为什么斯大林经常在外国间谍回到苏联后将其杀害？
“Why did Stalin often kill his foreign spies when they returned to the USSR?”
SHORT ANSWER
If you launch a totalitarian project, agents of change that are not of your own making pose a threat to your power.
Kill them, or one of them one day may kill you.
LONGER ANSWER
The Russian Bolsheviks blazed many new trails in the history of politics.
One of them was building a cross-border network of undercover agents. It spanned many countries, many ethnicities, and had various sources of funding. The closest you can find to it in European history is the Catholic church.
But the Catholics are neither revolutionary nor progressive.
New kids on the block
The Russian Communists followed in the steps of our 19th-century political terrorism, pioneered by the Naródniks. The level of dedication and discipline they achieved—considering this was not a classic clan-based or ethnic criminal structure—was astounding.
The glory of Soviet secret services stood on the shoulders of these men and women. This clandestine structure called RSDRP(b) was created for toppling the Czar and grabbing State power.
Once this was done in 1917, a new ambitious objective arose: a world revolution. In 1919, the Third (Communist) International was created to serve as the Bolsheviks’ global arm. From this, the Soviet rulers spun out a vast overseas network of OGPU/NKVD/MGB/KGB/GRU and Comintern agents.
A game no one played before
You need to appreciate the foundation of Soviet spy activity before and right after WW2. Our men were not just spies. They were silent warriors of the coming revolution.
Remember the Cambridge Five? That’s us.
However, this created a headache for Stalin. If all the warriors of the Red Caliphate across the world are servants of the revolutionary idea—and not Stalin personally—what would stop them from turning against him? These men were at the origin of this epic new game. What if they decided he’s doing it all wrong?
Take the heat or get out of the kitchen
This was no joke. These were competent, ferocious men. They were Communists. And radical progressives are an uneasy bunch. Just look at the contemporary Marxists and other radical Socialists. Besides the hate of Capitalism, they never seem to agree with each other about anything of substance.
This propensity to quarrel among themselves gets stratospheric once they get weapons in their hands. Double so, when they get power.
Remember, Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, kept pounding Stalin’s USSR until he was killed in 1940. By that time, he was the only remaining hero of the 1917 revolution. At the darkest days of the Great Purges, he lambasted Stalin as a sellout and despot who betrayed Communism.
The blight outside the perimeter
Soviet agents abroad were not insulated from his propaganda by Stalin’s censorship inside the USSR. They were out there far beyond his radar, year after year. The absolute majority of them didn’t owe him personally anything. What if all of them were tainted? What if they were all plotting against him like the Bolsheviks preparing the Czar’s demise ahead of the revolution?
Better safe than sorry.
He called them back, one after one, and executed them.
The durability and strength of his rule demonstrated that he was most probably right. (For true Stalinists who want to know how to do things right the Stalin’s way, check out Dima Vorobiev's answer to “Is it true that Joseph Stalin rarely made direct orders of assassination?”)
In the photo below, Stalin, Molotov (right of Stalin), and Kalinin (left of Stalin) pose with the top NKVD brass.
Look at these faces. How could Stalin know for sure which of these people was going to turn on him?
He chose the safest way. He rotated them in a meat grinder.
Why would anyone want to be a foreign spy when Stalin would not only refuse to listen to their reports but execute them for their troubles?
It sometimes seems that Stalin was competing with the Nazis on who could execute and terrorise the most Russians.
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