William C. Fuller Jr.’s book The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 2006, $39.95) is an excellent character study of a Russian officer during the years leading to World War I and a revealing analysis of the competing and contradictory political forces that toppled the Romanov dynasty and led to a Bolshevik takeover. Fuller’s study focuses on the life of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Miasoedov, a member of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes (the overt arm of Russia’s political police under the Ministry of Interior) who later became an intelligence officer with the Tenth Army during the war. Miasoedov was charged with spying for Germany in 1915 and hanged after a two-hour trial in Warsaw despite his complete innocence. Fuller convincingly argues that this breach of justice occurred because Miasoedov had become a convenient scapegoat for a wide cross-section of Russian political forces that sought to blame him for the military disasters at Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes, as well as the Great Retreat.
Miasoedov was convicted with ease because his background lent itself to stereotypical notions about traitors. In 1894 he was assigned as head gendarme to Verzhbolovo on the Prussian border, where he guarded against smuggled goods, subversive propaganda and illegal weapons entering on the Warsaw–St. Petersburg railway line. Amid the ethnic diversity of the northwest borderlands, Miasoedov made many professional and personal contacts with Jewish, German and Polish businessmen, a fact that aroused suspicion among anti-Semitic and xenophobic members of the Russian officer corps. Miasoedov’s behavior in Verzhbolovo— marrying into a wealthy German-Jewish émigré family and hunting with German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II—would make him suspect in the eyes of future interrogators. Perhaps most ominous for the young officer’s future was his business partnership with Samuel, Boris and David Freidberg in the lucrative transatlantic transport of Eastern European emigrants to the United States. Miasoedov became the Jewish brothers’ connection to the tsarist government and liaison in political matters—a dangerous association in an empire that still instituted an official policy of exclusion and limitation against Jews. In the end, two of the Freidberg brothers were hanged during the wartime spy crisis for their connection to Miasoedov despite a complete lack of hard evidence that they had actually served as spies.
Miasoedov was indicted on the accusation of Lieutenant Iakov Kolakovskii, a returning Russian prisoner of war who stated that he learned of Miasoedov’s espionage from his German captors. The subsequent trial was a mockery of justice. No physical evidence or confirmed witness account was advanced to prove he was spying for Germany. Miasoedov was thus initially found innocent of espionage charges by the regular military justice system, but was then retried by an improvised field court at the insistence of Stavka (the Russian high command). Stavka carefully scripted the trial by sanitizing the information judges could hear. Administrative punishment was meted out on anyone who came forward to testify to Miasoedov’s bravery or loyalty. General N.N. Ianushkevich of Stavka asserted that the trial should move forward speedily “in order to calm public opinion before the [Easter] holidays.”
Why then did certitude about Miasoedov’s guilt become a standard feature of the time and enter into the historiography of Russia, even during the Soviet era? Fuller’s masterful answer gives the reader a look at Russia’s volatile political system during World War I. Both conservative and liberal military circles accepted the Miasoedov affair—not the lack of ammunition and artillery shells, the shortage in manpower or inadequate leadership—as the primary reason for Russian disasters along the front. This certitude conveniently exonerated Stavka and the crown of any blame while at the same time reinforcing anti-Semitic and Germanophobic impulses among the populace. It was paradoxically even more convenient for the ascendant political left. For liberals, wartime treason proved that the tsarist system was corrupted and that only the Duma, Russia’s legislative body, could be trusted to rid the army of traitors. M.V. Rodzianko, the Octobrist president of the Duma, stated, “Even those who clean Miasoedov’s boots ought to be hanged.” It was a great irony of the affair that traditional monarchism became equated with treason, and even more ironic that the Bolshevik party, which was determined to enact an unequivocal and immediate end to the hostilities with Germany, eventually took control of the country.
Originally published in the December 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.
