Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence

By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa

— — —

Jonathan Haslam, one of the best historians in the University of Cambridge, has yet again produced a masterpiece. It is a magnum opus on the Soviet intelligence system. He has written on the intelligence in the European state systems before, and also the intelligence system of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While the subject still revolves on the secret intelligence apparatus of the old Soviet Union, he was able to explain the inner belly of the beast with more flair, indeed, with impressive precision on the espionage at work.

Current Russia, however, has escalated itself from sheer reliance on human intelligence to cyber-espionage, manifesting most ardently in the hacking of the Democratic National Party and the US presidential election. This book, however, shows the seriousness by which Stalin put on the ruthlessness of espionage. If President Putin had been measured against Stalin’s methods, the former would have looked like a proverbial Boy Scout. This book delves into all the insidious aspects of the Soviet intelligence system, especially the history that paved the way to its crude methods.

When the Soviet Communist Party came into power in 1917, it could only secure some of the cities, not entire Russia and other peripheral lands. Suspicions on counter-revolutionaries were at their peak, even before the Nazi invasion of the Cold War. The Soviet Union, in other words, rested on the brittle ground, and spying became the edifice of its own existence, not just weapons and offensive military platforms. “Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence” is an exceptional work of scholarship. It has breadth, depth, and archival references that run into reams of pages.