The Orlov KGB File

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The Orlov KGB File is written by Boris Volodarsky and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1929631847 (ISBN 10) and 9781929631841 (ISBN 13).

Alexander M. Orlov carefully picked his moment to defect. With a letter from the Canadian Consul General, he disappeared with his family in Paris on the afternoon of July 13, 1938. They sailed to Canada and established himself in Montr�al. Soviet Intelligence jealously guards its secrets despite the flood of details published after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The historical facts that Moscow has revealed are not simply incomplete but are selected and structured to impress and to hide activities, past as well as ongoing, that remain classified. The true history of the Orlov defection offers a unique path to understand Soviet secret intelligence, its development, and its objectives from Lenin and Stalin to the present Russia of Putin and Medvedev. Orlov defected in a specific context. On November 25, 1938, Lavrenti Beria was appointed as the new People's Commissar of the Interior. His first task was to purge the NKVD of both Yehzov appointees and the remnants of Yagoda's men. From September 1938 to February 1939, ninety-seven top NKVD functionaries were arrested, as many as in the whole two years of Yehzov's rule. Most were shot in 1939, well before Yehzov, but some were interrogated for two years to collect material for future arrests. In examining the true history of the Orlov defection, the author, Boris Volodarsky, himself a former GRU officer, takes the reader on a journey deep into the secrets of the KGB and piles one startling revelation over another, all the way to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.