EVGENY YU. SERGEEV. RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE IN THE WAR WITH JAPAN, 1904 - 1905. SECRET OPERATION ON LAND AND SEA. London-New York: Routledge, 2007. 252 p.* The interest of Russian and foreign researchers in the history of Russian and Soviet intelligence services has been booming over the past decade and a half or two. Thanks to the absence of ideological blinders and prohibitions, the possibility of working with previously inaccessible documents of archives "slightly opened" at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries, the number of monographic works devoted to intelligence in our country and abroad has already reached many dozens, and perhaps even exceeded a hundred. Unfortunately, most of the books that have appeared, written by both historians and former special services personnel, suffer from one common and very significant drawback: only a relatively few of them are created on the basis of an analysis of the entire range of sources, all available archival and published documents, memoirs, diaries and notes of participants and contemporaries of events, press materials, works of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published in Russia and abroad, documents of oral history. As a rule, these publications are either based on personal memories and experience, or are more or less successful compilation of information gleaned mainly from the works of those relatively few researchers who took the hard work to get acquainted with the available published and archival materials, the work of their predecessors and colleagues, and other sources. In addition, a significant part of these works examines the history of individual intelligence agencies (Russian military intelligence, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army)./Soviet Army and intelligence OPTU/NKVD/NKGB/KGB of the USSR), their activities in any one country or are devoted to the history of individual operations and do not give a broad perspective of the entire Russian (Soviet) intelligence community. As for ... Read more