Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  Secrecy serves several basic functions. The main one is the opportunity it affords to manipulate information to conceal outrages one has created. The notorious list also served this fundamental purpose. For example, information about the size of the mesh in fishing nets was classified if it was smaller than the generally accepted international standard.

  But there were also politically significant and strategic issues. The main one was to deceive the people on any matter that the authorities desired. If something is classified, then no one knows about it; therefore, it does not exist. For example, almost everything concerning life outside the USSR was classified, including prices in the stores, salaries, and standards of living. However, in this area secrecy is effective only up to a certain point, after which censorship comes into force, whether officially, as in the USSR prior to perestroika, or unofficially, as was the case after Putin came to power. Yury Shchekochikhin wrote perceptively that “censorship is not censors, it is a state of society in which it is sometimes forced and sometimes desires to find itself. . . . Censorship is, most of all, a need of society itself at one or another stage of its development, one of the means of defending itself from the world outside that the authorities make use of, encouraging this instinct and supporting it by creating special state institutions.”20

  As for secrecy, at the level of everyday bureaucratic work, secrecy imparts a special quality to anything, even the most insignificant question. The lion’s share of ciphered dispatches between Moscow and its diplomatic representatives abroad consists of completely open information: communications incoming from people on overseas assignments, summaries of articles published in the press, and similar trifles that could most certainly be sent by fax. But even though the faxes might not be read, and the summaries of articles might be of no interest to anyone, the mighty aura of secrecy comes into play. The cipher clerks were very surprised and asked for verification when they saw on many of my telegrams the notation “unclassified.”

  The most important function of the system of classification is that it facilitates the control of “bearers of state secrets,” who are well aware that access (albeit formal) to classified material automatically implies the possibility of being shadowed by the special services. In addition, having access to state secrets also signifies the possibility of being barred from travel abroad, for a request for a passport to travel abroad is premised upon “approval” from the special services.

  I can illustrate this with an example from my own experience. When I was given access to classified material at the Diplomatic Academy, I was summoned to the Special Department to review an encoded telegram that was of no interest to me whatsoever. The purpose was obvious: from the moment I signed that I had read it, I could be considered the bearer of a state secret, and the KGB had a formal basis to monitor my phone conversations and everything else in my life.

  Here is another example. I was writing something at my desk in my office at the Security Council. Without knocking, the door was flung open, and in marched the chief security officer with a stern and severe look pasted on his face; behind him loomed two or three of his subordinates, checking procedures. Needless to say, there was trouble. “You’re not following the rules! You’re violating procedures! You must know what this will come to!” This is what it was all about. As someone who was actively engaged in work, I was simply unable to carry out the required demands. After receiving a classified document, officials were obligated to write down its number, its title, and a summary of its content in a special notebook (also classified, of course). When passing the document to anyone else, one had to make the appropriate notation and get the signature of the person who received it from you. There were mountains of such documents that flew back and forth among us officials, uncontrolled by the special services. Apparently, I had “rubbed so much salt” into someone’s wounds that the person had decided to strike back in full force. In fact, the only officials who scrupulously entered into their notebooks all the papers they had received were good-for-nothings who had nothing better to occupy their time. However, my “well-wishers” miscalculated, for I was held in quite high esteem.

  As noted previously, the regime of secrecy was firmly ensconced even in the Kremlin’s medical establishment that initially served Soviet and, later, high-ranking Russian officials. In the First Polyclinic that treated the highest-ranking officials below the ministerial level, under no circumstances were patients ever given their medical records. According to the established rules in Russia, the pages of a medical record were supposed to be sewn together in order to avoid falsification. Not so in this clinic. Medical records were kept in loose-leaf binders from which at any time a page might be removed and another substituted in its place. Moreover, in the notorious Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry many medical records were also classified.

  The Iron Curtain served the same purpose. Even for trips to “socialist” countries only the most reliable persons, from the perspective of the KGB, were selected. Foreign radio stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union were jammed. Even high-ranking diplomats were given foreign newspapers and magazines with articles and photographs cut out, and other articles were stamped with what, because of their shape, were called “screws,” indicating the extreme sensitivity of this information. I remember from childhood such a photograph from the West German magazine Der Spiegel stamped with two such “screws” that showed five happy drunks sitting on an earthen berm around a Russian hut. Their faces were haggard; they looked stupefied, with vacant eyes and many missing teeth. They were terribly dressed and were singing something to the accompaniment of an accordion. Other poor huts were in the background with sheets drying on a clothesline. The caption underneath said, “If this is Heaven, then what is Hell?”

  Hypnosis

  After cutting off the flow of “harmful” information, what follows is hypnosis itself. Perfected during Soviet times, very few were able to resist it. Starting from kindergarten, one had drilled into one’s head that the USSR was the best country in the world, where, due to the concern of the party and the government, the happiest people lived while all around were only enemies.

  Membership in the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) was a necessary condition for entry into many institutes and universities. The Komsomol conducted its hypnosis séances in the guise of regular and obligatory meetings and “volunteer work.” In their institutes and universities, in the first instance, humanists, historians, philosophers, jurists, and journalists attended a practically continuous series of séances. Students in technical schools were not exempted, however. Everywhere the falsified history of the USSR, the history of the CPSU, and the philosophy of Marx and Lenin were required subjects of study. The great pianist Sviatoslav Richter said that his name was not engraved on the marble plaque honoring the best graduates of the Moscow State Conservatory because he had problems with the subject of scientific communism. Students who were Komsomol activists, to say nothing of those who were members of the CPSU, enjoyed special privileges with regard to taking exams and work assignments. Such was the upbringing of the so-called elite “builders of communism.” Some elite they were!

  Everyone without exception was continuously exposed to Soviet propaganda in the form of television, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Incidentally, it was no accident that the second-ranking person in the CPSU and, therefore, in the country was in overall charge of this propaganda. The propaganda mechanism was simple and well defined. The newspaper Pravda (Truth), which reflected the “general line of the party,” provided guidance for the country’s entire press. The television program Vremya (Time) played the role of auxiliary guide. More fundamental questions fell within the sphere of responsibility of the journal Kommunist (Communist). Other mass media had almost no chance of changing the interpretations of these publications and reports.

  The duo of the CPSU and the KGB kept their eyes tirelessly fixed upon the “ideological purity of Soviet society.” Moreover, in Soviet times there existe
d a very real vertical structure of power. In one way or another this duo existed almost everywhere throughout the country in the form of primary party, Komsomol, and trade union organizations in even the most remote and underpopulated villages. In the absence of other information, the endless repetition from daybreak to night of one and the same message over a period of years and decades throughout one’s life compelled the overwhelming majority of the people to believe the reports, contrary to all the evidence.

  During Gorbachev’s reformation, the hypnosis initially weakened and then ceased entirely. But people who had become addicted, as to a narcotic, found doing without it difficult. Therefore, the revival of hypnosis under Putin, however deplorable, was objectively desired. In fact, it had already begun to reappear under Yeltsin. In brief, here is how the evolution of the hypnosis unfolded.

  In the final years of the USSR, the system of secrecy assumed relatively normal dimensions. In the first post-Soviet years, it was in a shaky position. (There were many leaks of sensitive information.) But it later revived with new strength. Even the archives that had been opened after the breakup of the USSR were closed again. Instead of the Soviet censorship that had been done away with by perestroika, there came the telephone calls from on high, the intimidation and killing of journalists, and the elimination or transfer of the mass media to other more reliable owners.

  A lot happened to freedom of speech under Yeltsin. The story of the rise and fall of the Media-Most Group and of the telecommunications company NTV are most revealing in this respect. Their chief Vladimir Gusinskii and his closest associate Igor Malashenko, making wide use of the telecommunications company NTV, played a significant role in Yeltsin’s victory in the presidential election, after which NTV took off. At the same time, NTV sharply criticized the war in Chechnya and several of Yeltsin’s closest associates, including the all-powerful Alexander Korzhakov, who then headed Yeltsin’s personal security guards.

  The thorough suppression of Media-Most and NTV occurred after they supported the electoral bloc headed by former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov and Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. Either one of them might have had a real chance of winning the 2000 presidential and 1999 parliamentary elections against the Unity Party whose electoral platform proclaimed unconditional support for Putin. The suppression of NTV and Media-Most was clearly the first step in smothering freedom of speech in Russia. Additional steps soon followed.

  News of the direct involvement of Minister of the Press Mikhail Lesin provided supplementary evidence of the “impartiality” involved in the suppression of Media-Most. Specifically, he signed the document attesting that the deal to sell Media-Most was arranged in exchange for the freedom and security of Most Group chieftain Vladimir Gusinskii and his partners. According to Malashenko’s testimony, during negotiations for the deal, Lesin repeatedly contacted Vladimir Ustinov, procurator-general of Russia, to coordinate the details and inquired especially how—according to which statute, for how long, and so on—criminal charges against Gusinskii would be deferred. Moreover, Lesin proposed that he receive a commission of 5 percent for arranging the deal.

  The scandal concerning the liquidation of NTV is revealing but not unique. It suffices to recall that Boris Berezovsky, who was riding high during Yeltsin’s presidency and who had done a lot to bring Putin to power, was soon deprived of his control of Russian television’s Channel One with the Kremlin’s active involvement. The “sixth channel,” where a large part of the staff from NTV went in the summer of 2001, ceased to exist in its previous form, thereby signaling the final suppression of independent television and other mass media outside the Kremlin’s control. From then on, as in the Soviet era, news, social, and political programs turned into apologias for the authorities. The mass audience no longer had access to an alternative point of view. Other media such as Novaia gazeta (New paper) and the radio station Ekho Moskvy, which appeared to maintain their independence from the Kremlin, had such small audiences—at least in 2001—that they could hardly hope to compete with pro-government sources of information.

  In 2000 even prior to Putin’s inauguration, the pro-Kremlin youth movement Idushchie vmeste (Going Together) was founded and became the forerunner of movements such as Nashi and Molodaia Gvardiia (Young Guard), established in 2005. These were not merely revivals of what, by comparison with them, was the inoffensive Komsomol but also the creation of an aggressive Putinjugend (Putin Youth), which was above the law. Everything was done to encourage membership in these movements. Moreover, students in a number of universities were compelled to participate in their projects, and those who refused were discredited and expelled.

  Dragging youth into these political intrigues is extremely amoral per se, yet the amorality of the Russian authorities went much further. This was revealed in the winter of 2009 when Anna Bukovskaia, the former commissar of the movement Nashi, publicly acknowledged that this pro-Kremlin youth organization had created a network of paid agents to keep tabs on the opposition. She said that in 2007, on the orders of Nashi, a secret project was launched called Presidential Liaison that was aimed at infiltrating its paid agents into the opposition: first of all into Yabloko, then into the United Civic Front, Defense, and the National Bolshevik Party. The information collected went directly to the Presidential Administration.21

  There is one more little-known but extremely important element of hypnosis. In the USSR there existed a phenomenon known as “active measures” (in professional jargon, aktivka), which was later renamed “purposefully conveyed information.” This very specific phenomenon is critically important for understanding what is going on in Russia. It is a set of top-secret measures worked out and implemented on instructions from the highest state authorities to achieve concrete political goals for which the participation of the special services is required. A wide variety of persons and organizations, perhaps unable even to guess what this is all about, may be involved in achieving these goals. (For example, as part of the aktivka, a journalist may be deliberately fed information.)

  This extremely sharp and effective means of conducting foreign and domestic policy is used to achieve the most important and delicate of goals. Everything connected with aktivka is a deep secret. Consequently, its planners and implementers can act with complete impunity.

  Establishing political parties; discrediting or, on the contrary, praising someone or something; creating a mood in society that serves those in power—all this and much more may be the result of aktivka. When investigators encounter something in Russia that benefits the authorities but is difficult to explain from any perspective, they must ask, is this not aktivka in action?

  For example, wasn’t the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London a case of active measures? On the one hand, too many absurdities characterize his killing. For example, traces of radioactive polonium-210 were left behind, and Andrei Lugovoi, the suspected killer of the former special services officer, was quickly elected to the Duma, which gave him immunity. On the other hand, it looked very much like a ritualistic murder, so one could not help but wonder whether it was planned and carried out as a way to get rid of an opponent of the regime. Particularly noteworthy is that Andrei Lugovoi was selected for the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) headed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who feigned madness but was really a cynical KGB officer.

  The story of the founding of the LDPR clearly illustrates the meaning of active measures. According to the testimony of Anatoly Kovalev, who was present on the occasion, the “decision” to establish the LDPR “was adopted” during a dinner break at a meeting of the Soviet Communist Party Politburo. Vladimir Kriuchkov, the head of the KGB, took the floor and made the proposal. Gorbachev, who either did not understand or was confused about what was going on, had already lifted a spoonful of borscht to his mouth, paused, and then silently swallowed it. But by no means did his silence indicate approval.22 Kriuchkov’s proposal became the basis for a resolution of the Soviet Politburo. The result was that a multiparty system was pr
oclaimed in the USSR, and a former officer of the KGB soon firmly settled in somewhat higher on the slope of the political Mount Olympus. It speaks volumes that such a party headed by such a leader took under its wing someone who was the prime suspect in a murder.

  Responsible, if not necessarily clever, authorities were always very cautious with regard to active measures, even though they still committed unbelievable mistakes and allowed themselves to be deceived. As already noted, everything connected with active measures was highly classified and, therefore, hidden from view. But, for example, I can assert without fear of being contradicted that the revival of Nazi and fascist organizations in the USSR was the result of precisely such activities.23

  We must draw a clear distinction between the active measures that are possible only with the approval of the highest authorities and those provocations carried out by the special services and other coercive agencies. For example, the clubbing and teargassing in Tbilisi and Vilnius of demonstrators who were also run over by tanks, as well as other crimes aimed at stopping Gorbachev’s reforms, are examples of such provocations. No one can be sure, however, that orders to that effect were not issued by, for example, Yegor Ligachev, who was the second in command in the CPSU at the time and often in charge when Gorbachev traveled abroad or was on vacation.