Finland, including the chief of mission, Aleksey Sergeyevich Chernykh and Sipelgas’ Razvedupr supervisor, military attaché Ardalyon Aleksandrovich Bobrishchev.[xvi] Sipelgas took credit for prompting the expulsions of almost 20 chekists from Finland over a 3-year period.[xvii]

The final major divergence from “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent” involved Sipelgas’ departure from Finland and break from Soviet intelligence, which probably occurred in late 1924. Finnish police files indicate that he was caught stealing a large sum of money from one of his contacts in Helsinki; his departure was likely to escape prosecution. And rather than escaping to distant Brazil, Sipelgas retreated to Estonia, where he resumed his literary and translating career.[xviii]

Sipelgas’ odyssey with Soviet intelligence began with coercion, and his strong opposition to the Bolshevik revolution probably shaded his motivation throughout his intelligence career. If he is to be believed, he cooperated primarily out of a sense of fear, although, by his own account, once recruited he applied himself energetically to intelligence work. He also complained of the hypocrisy of Soviet representatives abroad who lived luxuriously while people in the Russia were struggling. In “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” Sipelgas wrote of Bobrishchev spending time in an expensive nightclub with beautiful women on his arm. Sipelgas writes that “Smirnov” thought to himself, “What if I sent a photo to the Moscow ‘Pravda’ and showed the hoodwinked proletariat how the military representative of the Workers and Peasant Army, ‘lives and works’.”[xix] While it is unknown whether this incident ever actually occurred, it is at least a metaphor for Sipelgas’ disdain for what he viewed as Soviet hypocrisy. He also disparaged the priceless antiques confiscated from the homes of executed aristocratic families and placed in the extravagantly refurbished Russian embassy in Helsinki.[xx]

While in Finland, Sipelgas’ intelligence tasks focused on the White emigration, the Finnish military, Finnish domestic politics, third-country diplomatic representations, and internal Russian security/counterintelligence. He also claimed to have been involved in covertly supporting the 1924 Bolshevik uprising in Estonia, and he was entrusted with large financial transactions to support Soviet intelligence operations.

Specific intelligence collection topics noted in “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent” include:

Finnish military objectives

· Condition of the Finnish army. Recruit agents in every army and navy unit.

· Collect information about Finnish military: infantry, aviation, technical readiness, artillery, military warehouses, supply bases, strongholds, forts, the dislocation of barracks, prisons, public and state buildings, command staff, headquarters, and ministries, etc.

· Upcoming exercises, and unit training events

· Plans for the Kronstadt Fortress

· Identify the command staff and any upcoming changes in it, where officials went and where they came from.

· Identify Finnish officers who are disgruntled or whose personal lifestyle makes the vulnerable to recruitment.

· The attitude of the junior ranks, food, uniforms, number of communist cells, agents, and informants

· Recruit waiters who work in officers clubs and casinos

Internal Finnish government objectives

· Place members of the Parliament (Finnish Communist Party and Social Democrats) under surveillance and provide monthly reports of their activities, lifestyle, connections with other parties, and interrelationships with the Central Committee of the Finnish Party. Pay close attention to how closely they comply with directives from the Russian Communist Party.

· Identify anyone who is opposed to the Finnish government, regardless of ideological orientation

· Provide information about all banquets, balls, meetings, and conferences of a military, academic, international, or political nature; the names of their organizers, any speakers who speak against the RSFSR

· Recruit typists, stenographers, and receptionists in the War, Navy, Internal Affairs, and Foreign ministries

White Emigration

· List all Russian émigrés with their addresses.

· Become familiar with and trusted by White Army leaders in Finland.

· Report on the address and activities of Colonel Mitskevich, a close associate of White General Yevgeniy Karlovich Miller, who arrived from Poland. Obtain his photograph.

· Recruit young attractive women among local Russian émigrés.

Internal Russian security

· Report on the activities of embassy, trade mission, consulate, and commercial departments of Vneshtorg, Nefsindikat, Dobrflot, and Khlebeksport. Send reports without informing the rezident, military agent, or special representative; send via specially encrypted telegram to Menzhinskiy.

· Send any published or translated works on military, memoir, or anti-Soviet topics via diplomatic pouch. Identify their authors and their addresses

Third-Country Targets

· Recruit agents in the general consulates of Great Britain, USA, France, and Italy. Report any changes in the appearance of visas, stamps, signatures, and secret marks.

· Report on the attitudes of other diplomatic missions toward the gala soiree held to celebrate the newly refurbished RSFSR embassy in Helsinki.

· Be alert for American and British agents working in your sector

After his break from the Razvedupr, Sipelgas remained in Estonia for 4 years, during which time he spent a year in prison for fraud related to an unsuccessful attempt to launch a new newspaper. He traveled to France in 1929, approaching the newspaper Vozrozhdenie to publish his “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” which, as noted earlier, ran serially in the newspaper from March to May 1930, and was published in book form later that year. In Paris he was drawn once again into a relationship with Soviet intelligence in 1931, this time, he claims, with the specific intention of penetrating the OGPU to unearth facts about the kidnapping of White General Aleksandr Pavlovich Kutepov, who had disappeared from Paris in February 1930. Sipelgas wrote that he allowed himself to be “recruited” by officers of the Paris OGPU rezidentura, working for them for nine months, during which time the OGPU reportedly asked him to obtain information about someone named Olshanskiy who had published articles in Vozrozhdenie (Olshanskiy was Sipelgas’ own nom de plume).

After several months of running him, the Paris rezidentura received a copy of Sipelgas’ 1920 Razvedupr recruitment file and photograph, showing that their “recruited source” was actually a former OGPU officer. The Soviet embassy reported him to the French police, and he was forced to flee France in January 1932. He wrote about this experience in an article titled “В Стане Врагов” (In the Enemy’s Camp”) in Vozrozhdenie in May 1932. With the support of anti-Bolshevik émigré activist Vladimir Lvovich Burtsev, he also published a series of articles titled “Г.П.У в Париже: Записки бывшего ‘секретного сотрудника'” (“The GPU in Paris: Notes of a Former ‘Secret Collaborator’”) in August 1932 in the Russian émigré newspaper Иллюстрированная Россия (Illustrated Russia), in which he made reference to his earlier work for the Soviet intelligence in Finland. Sipelgas subsequently returned to Estonia, where he died in 1937. He never visited Brazil.

[i] Andrey Pavlovich Smirnov, “Записки агента Разведупра” (“Notes of a Razvedupr Agent”), Vozrozhdenie, published serially from 4 March – 3 May 1930.

[ii] A. Olshanskiy, Записки агента Разведупра (Notes of a Razvedupr Agent) (Paris: Mishen, 1930).

[iii] Ben Hellman, “Писатель Александр Сипельгас, он же разведчик А. Смирнов. Русско-финско-эстонская загадка” (“Author Alexander Sipelgas, also known as Intelligence Officer A. Smirnov: Russo-Finno-Estonian Riddle”) in Встречи и столкновения: Статьи по русской литературе (Meetings and Clashes: Articles on Russian Literature), Slavica Helsingiensia 36 (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2008), pp. 202, 216.

[iv] Hellman, “Author Alexander Sipelgas,“ p. 231.

[v] Prokhorov, What is the Cost of Betraying One's Homeland?, pp. 10-16; see also IPAFSS, “Смирнов, Андрей Павлович” (“Smirnov, Andrey Pavlovich”), http://www.fssb.su/history-state-security/history-state-security-traitors/42-1925-smirnov-andrey-pavlovich.html

[vi] By strange coincidence, the name of the GPU officer who confronted “Smirnov” in prison was Pavlonovskiy, the same as the pseudonym that the German police assigned to Karpov in 1924 (see “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 4 March 1930, p. 3).

[vii] “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 3 April 1930, p. 2.

[viii] “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 22 March 1930, p. 3.

[ix] “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 15 March 1930, p. 3. The International Society for Aid to Revolutionary Fighters is often referred to by its Russian acronym MOPR (Международная организация помощи борцам революции), see “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 29 April 1930, p. 2.

[x ] “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 3 May 1930, p. 3.

[xi] Hellman, “Author Alexander Sipelgas,“ p. 204-205.

[xii] Hellman bases much of his article on the Alexander Sipelgas File, National Archives of Finland, Finnish Police (Valpo I) Files, Box 104, Folder 11040. Sipelgas briefly mentions his security work for the Baltic Fleet in his 1932 article, “Г.П.У в Париже: Записки бывшего ‘секретного сотрудника'” (“The GPU in Paris: Notes of a Former ‘Secret Collaborator’”), Иллюстрированная Россия (Illustrated Russia), 6 August 1932, p. 2.

[xiii] Hellman, “Author Alexander Sipelgas,“ p. 207, citing the Alexander Sipelgas File.

[xiv] Hellman, “Author Alexander Sipelgas,“ p. 216. Throughout “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent” Sipelgas refers to the exorbitant amounts of money the ChK/GPU spent on operations in Finland, as well as on expensive food, clubs, gala balls, and the luxurious refurbishment of the Russian Embassy in Helsinki (see “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 26 April 1930, p. 3).

[xv] Hellman speculates that Sipelgas’ anti-Bolshevik writings were either part of the Soviet plan to ingratiate him into the Russian émigré community, or that the Razvedupr was unaware that “Smirnov” was the same person as the Sipelgas who authored the anti-Bolshevik literature (see Hellman, “Author Alexander Sipelgas,“ p. 214). It seems unlikely, however, that the Razvedupr was not aware of his real identity (see also Helman, p. 217).

[xvi] Hellman, “Author Alexander Sipelgas,“ p. 215. Bobrishchev was expelled from a subsequent assignment in Iran four years later, as discussed by Soviet intelligence officer defector Georgiy Sergeyevich Arutyunov (see separate entry in this database).

[xvii] A. I. Sipelgas-Olshanskiy, “Г.П.У в Париже: Записки бывшего ‘секретного сотрудника'” (“The GPU in Paris: Notes of a Former ‘Secret Collaborator’”), Иллюстрированная Россия (Illustrated Russia), 6 August 1932, p. 2.

[xviii] Hellman, “Author Alexander Sipelgas,“ p. 218.

[xix] “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 11 March 1930, p. 4.

[xx] “Notes of a Razvedupr Agent,” 26 April 1930, p. 3.