I'm hugely interested in this time period, but it has occured to me that I've never come across anything that details the nature of the training for NKVD intelligence officers, especially those who were to be involved in espionage outside of the Soviet Union.
I'm curious if anybody knows what the selection process was like – could one simply walk in and apply, or did you need to have been a party member for a certain amount of time? Were there age or gender limits? I also wonder what the training itself looked like – what exercises would prospective officers have to complete, and how difficult was it to pass the course? What were the repercussions of failure?
I'd also appreciate it if you could point me in the direction of some good books on the matter.
Thank you!
As to the actual content of the courses, I have the impression from the way Dzhirkvelov refers to "some students on the course, especially in the faculty of foreign languages, which trained interpreters for the KGB's special services," that this school functioned like a normal college in that students could choose different areas on which to concentrate their studies, such that not every student too all the same courses. As to the training which Dzhirkvelov himself underwent, he mentions both physical training (he describes being woken at 7 AM to do calisthenics outside in the Russian winter, an experience which apparently caused students from the Southern parts of the USSR to ask if they could be let off exercising in the early morning frost.
Dzhirkvelov joined the NKVD at the age of 17, I think in 1944 during WWII. It's a little late for our purposes, but it's the best I can do for you off the top of my head. He got into the NKVD because his mother was also in the NKVD before him; the other account of life in the KGB that I've read, Next Stop Execution by Oleg Gordievsky, is also by a man whose father was in the NKVD before him. I think this was pretty common, though it may have been less so in the 1930s. He specifically describes being put more-or-less straight into service after joining, and then, after the war was over, being sent back for official education at the KGB school. From this account, I gather that the age limit, at least during wartime, was 17. He doesn't say whether he was in the Komsomol beforehand or if that was a requirement. There was definitely no official limit on gender, although the majority of KGB agents were women due to extant prejudices in society. Interestingly, according to historian Dan Healey, at least one transgender man served in the KGB during the Civil War. You didn't ask about race/ethnicity, but to my knowledge there were no explicit limitations on that either, during this period. The majority of the KGB was ethnically Russian and from Christian backgrounds, but people from the other nations of the USSR as well as Jews did serve in the KGB. After the war, Stalin passed rules banning any with at least 1 Jewish parent from serving in the KGB, and these rules persisted until the fall of the USSR.
I don't know if one could just walk in and apply, but my guess, from the memoirs I've read and also from my knowledge of recruitment tactics for Western intelligence agencies during this period, was that they had to choose to make an offer to you first, not the other way around. Worth noting that in the 30s, the USSR had only existed for about ten years, and it seems to me, from what I've read about the period, that a lot of norms about how the USSR functioned didn't get established until the 30s.
"The KGB school was situation at that time in Bolshoi Kiselny Street in a red-brick building protected on one side by a high wall. Some three hundred metres away was the main KGB building in Dzerzhinsky Square. This is the building known in the West as the Lubyanka. It took me about fifteen minutes to get from the Metro station to the KGB school."
Dzhirkvelov describes the training he received post-war in great detail; he says it was an excellent education with high standards. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that students were under a great deal of pressure; Dzhirkvelov says there were two suicides in his time there. After one of them, the students were lectured that suicide was an act unworthy of a KGB officer. Students also lived very restricted lives and had few contacts outside the KGB, because "we might by chance meet people already under observation by the security service." They were also indoctrinated in a paranoid mindset, taught to regard nearly everyone outside of the KGB as a possible enemy of the people.
As to the actual content of the courses, I have the impression from the way Dzhirkvelov refers to "some students on the course, especially in the faculty of foreign languages, which trained interpreters for the KGB's special services," that this school functioned like a normal college in that students could choose different areas on which to concentrate their studies, such that not every student too all the same courses. As to the training which Dzhirkvelov himself underwent, he mentions both physical training (he describes being woken at 7 AM to do calisthenics outside in the Russian winter, an experience which apparently caused students from the Southern parts of the USSR to ask if they could be let off exercising in the early morning frost. Their lecturer agreed, "although it was contrary to the rules.") and lectures on spycraft. Dzhirkvelov says that the topics of these lectures included "practically every method" of sabotage and assassination.
As for the repercussions of failure, I would imagine that normally, the repercussion would be that the failed student would be kicked out and not get to be in the KGB. I haven't read any specific descriptions of such a case, but I think it would've been mentioned if failing this course resulted in imprisonment or execution.
With that said, the 1930s were the height of paranoia in the USSR, when people were disappearing left and right into the Gulag. Both Gordievsky and Dzhirkvelov mention the psychological toll it took on their parents to be in the KGB during this period. I think it's also worth mentioning that people joining the KGB in the 1930s would often have been the first generation of KGB officers to have grown up in the USSR, replacing an earlier generation who grew up in the Russian Empire and fought in the Civil War.
Book Recommendations: