Episode #43 – The Assassins Immortalized On Russia’s Stamps With Mark Pruett
Grigori Syroezhkin has been called “The Human Plague”, and is the Soviet agent who in 1925 executed British intelligence officer Sidney Reilly, arguably the greatest spy in history.
Syroezhkin joined the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, known as the Cheka at age 18. He was more than just a strong young man. Something inside him made him uniquely qualified in the use of violence and terror. He quickly became one of the Cheka’s most prolific killers. From 1918 until 1938 he went wherever he was needed to crush rebellions (real or imagined) and to terrorize and subjugate the population into accepting Bolshevik rule.
In his early 20s he helped crush the Tambov rebellion, and destroyed gangs mostly comprised of hungry citizens. He received a gold watch from the Cheka as a reward for his brutal work in Belarus in 1924. The following year he shot Sidney Reilly in the chest in a forest outside Moscow (picture 2). Afterwards he went on to hunt down bandits and rebels in Chechnya and Yakutia.
By his late 20s he was operating in Mongolia and even pursuing Russian refugees into China. In 1935 he was in Spain ahead of the Spanish Civil War, where he and other Cheka men shipped 500 tons of Spanish gold to Moscow for “safekeeping”.
But even years of brutal enforcement of Soviet authority wasn’t enough to keep him above suspicion. Like so many of his Cheka colleagues, Syroezhkin was eventually recalled to Moscow, accused of being a spy, and purged from the ranks with a bullet to the head and a burial in a marked grave.
Decades later, Syroezhkin’s image was rehabilitated when he was featured on a 2002 set of commemorative postage stamps, featuring heroic intelligence officers of the past. His official biography hardly tells the true story of his two decades of terror and brutality.
For episode 43 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with Dr. Mark Pruett, author of Putin’s Boys: The Stamp Men about the true history of the early Cheka men, and how their stories have been twisted into something almost unrecognizable in order to fit the needs of the modern Russian government.
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