CONCLUSION: FROM THE ONE-PARTY STATE TO THE PUTIN PRESIDENCY
The Role of Russian Intelligence
Most academic historians have been slow to recognize the role of intelligence communities in the international relations and political history of the twentieth century. One striking example concerns the history of signals intelligence (SIGINT). From 1945 onwards, almost all histories of the Second World War mentioned the American success in breaking the main Japanese diplomatic cipher over a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. British success in breaking German ciphers during the First World War was also common knowledge; indeed one well-publicized German decrypt produced by British codebreakers—the Zimmermann telegram—had hastened the US declaration of war on Germany in 1917. But, until the revelation of the ULTRA secret in 1973, it occurred to almost no historian (save for former intelligence officers who were forbidden to mention it) that there might have been major SIGINT successes against Germany as well as Japan. Even after the disclosure of ULTRA’s important role in British and American wartime operations in the west, it took another fifteen years before any historian raised the rather obvious question of whether there was a Russian ULTRA on the eastern front.1
At the end of the twentieth century, many of the historians who now acknowledge the significance of SIGINT in the Second World War still ignore it completely in their studies of the Cold War. This sudden disappearance of SIGINT from the historical landscape immediately after VJ Day has produced a series of eccentric anomalies even in some of the leading studies of policymakers and international relations. Thus, for example, Sir Martin Gilbert’s massive and mostly authoritative multi-volume official biography of Churchill acknowledges his passion for SIGINT as war leader but includes not a single reference to his continuing interest in it as peacetime prime minister from 1951 to 1955.
There is even less about SIGINT in biographies of Stalin. While there are some excellent histories of the Soviet Union, it is difficult to think of any which devotes as much as a sentence to the enormous volume of SIGINT generated by the KGB and GRU. In many studies of Soviet foreign policy, the KGB is barely mentioned. The bibliography of the most recent academic history of Russian foreign relations from 1917 to 1991 (published in 1998), praised by a British authority on the subject as “easily the best general history of Soviet foreign policy,” contains—apart from a biography of Beria—not a single work on Soviet intelligence among more than 120 titles.2
Though such aberrations by leading historians are due partly to the over-classification of intelligence archives (worst in the case of SIGINT), they derive at root from what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”—the difficulty all of us have in grasping new concepts which disturb our existing view of the world.3 For many twentieth-century historians, political scientists and international relations specialists, secret intelligence has been just such a concept. It is, of course, naive to assume, as some “spy writers” have done, that the most secret sources necessarily provide the most important information. But it is also naive to suppose that research on twentieth-century international relations and authoritarian regimes (to take only two examples) can afford to neglect the role of intelligence agencies. As a new century dawns the traditional academic disregard for intelligence is in serious, if not yet terminal, decline. A new generation of scholars has begun to emerge, less disoriented than most of their predecessors by the role of intelligence and its use (or abuse) by policymakers.4 A vast research agenda awaits them.
Research on the Soviet era has already undermined the common assumption of a basic symmetry between the role of intelligence in East and West. The Cheka and its successors were central to the functioning of the Soviet system in ways that intelligence communities never were to the government of Western states. The great nineteenth-century dissident Aleksandr Herzen, perhaps the first real Russian socialist, said that what he feared for the twentieth century was “Genghis Khan with a telegraph”—a traditional despot with at his command all the power of the modern state. With Stalin’s Russia, Herzen’s nightmare became reality. But the power of the Stalinist state was, as George Orwell realized, in large part a secret power. The construction and survival of the world’s first one-party state in Russia and its “near abroad” depended on the creation after the October Revolution of an unprecedented system of surveillance able to monitor and suppress all forms of dissent. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell depicts a state built on almost total surveillance:
There was… no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.5
Millions in Stalin’s Russia felt almost as closely watched as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Because of the ubiquity of NKVD informers,” writes historian Geoffrey Hosking, “…many people had no one whom they trusted completely.”6
The foundations of Stalin’s surveillance state were laid by Lenin, the Cheka’s most ardent supporter within the Bolshevik leadership, who dismissed protests at its brutality as wimpish “wailing.” With Lenin’s personal encouragement, the Cheka gradually permeated every aspect of life under the Soviet regime.7 When, for example, Lenin sought to stamp out celebration of the Russian Christmas, it was to the Cheka that he turned. “All Chekists,” he instructed on December 25, 1919, “have to be on the alert to shoot anyone who doesn’t turn up to work because of ‘Nikola’ [St. Nicholas’s Day].”8 Stalin used the Cheka’s successors, the OGPU and the NKVD, to carry through the greatest peacetime persecution in European history, whose victims included a majority of the Party leadership, of the high command and even of the commissars of state security responsible for implementing the Great Terror. Among Western observers of the Terror, unable to comprehend that such persecution was possible in an apparently civilized society, there were some textbook cases of cognitive dissonance. The American ambassador, Joseph Davies, informed Washington that the show trials had provided “proof beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.” The historian Sir Bernard Pares, widely regarded as the leading British expert of his generation on all things Russian, wrote as late as 1962, “Nearly all [those condemned at the trials] admitted having conspired against the life of Stalin and others, and on this point it is not necessary to doubt them.”9
After the Second World War the NKVD and its successor, the MGB, played a central role in the creation of the new Soviet empire in eastern and central Europe. Their role, according to a sanctimonious Soviet official history, was to “help the people of liberated countries in establishing and strengthening a free domestic form of government”10—in other words, to construct a series of obedient one-party states along the Soviet Union’s western borders. Throughout the Soviet Bloc, security and intelligence services, newly created in the image of the MGB, played a crucial part in the establishment of Stalinist regimes. Informers in the German Democratic Republic were seven times more numerous even than in Nazi Germany. As in East Germany, many of the leaders of the new one-party states were not merely loyal Stalinists but also former Soviet agents.
Though post-Stalinist enemies of the people were downgraded by the KGB to the category of dissidents and subjected to less homicidal methods of repression, the campaign against them remained uncompromising. In order to understand the workings of the Soviet state, much more detailed research is needed on the KGB’s methods of social control. Mitrokhin’s notes on documents from internal KGB directorates which found their way into FCD files illustrate the enormous wealth of highly classified material on the functioning of the Soviet system which still remains hidden in the archives of today’s Russian security service, the FSB.
Among the KGB’s innovations during the Cold War was the punitive use of psychiatry against ideological subversion. The KGB recruited a series of psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Ps
ychiatry and other institutes who were instructed to diagnose political dissidents as cases of “paranoiac schizophrenia,” thus condemning them to indefinite incarceration in mental hospitals where they could be drugged and tranquilized. One “plan of agent operational measures” implemented late in 1975 involved the use of four agents (KRAYEVSKY, PETROV, PROFESSOR and VAYKIN) and six co-optees (BEA, LDR, MGV, MZN, NRA and SAB) in the psychiatric profession.11 There were, almost certainly, many more. Remarkably, most incarcerated dissidents retained their sanity, even after treatment by KGB psychiatrists. An examination of twenty-seven of them in 1977-8 by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Voloshanovich, a doctor at the Dolgoprudnaya psychiatric hospital, concluded that none was suffering from any psychological disorder.12 In 1983 Soviet psychiatrists resigned from the World Psychiatric Association, just in time to avoid expulsion for systematic abuse of their patients.
The KGB’s most widely used methods of social control were the simpler, though immensely labor-intensive, techniques of ubiquitous surveillance and intimidation. Andropov’s first-hand experience as ambassador in Budapest in 1956, reinforced by the Czechoslovak crisis during his first year as KGB chairman, convinced him that the KGB could not afford to overlook a single instance of ideological subversion. “Every such act,” he insisted, “represents a danger.”13 None was too trivial to attract the attention of the KGB. The effort and resources employed to track down each and every author of an anonymous letter or seditious graffito criticizing the Soviet system frequently exceeded those devoted in the West to a major murder enquiry.
Among the many successful operations against such authors which were celebrated in the classified in-house journal KGB Sbornik was the hunt for a subversive codenamed KHUDOZHNIK (“Artist”), who in July 1971 began sending anonymous letters attacking Marxism-Leninism and various Party functionaries to CPSU and Komsomol committees. The letters were written in ballpoint pen and signed “Central Committee of the Freedom Party.” Forensic examination revealed barely detectable traces on the back of some of the letters of pencil drawings—hence the codename KHUDOZHNIK and the hypothesis that he had studied at art school. Detailed study of the contents of the letters also revealed that he regularly read Komsomolskaya Pravda and listened to foreign radio stations. The fact that some of the letters were sent to military Komsomols led to an immense trawl through the records of people dismissed from military training establishments and the files of reserve officers. The search for KHUDOZHNIK was concentrated in Moscow, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Gavrilov-Yam, where his letters were posted. In all four places the postal censorship service (Sluzhba PK) searched for many months for handwriting similar to KHUDOZHNIK’s; numerous KGB agents and co-optees were also shown samples of the writing and given KHUDOZHNIK’s supposed psychological profile. An enormous research exercise was undertaken to identify and scrutinize official forms which KHUDOZHNIK might have filled in. Eventually, after a hunt lasting almost three years, his writing was found on an application to the Rostov City Housing Commission. In 1974 KHUDOZHNIK was unmasked as the chairman of a Rostov street committee named Korobov. After a brief period under surveillance, he was arrested, tried and imprisoned.14 As in many similar cases, the triumphalist KGB report on the lengthy operation to track down KHUDOZHNIK showed no sense of the absurdity of devoting such huge resources to the hunt for an author of “libels against Soviet reality” none of which ever became public.
KGB officers were regularly reminded by articles in KGB Sbornik and other exhortations that even Western popular music was inherently subversive. Provincial KGBs went to enormous pains to discover the extent of local interest in such music, and were usually disturbed by what they discovered. The KGB in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast, where Brezhnev had begun his career as a party apparatchik, calculated after a presumably lengthy examination of young people’s private correspondence in the mid-1970s, that almost 80 percent of the 15-20-year-old age group “systematically listened to broadcasts from Western radio stations,” especially popular music, and showed other unhealthy signs of interest in Western pop stars such as trying to obtain their photographs. The almost surreal nature of the report on musical subversion in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast is a reminder of how the hunt for ideological dissidence frequently destroyed all sense of the absurd among those committed to the holy war against it:
Even listening to musical programs gave young people a distorted idea of Soviet reality, and led to incidents of a treasonable nature. Infatuation with trendy Western popular music, musical groups and performers falling under their influence leads to the possibility of these young people embarking on a hostile path. Such infatuation has a negative influence on the interests of society, inflames vain ambitions and unjustified demands, and can encourage the emergence of informal [not officially approved] groups with a treasonable tendency.15
Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd, amongst others, were thus identified as potential threats to the Soviet system. The fact that the Communist one-party states felt so threatened by Western pop stars confirmed their status as symbols of youthful rebellion. Even in Albania, after the collapse in 1992 of the last and most isolated Communist regime in Europe (isolated even from Moscow), the elegant tree-lined Bulevard in the center of Tirana was full of young people wearing Michael Jackson (or “Miel Jaksen”) T-shirts. The decapitated statue of Stalin was inscribed, in large red characters, with the words “Pink Floyd.”16
All points of contact between Soviet citizens and Westerners were regarded by the Centre as potential causes of ideological contagion. Foreign residencies had Line SK officers whose chief duty was to prevent such contamination in the local Soviet colony, which invariably contained large numbers of KGB agents and co-optees. In the mid-1970s 15 percent of Soviet employees in New York were fully recruited agents.17 It has long been known that Soviet groups traveling abroad were always carefully shepherded by KGB officers. What has not usually been appreciated, however, is the large proportion of agents and co-optees in each group (frequently over 15 percent) who monitored the behavior of their fellow travelers. When the Soviet State Academic Symphony Orchestra gave concerts in the FRG, Italy and Austria in October and November 1974, for example, two KGB officers, Pavel Vasilyevich Sobolev and Pyotr Trubagard, posed as members of the orchestra staff. The 122 members of the orchestra also included no less than eight agents and eleven co-optees. In the course of the tour “compromising materials” were obtained on thirtyfive members of the orchestra, including evidence of “alcohol abuse,” “speculation” (probably mostly involving attempts to purchase Western consumer goods), and—in the case of the Jewish musicians—“friendly” correspondence with individuals in Israel. Further “compromising” information was obtained on the musicians’ families, such as the fact that the wife of one of the violinists (identified by name in Mitrokhin’s notes) exchanged birthday greetings with acquaintances in France.18 The Moscow Chamber Orchestra also traveled to the West in October 1974 under the supervision of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sizov of the KGB. Of the thirty members of the orchestra, three were agents and five co-optees. The “compromising information” gathered by the eight informers on the other twenty-two which most concerned the KGB was evidence that some of them corresponded with foreign acquaintances.19
It was chiefly because of the immense time and effort expended in the war on all fronts against ideological subversion that the KGB was many times larger than any Western intelligence or security service. One example of the overwhelming concentration by provincial KGBs on cases of ideological subversion is provided by the classified report for 1970 by the KGB directorate for Leningrad and Leningrad Oblast. Not a single case had been discovered of either espionage or terrorism. By contrast, 502 people were given “prophylactic briefings” (warnings) over their involvement in “politically harmful incidents”; forty-one were prosecuted for committing or attempting to commit state crimes (most almost certainly involving ideological subversion); thirty-four Soviet citizens were caught trying to cross the frontier. Extensive work was car
ried out in institutes of higher education “to prevent hostile incidents.” The postal censorship service intercepted about 25,000 documents with “ideologically harmful contents”; a further 19,000 documents were confiscated at the frontier. One hundred and nine individuals (as compared with ninety-nine in 1969) were identified as distributing subversive leaflets and sending anonymous letters; twenty-seven of the culprits were tracked down. The KGB’s huge agent network was reported to have grown by another 17.3 percent over the previous year. On the debit side the KGB surveillance service was reported to have crashed twenty-seven cars in the course of its operations.20 Oleg Kalugin, who became deputy head of the Leningrad KGB in 1980, privately dismissed its work as “an elaborately choreographed farce,” in which it tried desperately to discover enough ideological subversion to justify its existence.21
As head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, Andropov sought to keep ideological subversion at the forefront of the leadership’s preoccupations. Issues as trivial (by Western standards) as the activities of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the depths of Siberia or the unauthorized publication in Paris of a short story by a Soviet author were liable to reach not merely Andropov’s desk but also, on occasion, the Politburo. Though even the leading dissidents had little resonance with the rest of the Soviet population, at least until the Gorbachev era, they occupied many hours of Politburo discussions. Early in 1977 a total of thirty-two active measures operations against Andrei Sakharov, denounced by Andropov as “Public Enemy Number One,” were either in progress or about to commence both within the Soviet Union and abroad.22
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