The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  In the interview with Prykhodko, the man who called himself Stashinsky repudiated quite a few elements of his story as it has been known in the West. He told the journalist that he had joined the KGB out of conviction, and it was out of conviction that he had killed Bandera and Rebet. He believed that Soviet rule had brought progress and well-being to his homeland. The most striking revelation, however, had to do not with Stashinsky’s political beliefs but with his escape to the West. It was a special operation planned by Aleksandr Shelepin himself, said the old man, and it had proved a success. Shelepin, whose previous career had been associated largely with the Young Communist League, was concerned about his reputation among his older colleagues in the Soviet leadership. By letting the world know that he had ordered the successful killing of Bandera, Shelepin supposedly wanted to show his peers how tough he was. On Shelepin’s personal orders, Stashinsky was supposed to turn himself in and tell the whole truth about the assassinations. The plan was that after serving his sentence, which would certainly not be too long, given his voluntary confession, he would be whisked back to the Soviet Union by a KGB team. Stashinsky, a strong believer in Soviet ideology, had agreed to sacrifice himself.

  It had all worked exactly according to Shelepin’s plan. Things went wrong only after the CIA allegedly transferred Stashinsky to the United States after his release from the West German prison. “I was released before my term was up and taken to Washington,” Stashinsky told the young journalist. “There I was suspected of playing a double game, and they decided to send me to Latin America, to Panama, for a time, under surveillance, and supposedly to acquire new habits. I understood that. I was more than careful: I understood that they could liquidate me at any moment.” A KGB team came to Panama in 1968 to rescue Stashinsky, taking him first to Africa and then, in 1970, back to the Soviet Union.

  What about his personal life? He was indeed married to Inge, who, like him, was a KGB agent out of conviction rather than necessity. They indeed had a son, whom they had left with the KGB in Moscow in August 1961, when they had gone to East Berlin and then to the West. The body of the child buried in Dallgow was supplied by the KGB from an East Berlin hospital. The old man said that he had divorced Inge, who settled in East Germany after the operation, but her intelligence career had suffered because Stasi officials distrusted KGB agents. After a difficult childhood, their son had settled in Ukraine. He became a professor at Kyiv University and was in touch with his father. Stashinsky had never tried to get in touch with his parents or sisters back in Borshchovychi near Lviv. Their political views differed from his, said the old man. No compromise was possible.1

  It was an amazing story—one that was picked up and treated seriously by some of the most astute Ukraine-watchers in the West. Taras Kuzio, a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, was appalled that Stashinsky was allegedly collecting a pension in an independent Ukraine. “One of the KGB’s master assassins reared his head in Kyiv this summer,” wrote Professor Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University in his blog on the World Affairs website. Still, he had doubts about the authenticity of the interview, which were shared by many of his readers. One of them questioned the details of Stashinsky’s story as presented by Prykhodko. “She could easily end all speculation by revealing a photo of Stashinsky . . . since there is absolutely NO danger to Stashinsky today, as no one would waste a bullet nor gas on this ancient relic,” wrote an agitated reader of the blog. The commenter also suggested that DNA evidence might be used to establish the man’s true identity.2

  The interview indeed raised numerous questions. The very idea that Shelepin was seeking publicity in the West flies in the face of the internal political struggles of the Kremlin in the 1950s and 1960s. The American part of the story appears equally groundless in light of CIA documents known today. The interview was only the latest manifestation of the growing interest in Stashinsky and his story in today’s Russia and Ukraine.3

  The Soviets had lost the clandestine war of assassins and poison guns they had fought in the 1950s and 1960s. They had been defeated in the court of public opinion and had failed to achieve either the short-term or the long-term goals associated with the killing of Bandera. Today, veteran KGB officers are the first to admit that instead of undermining the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the West, the murder reinvigorated it. The crime also did nothing to temper the idea of political independence in Ukraine. In December 1991, thirty-two years after the assassination of Stepan Bandera, Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union, and in so doing helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But Stashinsky and his crimes were never completely forgotten either in Moscow or in Ukraine. Forever linked together in public memory, Bandera and Stashinsky appeared as two antipodes in the political and ideological struggles that preceded the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

  Stashinsky’s name first reappeared in Russian newspapers in the fall of 2006 in connection with the poisoning by radioactive plutonium of the former KGB officer and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Litvinenko. Reacting to Western media reports that the assassination had been carried out by Russian intelligence agents, Sergei Ivanov, the spokesman for the Russian foreign intelligence service, issued a statement that read: “Since 1959, when the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera was eliminated, Soviet intelligence and its successor, the Foreign Intelligence Service, have not practiced the physical liquidation of individuals objectionable to Russia.” Few observers in the West took the statement at face value. If anything, it only reminded readers of Moscow’s long tradition of using political killings as an instrument of foreign policy.4

  In Ukraine, Stashinsky’s name first made headlines again in the fall of 2008, when the Lviv city administration raised the price of tickets on city trams and buses by a whopping 33 percent for the general public and more than 40 percent for students. To “sell” the price hike to the public, the city issued 50,000 copies of leaflets that stated: “Treason to the homeland begins with an unpaid ride.” Stashinsky appeared in the news regularly after that. Those were the heydays of the democratic Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which brought the pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko to power. When Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin in 2004, many believed it to be the work of the Russian secret service. National pride was on the rise in Ukraine, and numerous nationalist groups treated Stepan Bandera as their hero. President Yushchenko even awarded him posthumously with the title of Hero of Ukraine.5

  As the political climate in Ukraine underwent another dramatic transformation with the rise to power of the Russian-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych in early 2010, so did the political values attached to Bandera and Stashinsky. Just as Bandera was being heralded as a Ukrainian national hero by newly revived nationalist forces, the pro-Russian websites got busy undermining the Bandera cult by lionizing his assassin, Bogdan Stashinsky. Natalia Prykhodko’s interview with the person calling himself Stashinsky contributed to a larger trend of presenting Stashinsky in a more positive light. “This mysterious interview . . . authentic or just a hoax, make[s] evident that Ukraine under Yanukovych is quickly turning back to honoring KGB ‘values,’” wrote a visitor (in broken English) to Alexander Motyl’s blog at the World Affairs website. “Also, it . . . show[s the] KGB [as] more mighty than [it was] in reality.”6

  Among some Western veterans of Cold War–era espionage, there was a growing suspicion that the secret services of Russia were behind the “revive Stashinsky” campaign. In April 2011, a few months before the publication of Prykhodko’s interview, an English-language blog appeared on the web ostensibly written by Bogdan Stashinsky himself. The author began his first post with the following statement: “I am strongly communistic. I believe in helping my country to create a better Soviet Union. To fulfill this goal I gathered information, took on aliases and killed.” In the same month a leader of the National Bolshevik Party of Ukraine, a marginal group in the eastern city of Kharkiv, called on the city
authorities to name a city park after Stashinsky.7

  In 2014, with the Euromaidan protests, the escape to Russia of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted by the Ukrainian parliament, and the Russian government’s subsequent invasion and annexation of the Crimea, Stepan Bandera returned to Ukraine yet again as a symbol of his homeland’s freedom and independence. Bandera’s name figured prominently on the banners of self-defense units that fought on Kyiv’s Maidan Square and then marched to Eastern Ukraine to fight the Russian-backed insurgency there.8 In August 2014, in the midst of the Russian hybrid war in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, unidentified perpetrators desecrated Bandera’s burial site in Munich, knocking down the cross on his grave—an act that was met with condemnation in both Germany and Ukraine, bringing back memories of the desecration by KGB thugs of Jewish cemeteries in West Germany. Around the same time, the rebel websites in Donbas revived the old KGB theories that Bandera had been assassinated by West German agents.9

  While once again raising the banner of Ukrainian independence from Moscow, the vast majority of Ukrainians today reject the radical nationalist ideology of Bandera, along with his strategy and tactics. In the midst of the Ukrainian crisis and mass mobilization of Ukrainian patriotism in May 2014, the leader of the largest nationalist party, Svoboda (Freedom), won only slightly more than 1 percent of the popular vote, while in the fall of 2014 his party failed to cross the 5 percent threshold required to obtain seats in parliament. Bandera stands today as the prophet of a minority radical nationalist faith that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. The majority has opted for the European values and a new pluralistic society. Very few embrace the cause of the assassin or the Soviet strategy of assassinating Ukrainian nationalist leaders in the 1950s.10

  Newspaper reporters who have gone to Stashinsky’s native village in the past few years to interview members of his family found none of them in the village. “His parents could not get over it,” said one of the neighbors about their reaction to the news that Stashinsky had assassinated Stepan Bandera. “They said that they had given their whole lives to Ukraine, and their son had brought them such shame. Maria, his sister, said that she had disowned her brother. It would have been better had they been exiled to Siberia: had God allowed them to return, they would not have been afraid to look people in the face. His father soon died; his sister Maria was sick all her life. Iryna, too, did not live long—she developed cancer of the stomach and died. They knew nothing but misfortune. At least after death, they should be remembered with a kind word.”11

  Neighbors believe that Bogdan Stashinsky returned to his native village at least once. According to a local legend, fresh flowers appeared on the graves of Stashinsky’s parents soon after his release from prison. Another legend has it that he still comes to the village from time to time to check on his parents’ house, which now belongs to a different family. To be sure, say the villagers, no one can recognize him any more—he is a ghost in his own homeland and a tragic figure who is regarded as a traitor by every side he had ever been on.12

  EPILOGUE: THE COLD WAR REDUX

  James Bond walks into the office of his boss, whose true name remains a secret to us—we know him only by the first letter of his last name, “M.” They have a conversation that ends differently from any other that Bond has had with his bosses, male or female, over the years. He reaches into his jacket pocket, extracts an unusual kind of gun, and shoots it at his boss, releasing a poisonous liquid. It is only at the last moment that “M” presses a concealed button on his chair. A bulletproof glass screen descends from the ceiling, separating him from his rogue agent. The stream of pressurized poison hits the glass wall. Bond himself loses consciousness. “Cyanide,” says the internal security chief, who rushes into the office after the shooting. He orders everyone to leave the premises. Miss Moneypenny, covering her mouth with her hand, watches in horror as her beloved agent is dragged out of the office.

  This is a key moment in Ian Fleming’s last Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. It was made into one of the most popular James Bond movies, with Agent 007 played by Roger Moore. Written in 1964, at the height of the Cold War, the novel includes elements of true espionage stories then current in the world media. The image of Bond, brainwashed by the Soviets and shooting a gun that spits liquid cyanide, comes directly from newspaper reports on the Bogdan Stashinsky trial. The Munich killings are actually discussed by Bond and “M” in Fleming’s novel immediately before Bond tries to kill his boss. “Did they happen to mention the murder of Horcher and Stutz in Munich last month?” asks “M,” trying to convince Bond that the KGB is anything but a champion of world peace.1

  When it comes to the use of the poison gun, Stashinsky succeeded where Bond failed. But the Stashinsky saga, its popular culture incarnations notwithstanding, presents a classic example of the failure of assassination as a tool of international policy. Although the assassin fulfilled his task, the murders themselves failed to achieve their ultimate goal, and on becoming public knowledge, they did major damage to the masterminds behind them.

  Conceived as part of the counterinsurgency effort in the final stages of guerrilla warfare in the Ukrainian territories recently conquered by the Soviet Union, the assassination of Stepan Bandera was carried out long after that movement had been effectively suppressed and its ties with foreign centers taken under control and manipulated by the Soviet secret services. Carried out at the insistence and with the enthusiastic approval of the Soviet political leadership, the assassination achieved a result contrary to the one envisioned by its instigators. Instead of creating confusion in the ranks of the anti-regime forces and provoking a power struggle among the leaders of the most militant émigré organization, it removed a leader who was no longer popular or dangerous from the scene, turning him into a martyr and providing his supporters with a tool for mobilization that they had previously lacked.

  Stashinsky’s escape to the West, and his readiness to reveal what he knew about the Soviet assassination program, severely damaged the credibility of the Soviet leadership and tarnished the image of the Soviet Union abroad. The assassin’s testimony and the public relations disaster that followed—risks involved in any government-backed assassination—were ultimately the result of major blunders on the part of the Soviet security apparatus in East Berlin and a breach of the established Soviet practice of forbidding intelligence officers and agents to marry foreign nationals. In both cases, the interference of the political leadership was at fault—a sign of the exuberance and hubris in the Kremlin following a successful strike against a high-profile enemy of the regime.

  The newly married couple managed to outwit the KGB. Raised in East Germany but employed in West Berlin, Inge Pohl had never accepted or learned to tolerate communist ideology and the Soviet way of life. Her planned recruitment by the KGB, if it ever took place, brought no tangible results. Facing standard economic hardships in the Soviet capital, she had little difficulty convincing her husband to defect to the more prosperous West. Stashinsky, born and raised in a patriotic Ukrainian family outside Soviet territory, had no strong attachment to the Soviet state or its ideology. He was recruited through blackmail and forced to spy on his own family and countrymen. Brought up as a Christian, he also had moral qualms about the killings he was forced to commit. The threat that the couple’s plans to defect might be uncovered by the KGB made them speed up their preparations, and the unexpected death of their son provided the opportunity they were looking for. Stashinsky and his wife acted on the belief that they could find safety from KGB assassins only by confessing and obtaining the protection of Western security services.

  Some of the most astute observers of the Stashinsky trial compared the defendant to the main character of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. “Stashinsky is an ideological Raskolnikov,” wrote the correspondent of the Kölnische Rundschau (Cologne Review) in his commentary on the trial and its verdict. Like Raskolnikov, Stashinsky struggled with
severe moral dilemmas, confessed under the influence of a woman he loved, and finally was sentenced to the same term: eight years. But even more striking parallels can be found between Stashinsky’s story and the one told in Joseph Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes. The main character of this 1911 masterpiece, a young man called Razumov, betrays to the Russian police a fellow student who seeks his protection after committing a terrorist act. The police recruit Razumov as an agent and send him to Switzerland to penetrate a circle of Russian revolutionaries. There he meets and falls in love with the sister of the man he betrayed. Unable to withstand the moral pressure, Razumov eventually confesses both to the woman he loves and to the revolutionaries on whom he came to spy.2

  When it comes to the KGB assassination program, the Raskolnikov/Razumov problem appears to be a factor in the defection of two Soviet secret agents, Nikolai Khokhlov and Bogdan Stashinsky, who were both considered loyal and committed to communist ideals. The American and West European intelligence services were only too happy to take advantage of the Dostoyevskian crises haunting their opponents. The problem was that the CIA and its West European partners too often resorted to the same methods as their opponents. “We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night,” says Control, a character in John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, as he tries to persuade a subordinate in the British intelligence service to assassinate one of its perceived opponents.3

  David Cornwell, the British intelligence officer who used the pen name John le Carré, knew what he was writing about. But the Western spy agencies running assassination programs never experienced the embarrassment that befell the Soviet agencies during the Stashinsky trial. This was primarily because despite what the James Bond novels and movies suggest, in reality such killings were largely outsourced to “freelancers,” quite often common criminals. The Western services supplied only the targeting and planning, finances, and logistical support. If the Soviets generally went after leaders of émigré groups whom they considered citizens of the USSR, the Americans stayed away from their own citizens and targeted foreigners. This was a significant difference between the political cultures of the two Cold War superpowers. In the tradition of the tsars, the Soviets believed that people like Bandera, who may never have been Soviet citizens but were born on territory later acquired by the Soviet Union, were their subjects and thus legitimate targets for assassination.4