In August 1917, after returning from a business trip to Nizhny Tagil, he decided to leave the profession of a design engineer and began working in the Office for the Demobilization of the Army and Navy.

[4] His uncle, Dr. Mikhail Kedrov, was an associate of Vladimir Lenin and was the head of the Cheka's "Special Department," which monitored the Red Army.

An example of this strategy was Operation Trust, which lasted from 1922 to 1927, a series of phony monarchist/counter-revolutionary front organizations that monitored the activities of genuine activists.

[6] Similarly, his Operation Syndicate-2 resulted in the arrest of Boris Savinkov, the head of the anti-Soviet emigrant organization "People's Union for the Defense of Motherland and Freedom".

Kutepov organized several terrorist operations inside the Soviet Union in retaliation, leading to Artuzov's dismissal in November.

He was placed as second deputy assistant of the Secret Operations Directorate of OGPU, the Cheka's replacement, which was headed by Genrikh Yagoda, a protege of Joseph Stalin.

Artuzov defended Yagoda and insisted that his senior position meant that he could only be held to account by the Party's Central Committee.

Artuzov's employees created a network of agents that supplied the Soviet leadership with valuable information about the events that took place in the National Socialist Party of Germany, as well as about the activities of a number of state bodies and special services.

Later that year, both organizations would become part of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB)—itself under the umbrella of NKVD, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

[11] According to Walter Krivitsky, who was working for Soviet military intelligence at the time, Artuzov accidentally angered Joseph Stalin at a meeting of the Politburo in June 1934, when they were discussing the possibility of an alliance with Poland against the rising threat from Nazi Germany.

This was one of several personnel changes following dismissal of the long-serving head of the GRU, Yan Karlovich Berzin, which may have reflected Stalin's anxiety about Nazi Germany and Japanese expansion.

Much of Artuzov's work developing Soviet human intelligence was undone by Stalin's purges of the NKVD during the Great Terror of 1936–1938, with more than half of the INO's operatives executed or sent to labor camps.