Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov (name at birth: Artur Eugene Leonard Fraucci) ( (); 18 February 1891 – 21 August 1937) was a leading figure in the Soviet international intelligence and counter-intelligence and security officer and spymaster of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
Early life
Artuzov's father was Italian-Swiss and employed as a cheesemaker; his mother was Estonian-Latvian. Artuzov studied metallurgy at St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute. Since childhood he was familiar with the Bolshevik revolutionaries Nikolai Podvoisky and Mikhail Kedrov, who were the husbands of his mother's sisters.
He started distributing illegal revolutionary literature as a teenager in 1906. In May 1909 he graduated with a gold medal from the Novgorod classical men's gymnasium and entered the metallurgical department of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, from which he graduated with honors in February 1917, after which he worked as a design engineer in the Metallurgical Bureau of Professor Vladimir Grum-Grzhimailo.
In August 1917, after returning from a business trip to Nizhny Tagil, he decided to leave the profession of a design engineer and began working in the Office for the Demobilization of the Army and Navy. In December 1917 he became a Bolshevik and after the Russian Revolution he joined the Communist Party.
From December 1917 to March 1918 he worked as secretary of the Audit Commission of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs in Vologda and Arkhangelsk, and from March to August 1918 he was the head of the partisan detachment of conscripts on the Northern Front. Then he successively held the positions of head of the military information bureau of the Moscow Military District and head of the active part of the Military Control Department of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.
Spy career
1919–1929
In 1918 he joined the Red Army and fought against the White Army during the Russian Civil War. The following year he joined the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka). His uncle, Dr. Mikhail Kedrov, was an associate of Vladimir Lenin and was the head of the Cheka's "Special Department," which monitored the Red Army. On July 18, 1921, Artuzov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner by the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
In the 1920s, Artuzov headed the Cheka's counterintelligence arm, KRO. In 1925 he wrote an operational manual called ABC of Counterintelligence, which recommended using ideologically based operations. An example of this strategy was Operation Trust, which lasted from 1922 to 1927, a series of phony monarchist/counter-revolutionary front organizations that monitored the activities of genuine activists.
Similarly, his Operation Syndicate-2 resulted in the arrest of Boris Savinkov, the head of the anti-Soviet emigrant organization "People's Union for the Defense of Motherland and Freedom". Another success of Artuzov was the arrest in 1925 of Sidney Reilly. Artuzov was the initiator and direct developer of Operation Tarantella.
Operation Trust was shut down in 1927, leading former Trust agent Alexander Kutepov to discover its true origins. Kutepov organized several terrorist operations inside the Soviet Union in retaliation, leading to Artuzov's dismissal in November. He was placed as second deputy assistant of the Secret Operations Directorate of OGPU, the Cheka's replacement, which was headed by Genrikh Yagoda, a protege of Joseph Stalin. Artuzov, a consummate professional spy, often clashed with the less extensively trained Yagoda.
Artuzov replaced Mikhail Trilisser as deputy head of the INO, the foreign intelligence directorate within OGPU, in October 1929. Trilisser had complained about Yagoda, his boss, at a Party meeting. Artuzov defended Yagoda and insisted that his senior position meant that he could only be held to account by the Party's Central Committee. Trilisser was dismissed and Artuzov promoted in his stead.
1930s
Encouraged by the success of Operation Trust, Artuzov spearheaded Operation Tarantella in 1930. A deception campaign aimed against British foreign intelligence, "the operation's broad aim was to convince London that industralisation of the Soviet Union was a huge success."
Artuzov was promoted to head the INO in 1931. Among his priorities was development of training courses for operatives; this was especially important because the organization was moving away from operations conducted under diplomatic cover, in favor of "illegal" operations.