The split of the country in 1917 into several opposing camps gave the special services the opportunity in practice to test the effectiveness of various methods and means of countering intelligence. The confrontation between the counterintelligence bodies of the anti-Bolshevik movement and Soviet power was nothing more than a struggle between competing counter-espionage departments, implemented to varying degrees on opposite sides of the front. Based on this, the period of the revolution and the Civil War can be called a turning point in the development of the Russian military counterintelligence service due to the steps taken in these years to transform the existing special services into more complex entities, organically built into the domestic system of public administration.