Stalin's Double-Edged Game

Raoul Wallenberg, the courageous Swedish financier and trade executive turned diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Hungary in 1944, was arrested in January 1945 by the Soviet military counterintelligence, incarcerated in the Lubianka prison in Moscow, and later executed for reasons that remain obscure to this day. Drawing on recently declassified Soviet encrypted cables and a wide array of Soviet, Swedish, and U.S. archival sources, Stalin’s Double-Edged Game: Soviet Bureaucracy and the Raoul Wallenberg Case, 1945–1952 offers the first comprehensive analysis of the inner workings and interdepartmental communication of the Soviet foreign and state security ministries in relation to Wallenberg’s case. The way these branches of the Soviet apparatus reacted to Swedish diplomatic approaches because of Wallenberg in the years 1945 through 1948 indicate that Stalin never had any plan for Wallenberg other than to have him murdered and to make the Swedes believe that he died in Hungary shortly after the fall of Budapest. This book thereby challenges prevailing hypotheses about the Soviet leader’s motives in regard to Wallenberg.