Know thy enemy I'm guessing looking at that collection, and nice touch with Tony Stark and Steve Rogers.
I was thinking the other day there was some mention of Russian mobile crematoriums, it reminded me of Suvorovs first day on the job with GRU when his new CO showed him the film of a man being thrown alive into a furnace and being told 'dead or alive, there is only one way to leave our organisation: the furnace.' I wonder if deceased Russian soldiers in this conflict will be cremated and 'unpersoned'.
The Soviet/Russia section in my home library is three shelves. My current book count is 832 books, mostly nonfiction. One of my favorite books in the Soviet/Russia section is
'Reluctant Farewell' by Andrew Nagorski, American journalist for Newsweek in several countries. You can see his book in that photo behind Tony Stark. Another favorite is
'A Time For Peace' by Mikhail Gorbachev. Both men gave valuable and insightful perspectives of the Soviet Union from unique positions.
As far as Suvurov go, the GRU have always been more mysterious than the KGB and for what it is worth, and if we take him at face value, the GRU is even more dangerous than the KGB. Here is why the GRU had more operational latitude regarding what it is allowed to do to anyone, even to its own, in the book 'Soviet Military Intelligence':
In Chapter Seven, "The GRU and the KGB":
The basic function of the KGB may be expressed in one guiding phrase, not to allow the collapse of the Soviet Union from inside. Every specific function stems from this.
The function of the GRU may also be stated in one parallel, but quite different phrase: to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union from an external blow.
So when we see the scope of the GRU's mission, it is understandable of the brutality of the GRU when you mentioned Suvurov's incident. The GRU have to deal with external threats unknown to common Soviet citizens so the organization had to be harsh.
Suvurov was also blunt about other countries. In Chapter Six, "The GRU and the Younger Brothers":
It is a fact that the peoples of all countries in thrall to the Soviet Union hate the Soviet communists; but none the less their intelligence services services work to the full extent of their powers in the interests of the elder brother. The solution to this riddle is this. By means of harsh economic treaties the Soviet Union has enchained all its 'younger brothers'. For Soviet oil and coal, electric energy and gas they all have to pay very heavily. The Soviet Union proposes to its satellites that 'you may pay by means of your own wares or you may pay by providing the secrets of other people'.
So it seemed during the Cold War yrs, the KGB and the GRU had greater multiples of intelligence sources than the West did.
Western states have been surprised by the extent of the intelligence interests of the communist states. Why should Mongolian intelligence be interested in atomic reactors, or Cuban intelligence in high-powered rocket engines? These questions are easily answered as soon as one realises that they are all part of one gigantic information. In the ranks of officials of Soviet state institutions overseas it is almost impossible to find one 'clean' one. All Soviet citizens, from ambassadors to cleaning staff, in one way or another co-operate with the KGB or the GRU. The same thing is true of the official institutions of the 'fraternal countries'.
As a side note, China's 'National Security Law' seems to be fashioned similarly to the Soviet version, that every Chinese citizen can be co-opted at any time into state intelligence service.
Fast forward to today with Vladimir Putin, with what we learned from Suvurov of the KGB and the GRU, Poutine made the various American CIA directors downright amateurish, and now he has been ruling Russia for 20 yrs with the combined services and global experience of the KGB and GRU under his command. A KGB man now able to override the institutional rivalries and barriers between the KGB and the GRU for his own benefits.
I see people in this forum, and in this Russia-Ukraine war topic, admires and praises Poutine without a clue of the world he came from and how it shaped him to what we see today. The literature I have are nearly 40 yrs old but they are still relevant because the people that are shaped by the information from inside these literature are
STILL alive and no less ambitious than when they were clawing their ways bloodily up the Soviet institutions of power.
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