Shcharansky’s trial, held at the same time as Ginzburg’s, had moments of farce as well as brutality. At one point a witness named Platonov was asked, “What can you tell us about the case of Shcharansky?” “Nothing,” he replied. “I’m not familiar with the case.” But Ginzburg, he declared, had behaved very badly. It quickly became clear that Platonov had turned up in the wrong court. The trial ended, however, in a great moral victory for Shcharansky. He declared in his closing address:
I am proud that I came to know and work with such people as Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and Aleksandr Ginzburg, who are carrying on the best traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. But most of all, I feel part of a marvelous historical process—the process of the national revival of Soviet Jewry and its return to the homeland, to Israel.
For two thousand years the Jewish people, my people, have been dispersed all over the world and seemingly deprived of any hope of returning. But still, each year Jews have stubbornly, and apparently without reason, said to each other, “Next year in Jerusalem!” And today, when I am further than ever from my dream, from my people and from my Avital [Shcharansky’s wife], and when many difficult years of prisons and camps lie ahead of me, I say to my wife and to my people, “Next year in Jerusalem!”
And to the court, which has only to read a sentence that was prepared long ago—to you I have nothing to say.28
The KGB’s main fear in the aftermath of the show trials of Orlov, Ginzburg and Shcharansky was that Orlov, like Sakharov three years earlier, would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The KGB residency in Norway was ordered to give the highest priority to an active measures campaign, personally overseen by Andropov himself, designed to discredit Orlov and ensure that his candidacy failed.29 On October 27, 1978 the Oslo resident, Leonid Alekseyevich Makarov (codenamed SEDOV), rang Suslov, the Politburo’s leading ideologist, in the middle of the night to pass on the good news that the prize had gone instead to the Egyptian and Israeli leaders Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Makarov succeeded in claiming more of the credit than he deserved for what was regarded by the KGB as a famous victory. In a notably immodest telegram to the Centre, he reported that the residency had successfully “carried out complex active measures through reliable assets in order to disrupt the anti-Soviet operation” to award the prize to Orlov. It claimed to have brought pressure to bear during conversations with a series of Norwegian political leaders, chief among them Knut Frydenlund, the foreign minister, Reiulf Steen, chairman of the Norwegian Labor Party and of the Parliamentary Foreign Policy Committee, Tor Halvorsen, chairman of the Central Federation of Trade Unions and of the Board of the Norway—USSR Friendship Society, and Trygve Bratteli, a former prime minister and chairman of the Parliamentary Labor Party Group:
In the course of these conversations, the provocative nature and anti-Soviet bias of the agitation around Yuri Orlov was emphasized… It was pointed out that the political leadership of Norway needed to show proper responsibility for the state and development of bilateral relations between our countries. The conversations produced the desired response in influential circles of the Norwegian Labor Party. The work that we did exerted useful influence on the foreign policy leadership of Norway and, in our opinion, made it possible for the residency’s task to be carried out—to prevent the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yuri Orlov and his Committee.30
The Centre gave Makarov as much credit as he gave himself. Viktor Fedorovich Grushko, head of the FCD Third Department (whose responsibilities included Scandinavia), telegraphed congratulations on “the determination and operational effectiveness which the residency has shown while carrying out this work.”31
ANDROPOV REMAINED AS obsessed with ideological subversion during his final years as KGB chairman as he had been at the outset. The war against subversion extended even to abstract painting. A joint report in 1979 by the KGB Moscow Directorate and the Moscow department of the Fifth Directorate proudly reported that, over the past two years, “it proved possible to use agents to prevent seven attempts by avant-garde artists to make provocative arrangements to show their pictures.” Four “leaders of the avant-garde artists” had been recruited as agents. Surveillance of the “creative intelligentsia” was an important part of “the task of the [KGB] agencies to protect the intelligentsia from the influence of bourgeois ideology”:
Creative workers produce individualistic works; they are cut off from the positive influence of the collective for forming and training their personality; they develop an egocentric attitude towards reality, one that is based on strictly personal perceptions, personal interest, arrogance, ambition and over-estimation of their importance.32
Andropov told a Fifth Directorate conference in March 1979 that the KGB could not afford to ignore the activities of a single dissident, however obscure:
Our enemies—and even certain comrades from Communist Parties in Western countries—often bring up this question: “If, as you say, you have constructed a developed socialist society, then do various anti-social phenomena or the negative activities of an insignificant handful of people really represent a threat to it? Are they really capable of shaking the foundations of socialism?”
Of course not, we reply, if one takes each act or politically harmful trick individually. But if one takes them all together, combining their content with their purpose as regards ideological sabotage, then every such act represents a danger. And we cannot ignore it. We simply do not have the right to permit even the smallest miscalculation here, for in the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or indirectly intended to create an opposition which is hostile to our system—to create an underground, to encourage a transition to terrorism and other extreme forms of struggle, and, in the final analysis, to create the conditions for the overthrow of socialism.
The experience of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed that behind the Soviet dissidents were “the main organizers of ideological sabotage—the intelligence services and subversive centers of the imperialist nations. The struggle against them must be decisive, uncompromising, and merciless.” Within the Soviet Union the “twelve-year ideological struggle” of the Fifth Directorate showed that repression worked:
The Check lists have learned to quash undesirable and hostile phenomena in their initial stages. This is confirmed by the facts. Of the 15,580 people who were suppressed last year, only 107 showed themselves to be hostile a second time.33
In 1980 even Sakharov ceased to be untouchable. While being driven to the Academy of Sciences on January 22 he was arrested, taken to the prosecutor’s office and told that he and his wife were to be exiled to Gorky, a city closed to Westerners: “You are forbidden to go beyond the city limits of Gorky. You’ll be kept under surveillance, and you are forbidden to meet with or contact foreigners or criminal elements [dissidents].34 The KGB Fifth Directorate organized a series of workplace meetings in Gorky as well as broadcasts on local radio and television in an attempt to ensure that Sakharov and Bonner were reduced to pariah status throughout their exile. To the KGB’s embarrassment, however, Sakharov’s banishment to Gorky was quickly followed by an unconnected period of social unrest which it feared would become known in the West. In May there was a strike at the car factory there. In September and October, after a series of four murders in Gorky, rumors spread rapidly round the city that murders were in fact occurring daily but were being officially concealed. In the ensuing panic schools suspended some of their classes and factories canceled night shifts. There were numerous letters to the authorities pleading for the murderers to be caught. To the Centre’s relief, however, the mayhem in Gorky passed unnoticed in the West.35
During the early 1980s the dissident movement seemed at its lowest ebb since its emergence in the 1960s. Most leading dissidents were in labor camps or exile. Those who remained at liberty were under constant KGB surveillance. Samizdat literature was reduced to a trickle. During the second half of the 1980s, however, the dissidents found themselves, to their
great surprise, rapidly transformed from “anti-social elements” into the prophets of perestroika. The chief agent of this transformation was Mikhail Gorbachev.
“When I became General Secretary,” writes Gorbachev in his Memoirs, “I considered it an important task to rescue Academician Sakharov from exile.”36 The record of his statements in both public and private during his first year as Soviet leader, however, tells a more complicated story. At a Politburo meeting on August 29, 1985, Gorbachev announced that he had received “a letter from a certain Mr. Sakharov, whose name will not be unknown to you. He asks us to allow his wife Bonner to go abroad for medical treatment and visit relatives.” The KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, reported that Sakharov was in poor health: “He has largely lost his position as a political figure and recently we have heard nothing new from him. So perhaps Bonner ought to be allowed abroad for three months.” Chebrikov appeared to believe the propaganda image of Bonner sedulously cultivated by the KGB over the previous decade: “We must not forget that [Sakharov] acts very much under Bonner’s influence… She has one hundred per cent influence over him.” “That’s what Zionism does for you!” joked Gorbachev. Chebrikov added that, with Bonner away, Sakharov might even be willing to reach some sort of accommodation. 37 Though he did not tell the Politburo, Chebrikov was doubtless aware from KGB surveillance reports that Sakharov had welcomed Gorbachev’s election as general secretary with the comment: “It looks as if our country’s lucky. We’ve got an intelligent leader!”38
Aleksandr Yakovlev, the most influential reformer among Gorbachev’s advisers, secretly asked two officials of the Central Committee’s international information department, Andrei Grachev and Nikolai Shishlin, to prepare a case which would persuade the Politburo to end Sakharov’s exile. According to Grachev, both Yakovlev and Gorbachev realized that neither democratic reform nor the normalization of East—West relations could proceed so long as Sakharov’s banishment continued. But “the delicacy of the problem was indicated by Yakovlev’s conspiratorial tone” as he emphasized the need to avoid attracting the attention of the KGB. Grachev and Shishlin had to conduct an elaborate covert operation even to obtain copies of Sakharov’s works without Chebrikov realizing what they were up to. On December 1, 1986 Gorbachev finally considered the time to be ripe to raise the Sakharov question at the Politburo, and gained its approval to end his exile.39 On December 15 two electricians, escorted by a KGB officer, arrived at Sakharov’s Gorky flat and installed a telephone. At 10 a.m. the next day he received a call from Gorbachev. “You [and Bonner] can return to Moscow together,” Gorbachev told him. “You have an apartment there… Go back to your patriotic work!”40
Though Gorbachev probably had in mind Sakharov’s work at the Academy of Sciences, by far his greatest impact was on the transition to a democratic political system—in changing the Soviet Union from what the Marquis de Custine, a French visitor to Tsarist Russia over a century and a half earlier, had described as a “nation of mutes.” Custine had famously prophesied:
Nations are mute only for a time—sooner or later the day of discussion arises… As soon as speech is restored to this silenced people, one will hear so much dispute that an astonished world will think it has returned to the confusion of Babel.41
“The day of discussion” arrived in Russia on May 25, 1989, with the opening of the first session of the Congress of People’s Soviets, the product of the first contested elections since 1917. Gorbachev later acknowledged that, of all the deputies elected to the congress, Sakharov was “unquestionably the most outstanding personality.”42 At the time, however, Gorbachev viewed Sakharov with a mixture of irritation and admiration. Sakharov wanted the congress to abolish the one-party state, curb the power of the KGB and establish a directly elected office of president. “If only we had listened more carefully to Andrei Dmitriyevich [Sakharov],” Gorbachev said later, “we might have learned something.” But Gorbachev was not ready to end the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. He could not decide, Sakharov complained, whether he was “the leader of the nomenklatura or the leader of perestroika,” When the popular weekly Argumenti i Fakti published a poll showing that Sakharov was by far the most popular politician in the country, Gorbachev was so enraged that he threatened to sack the editor. Tension between Sakharov and Gorbachev renewed at the next session of the congress in December 1989. Gorbachev brushed aside an attempt by Sakharov to present him with tens of thousands of telegrams calling for an end to the one-party state. A few days later, Sakharov died suddenly of a heart attack. At his lying in state, Gorbachev and the Politburo stood bare-headed for several minutes in front of the open coffin of the man once described by Andropov as “Public Enemy Number One.”43
Sakharov’s premature death was in all likelihood partly due to the strain of his and Bonner’s earlier persecution, and to the lack of proper medical treatment during their Gorky exile. “The totalitarian system probably killed him,” said the democratic journalist Vitali Korotich. “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow.”44 In 1990 the text of a long letter (previously available only in samizdat) calling for democratic political change addressed by Sakharov and two other dissidents to the Soviet leadership twenty years earlier was exhumed from the CPSU archives and published for the first time. Since Gorbachev had become general secretary, almost every issue raised in the “subversive” appeal of 1970 had been placed on the political agenda and acted upon.45 Simultaneously, Solzhenitsyn’s works, banned from bookshops and library shelves since 1974, had become bestsellers.
The dissidents were not the main agent for change in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. As at other celebrated turning points in modern Russian history—among them the turn to the West in the early eighteenth century, the end of feudalism in 1861, collectivization and crash industrialization after 1929—change came chiefly from the top. The Soviet system was transformed, and ultimately destroyed, by Gorbachev’s courageous but misguided attempt to reform the unreformable. The dissidents, however, played a major role in changing the political consciousness of the Soviet élite. One KGB report of the mid-1970s quotes Solzhenitsyn as saying that the main task of the dissident movement was “a moral and ideological preparation of the Russian intelligentsia to oppose the Soviet regime.”46 Against all the odds, the dissidents largely succeeded in fulfilling that mission. A small and persecuted minority, powerless save for the strength and courage of its convictions, only feebly supported by the West, defeated a determined campaign to silence them by the world’s largest and most powerful security and intelligence service. Nowhere in the world during the final third of the twentieth century did a radical intelligentsia make a greater contribution to the destruction of an anti-democratic political system.
APPENDIX
THE INTERROGATION OF YURI ORLOV ON DECEMBER 29, 1977
The Interrogation of Yuri Orlov on December 29, 1977 According to official announcements in Moscow, Fifth Directorate interrogation records of the interrogation of dissidents have been destroyed. Mitrokhin’s copy may therefore be the only surviving transcript of Orlov’s interrogation. A copy was sent by the Fifth Directorate to the FCD to form part of the dossier being used to prepare active measures to discredit Orlov in the West and prevent him receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Mitrokhin’s growing sympathy for the dissidents is reflected in the fact that he copied the whole of this and some other documents dealing with their persecution, rather than following his usual practice of copying extracts, making notes or writing précis.
The interrogation was conducted by Captain Yakovlev, senior investigator for especially important cases with the investigation department of the KGB Directorate for Moscow and Moscow Oblast under the USSR Council of Ministers, assisted by Assistant Procurator Chistyakov of Moscow City:
QUESTION: You have been shown the resolution dated December 29, 1977 summoning you as the accused in criminal case No. 474, charged with committing a crime specified in Section 1 of Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Cod
e.
Do you understand the nature of the charge?
ORLOV: No, it is not clear to me. I have not been shown evidence that my actions had the intention of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime, or any other evidence; instead of which, as I see it, the charge presented to me contains emotional phrases which obscure the nature of the case.
QUESTION: Do you admit you are guilty of the charge?
ORLOV: No, I do not. I do not see any proof of my guilt; I do not feel guilty, in my own conscience.
QUESTION: Do you admit the facts of preparing, duplicating and disseminating the documents specified in the charge against you?
ORLOV: Since these documents are qualified as deliberately slanderous fabrications, uttered with the intention of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime, I refuse to answer your question.
QUESTION: The investigation has established that you were a direct participant in the preparation, duplication and dissemination of the documents cited in the charge, and in a number of cases you were their author. The contents of these documents, as the materials of the case show, are of a slanderous nature, defaming the Soviet State and social order. What can you say about that?
ORLOV: In answer to that question, I should like to say the same thing as I have said in answer to the previous question, namely that I do not see any evidence, and do not feel guilty in my own conscience.
QUESTION: It has also been established that you acted deliberately to undermine and weaken the Soviet regime. What do you have to say about that?
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