In 1950, American researchers from Harvard, which was sponsoring a special project with funding from the US Air Force, traveled to Munich. They sat down to talk with hundreds of displaced Soviet citizens to develop a more sophisticated understanding of Soviet society. Interviewers asked displaced Soviets about everything from their individual life stories to the way Soviet society was organized. These interviews were very detailed, touching on specifics like the role of the secret police in controlling Russian factories.
One of the people who had been invited to run the project in Munich was George Fischer, then a Harvard doctoral student. While researching his thesis, George had already come into contact with some White Russian émigrés in the United States. When he heard about the newest generation of Russian émigrés—the thousands of Soviet soldiers and citizens held by the Allied powers in western Germany—he naturally felt their experiences would be very important to his work. Harvard offered to send him to Munich, and he readily accepted. As an added benefit, George’s mother was already there; the former translator was working for the Allies, helping Soviet citizens in refugee camps.13
After a good deal of lobbying from George Kennan, the American Committee for the Liberation for the Peoples of Russia was launched that same year. There was also the National Committee for a Free Europe, an American-based group whose goal was to mobilize political exiles from Eastern Europe. To kick off these efforts, the CIA gathered Russian exile leaders together at an inn in the Bavarian town of Fussen. But the meeting was a failure. The White émigrés didn’t trust the social democrats; the Ukrainians accused the Russians of trying to reinstate the Russian empire’s 1914 borders; groups who were not invited complained bitterly. One group even staged a protest walkout.14
The Russian émigré community proved very difficult to deal with at all, let alone to direct from the outside. The British—America’s best ally in Cold War secret adventures—didn’t help. They preferred to spend their limited funds on acquiring defectors.15
Toward the end of 1950, a powerful new player appeared: the Ford Foundation. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Ford Foundation had operated as a small, not very significant fund. Then, in 1950, it began receiving tens of millions of dollars in dividends from the huge endowment of stock bequeathed to it by Henry and Edsel Ford.16 With $417 million at its disposal, the Ford Foundation became almost overnight the country’s largest philanthropic organization, and it decided to set a more ambitious international agenda for itself. To help accomplish this, the foundation elected Paul G. Hoffman, an automobile executive, as its president. Hoffman, who after the war had served as the first administrator of the Marshall Plan, turned to Kennan. Kennan, in turn, reached out to George Fischer in Munich.
George Fischer jumped at the opportunity to advise the foundation. He proposed the launch of the Free Russia Fund. He envisaged three objectives for it: to help refugees integrate into American society, to support political refugees in case of a change in the Soviet system, and to fund research on the USSR.
Fischer worked feverishly trying to get on paper how the fund would achieve these objectives. He soon came to a damning conclusion that echoed the CIA assessment: Soviet refugees were “so inexperienced in organization, so lacking vitality, and so unable to think outside the framework of totalitarian schemes, that they should be excluded from any management positions within the fund.”17
Still, he didn’t give up. The Free Russia Fund was launched in March, headquartered in New York. Fischer was the fund’s director and Kennan its president.
The publication of Russian Émigré Politics, George Fischer’s book, was the fund’s first achievement.
The book used the research George had done for Harvard in Munich to analyze the post–World War II Russian refugees. Fischer argued that this generation of Russian refugees—consisting mostly of people with military experience—could be useful as rank-and-file soldiers, should there be a war with the Soviet Union. He called them “fervent and equally invaluable allies in Freedom’s resistance against Soviet imperialism.”18 Fischer outlined his belief that once the war started, the Soviet military itself would likely become a hotbed of dissent. To support this theory, Fischer cited what had happened during World War II, when a huge—indeed, unprecedented—number of soldiers had deserted the Soviet army and switched sides to join the German army.
The CIA liked Fischer’s book. If Hitler’s army—which had committed horrible atrocities against the Russian population—was nonetheless joined by so many Red army soldiers, why shouldn’t the United States expect Soviet military personnel to defect in large numbers in the case of war with the United States? The idea was appealing. (The most common mistake generals make is to prepare fully for the previous war, and this hypothesis clearly seems to be an example).19 However, the question of émigré leadership remained unsettled.
The CIA decided on a compromise. Because the first émigré generation of Russian Whites was too old and the Soviet postwar generation too disorganized, the CIA chose to support an organization that was more or less in the middle. The CIA’s pick was the National Labor Union, or NTS (Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz), a group composed mainly of the sons and other younger relatives of the Whites.
The agency listed three specific reasons for this choice. First, the NTS had developed relatively popular media outlets in the United States and Germany, such as the Posev (Seeding) publishing house, which had been launched in a displaced persons camp near the German city of Kassel. Second, the NTS headquarters were in the United States. Finally, the CIA reported that President Truman had granted an audience to the NTS chairman in the fall of 1948, which meant the group was recognized in Washington.20 Furthermore, the NTS was also known to have cooperated with Red army turncoats during the World War II. As such, it seemed well suited to the role envisaged by Fischer—namely, that of embracing Soviet military defectors when the war started.
As it happened, the hot war between the United States and the Soviet Union never started. Thus it came about that in the 1950s, the CIA used NTS members extensively to conduct covert operations behind the Iron Curtain. It was from the ranks of the NTS that the CIA recruited secret agents to send back into Russia. NTS also launched giant weather balloons—20 meters in diameter, made of transparent plastic—to carry leaflets and false bank notes over the Iron Curtain.21
For all the Sturm und Drang surrounding these NTS actions, they were mostly useless. Straightforward covert actions didn’t work behind the Iron Curtain. Most operatives were caught before they made contact with any resistance operation inside the Soviet Union, real or imaginary, and none of the balloons ever reached the Soviet mainland—the wind too often blew them out back to Western Europe.
Other measures met with equally modest results. In the 1950s, Kennan’s “liberation committees” set up a number of radio stations, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, targeted at audiences in Eastern Europe and Russia. However, because of jamming, very few people in the Soviet Union could listen to them even if they wanted to. In that early period, secret agents, balloons, and radio broadcasts had a minimal impact on society in the Soviet Union.
The Iron Curtain worked pretty well in both directions: it didn’t let Russians out, and it didn’t let Western agents or subversive ideas in.
CHAPTER 9
STALIN’S DAUGHTER
Like the United States, the Soviet Union was also readying itself for an all-out war. Soviet intelligence agencies fully comprehended that large numbers of their compatriots had opted to stay in the West rather than return to the Soviet Union, and they directed a massive effort against this group. A series of assassinations took the leaders of resistance groups, one after another. The NTS was constantly in the crosshairs. Radio broadcasting targeted Soviet refugees in Germany, urging them to return or intimidating them into not taking part in any kind of anti-Soviet activity.
Still, times changed. When Stalin died, some rules were relaxed, if very slightly. The secret police began failing to prev
ent defections.
Arguably, some of the most important defectors to the West were not the generals and officers envisaged by Fischer but rather something that looked, on the surface, rather innocuous: books.
Stalin died in March 1953, and Zarubin, Gorskaya, and Eitingon found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly back in business. Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret services, called Zarubin and Gorskaya out of retirement and released Eitingon from jail. He gave them, along with another officer involved in Trotsky’s assassination,1 a new assignment: they were to form a special operations brigade to blow up American air bases in Europe if things got hot between the Soviets and the Americans. It was probably the only time when all of them worked together.
Once Eitingon felt securely established at Lubyanka, he invited his stepdaughter, Zoya Zarubina, back too. But this time, she said no. She was already forging a career at the Institute of Foreign Languages. This turned out to be a smart decision on her part, probably saving her from prison when, a few months later, Beria was ousted, crushed, and killed in a coup.
Eitingon was sent to jail again, this time for eleven years, for being Beria’s accomplice. He was convicted, along with his superior, of “heading a special group tasked to develop plans of assassination and beating up of Soviet citizens.” Eitingon’s “direct involvement in killing people by injecting poison was established,” read his sentence.2
After his arrest, the Soviet secret services went about their business as usual. They responded to Western covert warfare with a string of killings abroad. Germany, and Munich in particular, became a hunting ground for Soviet secret services: In 1957, a Soviet agent killed a Ukrainian émigré activist and writer with a poison vapor gun. A leader of the Ukrainian émigré community was poisoned by cyanide in 1959.3 An NTS chairman was about to be poisoned in 1954, but his would-be assassin defected to the West. Three years later, the defector himself barely survived a poisoning by thallium. Poison, indeed, never went out of fashion.
The Munich area was also targeted by Russian radio propaganda. One station, run from East Berlin by the Soviet Repatriation Committee, had Soviet citizens call on their husbands, sons, nephews, or old friends to return via personal letters read aloud on air. Even if the radio show did not tempt exiles to go back, it surely made emigrants think twice about taking part in any anti-Kremlin activity, in that it provided evidence that Soviet forces were keeping close watch on their relatives back home.4
In the mid-1950s, this sort of blackmail tactic expanded to the United States. Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy’s daughter, had fled the Soviet Union in 1929 and in two years had moved to the United States. She was living on a farm in upstate New York and working to provide help to refugees coming to America. The countess testified to the Senate that, in her experience, many Soviet exiles were targeted by Soviet agents. Exiles received mail “addressed to them under their original Russian names at the addresses in which they are living under false identities,” she said.5 The message was clear: the secret services had traced them in the United States, despite their new names.
Meanwhile, George Fischer’s ambitious plans for the Free Russia Fund hadn’t worked out. The fund had failed to find any high-profile political fugitives to support. There was, it seemed, no new Trotsky waiting in the wings—no one, anyway, who had any real chance of changing the Soviet system. No breakthrough research on the Soviet system was produced by emigrants that the fund could help promote either.6
The US military found a more practical and focused use for Russian émigrés: it set up a Russian institute in the Bavarian Alps, in the small mountain resort town of Garmisch, Germany, not far from Munich. From the 1950s on, American diplomats, military staff, and spies about to be stationed in the Soviet Union were sent to a yearlong military training program there, conducted entirely in Russian and taught by Russian émigrés from both the first and second waves.7
Fischer’s Free Russia Fund was more successful helping to resettle Soviet refugees in the United States, giving grants to the Tolstoy Foundation, run by Alexandra Tolstoy, among other organizations.
It was becoming clear that the Americans couldn’t expect any big breakthroughs until someone with a large following at home—a writer, a scientist, or an artist—defected to the West.
On April 26, 1967, the luxurious Plaza Hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park in New York hosted a large press conference. The Plaza—a monumental building, nineteen stories high and framed with towers, intended by its developers to call to mind a beefed-up French chateau—was crowded that morning with reporters.
Stalin’s only daughter, forty-one-year-old Svetlana Alliluyeva, had been in New York for a week. Her defection, on board a Swissair plane, made headlines all over the world. Alliluyeva had fallen in love with an Indian Communist, but her father’s old comrades refused to let her marry him. Within a year, she watched her lover die in Moscow. She was reluctantly allowed to take his ashes to India to pour into the Ganges River. From there, she walked into the US embassy in New Delhi, presented her passport, and requested political asylum.8
Now she walked into the Plaza’s grand reception hall. Red-haired, like her father, Svetlana was dressed in a modest deep-blue outfit. She took a seat at a long table, in front of a microphone. To her right stood George Kennan, watching her with pride.
This was a big moment for the former diplomat. When the US embassy in New Delhi sent a cable about Svetlana’s defection to Washington, the State Department had reached out to Kennan, now in retirement. At Svetlana’s request, they asked Kennan to fly to Geneva to meet her. Svetlana had likely asked specifically for him as the two knew each other from Kennan’s days as the US ambassador to Moscow. Kennan jumped on a plane immediately. He liked Svetlana. More important, her defection was just what he and George Fischer had been looking for, until now in vain: a high-profile Soviet defector who could sway American public opinion regarding the Soviet Union.
At the press conference, Svetlana started by answering reporters’ written questions in English that was hesitant but clear. She first addressed one posed by a reporter from NBC: “What is your political philosophy?” Alliluyeva said she didn’t have any political philosophy and explained that the young Soviet generation had become more critical, but to her, the religion made a big change. Svetlana conceded then that it was her relationship with Mr. Singh that changed her perspective on the Soviet Union. But, she added, this was not the only problem she had with her former homeland:
Among other events, I can mention also the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, which produced a horrible impression on all intellectuals in Russia and on me, also. I can say that I lost hope which I had before that we are going to become liberal, somehow. The way the two writers were treated and sentenced made me absolutely disbelieve in justice.9
Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were two prominent Soviet writers who had been convicted of anti-Soviet propaganda in 1966, after they published their satirical writings in France. They were sent to labor camps. Svetlana stressed that she was also a writer. In fact, she had already completed a book and had it smuggled out of Russia. “I hope you will read my book this autumn,” she said.10
Svetlana’s book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, was a personal memoir structured as a series of letters. It was indeed published but not in the fall; after the press conference, Harper & Row sped up the publication date, and the book was available in June. An instant national sensation, it became a New York Times bestseller.
Kennan helped arrange the book deal. He also helped Svetlana settle in, lending her his farm. It was located near a small town in Pennsylvania called, of all things, East Berlin.11
Svetlana’s was not the first book published by a Soviet defector in the West, but the others had been written by spies—unknown in the wider world and talked of only within the relatively small circles of counterintelligence and intelligence operatives. Stalin’s daughter’s memoir, for obvious reasons, was different. And it was also a very good boo
k.
With Svetlana, Kennan finally got what he and George Fischer had dreamed of more than fifteen years earlier: a Soviet émigré of huge political significance who could reach a large American audience.
Kennan remained a loyal friend to Svetlana for years to come. Always supportive, he helped her settle in at Princeton, where he lived. For him, she was a new Trotsky. Because he believed she was in real danger of being kidnapped by the KGB, he enlisted his family to look after her as well.12 So loyal was he that he stood behind her even when Svetlana, always emotional, behaved foolishly—for example, when she fell in love with her neighbor, Louis Fischer. George’s father was then seventy years old. The affair was passionate but didn’t end well. One day Svetlana smashed in one of the glass-paneled doors at Fischer’s house, demanding that he return the letters she had sent him.13
In the meantime, Louis’s son George was going through a traumatic experience. He had become very critical of the Vietnam war. After all, the protesters modeled much of their thought on the ideas of the New Left, propounded by George’s old tutor Paul Massing and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School. In spring 1968, when antiwar student protests broke out at Columbia University, Fischer—by then a forty-five-year-old associate professor of sociology and a staff member of the Russian Institute at Columbia—sided with the students.
After he added his signature to the statement, published in the Columbia Spectator, asking that “all civil and criminal complaints against those arrested during the recent demonstrations be dropped,”14 he was forced to leave Columbia University. With that, he gave up Kremlinology altogether. There is no evidence that he was ever in touch with Kennan after that.
The Compatriots Page 9