This is an extract from Stalin’s Apostles by Antonia Senior, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
It began when the snow melted. When the thaw came, the Ukrainian partisans could operate again. They could emerge from their hibernation in bunkers burrowed into the frozen soil of the borderlands between communist Poland and Soviet Ukraine. They could begin to think about operations against the Soviets, about when to hide and how to fight. They could inhabit what they called the ‘black’ life—in the shadows, paperless, refusing to participate in the Soviet state.1 And the onset of spring in 1951 meant that contact could resume between the black-life partisans of Ukraine and Western intelligence operatives who were determined to infiltrate the Soviet Union. Both the British and the Americans were working on plans to smuggle exiled Ukrainians into their homeland. There was an uneasy, combative collaboration between the two Western powers. The first mission of 1951 was a British-run operation, planned for mid-May. Sixteen Ukrainians were to be parachuted into these restless Soviet fringes. It had to happen in the spring: the Ukrainians, who knew the land they were jumping in to, were afraid of the snow. They feared camping out in the terrible cold and leaving footprint trails for the Soviet secret police to follow.
The Americans were planning their own drop of a four-man team on 20 May 1951, as part of Project Aerodynamic, one of a number of missions designed to get agents inside the vast tracts of land swallowed by the Soviet empire. The Americans and British were recruiting anti-communist exiles, training them up, and sending them through the Iron Curtain on highly dangerous quests designed to collect intelligence and make mischief. The Project Aerodynamic team was recruited from within displaced persons camps in Germany. They were promised dollars, American uniforms, two bottles of beer a day, and the chance to retake their homeland from the Soviets. The men chosen were nationalists, sometimes with dubious pasts of enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis. They tended to be the only men left standing out of families destroyed by war and the effects of the four horsemen of the Soviet uto-pia: famine, purges, counterinsurgency, and deportations.
The British, to the Americans’ disapproval, worked with followers of Stepan Bandera, a nationalist hero to many Ukrainians but also a violent antisemite whose followers collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust. They recruited their postwar agents from within the ranks of Ukrainian POWs stranded in Britain, often so-called Banderites, many of whom had fought in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel (SS) (1st Galician), commonly referred to as the Galicia Division.
In April 1951, the British and Americans, already working together despite arguments about recruiting Banderites, had decided to share all the details with each other about the upcoming missions—including timings and coordinates of drop zones. The security around the Ukrainians themselves was tightly controlled. Only a small group of British and American intelligence officers were initiated into the top-secret plans. The missions, or so they believed, were leak-proof.
The British-trained men were first to go. They boarded two planes in Cyprus on the evening of 14 May 1951. The planes were adapted for stealth jumps, with blacked-out cabin windows. The moon was clear and almost full. They needed a cloudless night so that an unauthorised, unlit plane could hope to navigate to precise drop zones deep in rural enemy territory.
The Ukrainians were split into three groups, imaginatively code-named A, B, and C. A and B went together in the first plane. Group C was headed by thirty-five-year-old Urri Vassilievitch Lubitski, a gaunt, dark-haired man. The wireless operator, Vasilli Ivanovitch Bardeish, was twenty-two, an ungainly young man with protruding ears and a weak chin. The team’s guide, Petr Mihailovitch Boyko, was even younger, only twenty, a good-looking boy with fair hair and blue eyes. Their five-man team climbed aboard the second plane.
Bardeish and Boyko had been children during the war, but their older companions were drawn from within the ranks of the disbanded and discredited Galicia Division. When the Galicia Division had been formed, Boyko was twelve and Bardeish fourteen. Now, they climbed aboard a plane to take them to a country that must have been retreating into hazy memory. In this version of a homecoming, they both carried suicide pills sewn into the collars of their shirts—easy to bite when the police were closing in.
The two planes took off from the Cypriot base and headed towards the Iron Curtain. Later debriefs would express surprise that the aircraft were able to fly so unimpeded over Soviet airspace. The only incident reported by the first plane was a white flare near Lviv. No one considered the possibility that the plane was expected and that this was a signal. The second airplane was pushing through a low cloud, which cleared just as it flew over a ‘fully illuminated airfield’. The airfield and its controllers seemed to pay no attention at all to the unrecognised air-plane flying overhead.
The two planes peeled apart over Soviet airspace. The second plane, the one carrying the two young Ukrainians Bardeish and Boyko, reached its drop zone position. This was in western Ukraine, in the moveable, long-suffering borderlands. As the door opened and the men peered into the vast blackness below, sometimes the Ukrainian agents lost their nerve. The scream of the engines and wind made it impossible to argue with a frightened jumper. On an American mission the previous spring, the pilot had wrestled with one of the Ukrainian partisans, trying to push him physically out of the plane.
This time, the jump door screeched open as they crossed the dark Carpathian Mountains, not far from the ancient city of Chernivtsi.
They were wearing partisan uniforms and Russian boots and carrying German kit—German rucksacks and compasses and knives and torches. There was, deliberately, nothing in their kit bag to indicate that this was a British-backed mission.
In their German-made rucksacks, the partisans carried a joint Anglo-American letter to the Ukrainian resistance, couched in vague terms without naming the intelligence agencies involved. It was signed ‘your friends’. The letter urged cooperation between the competing resistance groups in Ukraine. It promised help with setting up communications links with groups of exiles beyond the dark shutter of the Iron Curtain. It ended with a now familiar exhortation: Glory to Ukraine! Slava Ukraini!
The Ukrainians jumped.
As they floated down to their lost homeland in that hour before dawn, they did not know that the Soviet secret police were waiting for them in those dark forests below. The mission had been comprehensively betrayed by a British intelligence officer named Kim Philby—a communist, a spy, and a traitor.
(c) Antonia Senior
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