Operation Trust: A Fake Resistance Run by the Secret Police

In 1921 an organization called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia made contact with anti-Bolshevik exiles in Europe. It represented, it said, a network of former officers and officials inside the Soviet state — including men in senior positions — who were preparing for the regime's fall and needed coordination with the emigration.

For six years it corresponded with exile groups, hosted their representatives on secret visits to Russia, provided intelligence to Western services, and became the principal channel between the emigration and the supposed internal resistance.

It was created and run by the Cheka and its successor the OGPU. Every member was theirs, and the entire structure existed to identify, map and destroy the opposition it claimed to be.

Two of the most prominent opponents of the Soviet state were destroyed by it.

Boris Savinkov, a former terrorist and anti-Bolshevik organizer of formidable capability, was persuaded that a serious network awaited him and crossed the border in August 1924. He was arrested immediately, tried, and died in the Lubyanka the following year in circumstances that are still disputed.

Sidney Reilly, the British agent whose reputation was such that he is one of the models for the fictional master spy, crossed in September 1925 to meet the Trust's leadership. He was arrested and shot.

The mechanism is motivated reasoning, and it operates on precisely the population least equipped to resist it.

Exiles had staked their lives, their families and their identities on the proposition that the regime was temporary and that resistance existed inside Russia. An organization offering evidence for that proposition was not being evaluated by neutral observers. It was being evaluated by people for whom the alternative — that there was nothing inside, that they had lost, that the years were wasted — was intolerable.

Kunda's work on motivated inference describes the asymmetry: people apply more scrutiny to conclusions they do not want and less to conclusions they do, and they can generally find sufficient grounds to accept the latter.

Escalation compounded it. Every year of correspondence, every courier, every successful trip, was an investment, and each new contact was read as progress within an established relationship rather than tested as an approach from an unverified source.

The Soviets eventually publicized the operation themselves, which was a second-order attack: after the Trust, no exile organization could trust any contact from inside, which meant that genuine opposition, where it existed, could not be reached.