Thread by @ChekistMonitor

Colonel Vladimir Kravchenko was the first head of the KGB Press Bureau.

Was Kravchenko's only book "Under the Name of Schmidhen" published in 1970 (see below) based on an intentional historical falsification?

#KGBLiterati

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In his book, Kravchenko claimed that Ian Buikis was the real name of the Cheka agent Schmidhen who played a significant role in the sting counterintelligence operation against the British envoy Bruce Lockhart & his associates in Russia in 1918.

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Kravchenko stated that his claim was based on the Cheka archival documents & on interviews with Buikis who was still alive in the late 1960s.

Kravchenko's version of the events was widely repeated in the subsequent scholarship about the operation.

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However, in the post-Soviet period, the writer Alfred Avotin alleged that Kravchenko falsified historical evidence & persuaded Buikis to act the part of Schmidhen in interviews & public events in order to popularize the Cheka work.

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According to the testimony of Avotin's father who was also a Cheka officer & a friend of Buikis, agent Schmidhen was their mutual colleague Ian Sprogis.

Sprogis was allegedly killed under unclear circumstances in 1919.

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So, it turns out that 50 years later, Buikis assumed the identity of his long-dead friend in order to help #KGB PR efforts.

Yet another illustration of the KGB creating a convenient myth to overwrite inconvenient historical facts.

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