The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Only when the vast apparatus of KGB social control began to be dismantled did the full extent of its importance to the survival of the Soviet Union become clear. The manifesto of the leaders of the August 1991 coup, led by Kryuchkov, which attempted to overthrow Gorbachev, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the KGB campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state:

  Authority at all levels has lost the confidence of the population… Malicious mockery of all the institutions of state is being implanted. The country has in effect become ungovernable.62

  What the plotters failed to realize was that it was too late to turn back the clock. “If the coup d’état had happened a year and a half or two years earlier,” wrote Gorbachev afterwards, “it might, presumably, have succeeded. But now society was completely changed.”63 Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power of the KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. Large crowds, which a few years earlier could never have assembled, gathered outside Yeltsin’s headquarters in the Moscow White House to protect it from attack, and later circled the Lubyanka, cheering enthusiastically as the giant statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky was toppled from its plinth.

  At the time the speed of the collapse of the Soviet system took almost all observers by surprise. What now seems most remarkable, however, is less the sudden death of the Communist regime at the end of 1991 than its survival for almost seventy-five years. Without the system of surveillance and repression pioneered by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, without the KGB’s immense Cold War campaign against ideological subversion, the Communist era would have been much briefer. The KGB had indeed proved to be “the sword and the shield” of the Soviet system. Its most enduring achievement was to sustain the longest-lasting one-party state of the twentieth century.

  ————

  WITH THE DISINTEGRATION of the one-party state went most of the KGB’s vast system of social control. But though the power of the internal KGB directorates (reorganized successively as a security ministry, a counter-intelligence service and a security service) dramatically declined, the influence of the newly independent successor to the FCD, the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, quickly recovered. Indeed, the SVR soon became more publicly assertive than the FCD had ever been. In 1993, its head, Yevgeni Primakov, published a report attacking NATO expansion as a threat to Russian security—and he did so at a time when the Russian foreign ministry was taking a much softer and more conciliatory line. On the eve of President Yeltsin’s visit to Washington in September 1994, Primakov once again upstaged the foreign ministry by publishing a warning to the West not to oppose the economic and political reintegration of Russia with other states which had formerly been part of the Soviet Union. Primakov’s deputy, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, asserted the SVR’s right to a public voice, even if it disagreed with the foreign ministry’s: “…We want to be heard… We express our point of view as we deem necessary.”64

  The rivalry between SVR and foreign ministry during Yeltsin’s first five years as president ended in decisive victory for the SVR with Primakov’s appointment as foreign minister to replace the pro-Western Andrei Kozyrev in December 1996. Probably to the dismay of many Russian diplomats, Primakov took with him to the foreign ministry a number of SVR officers. Both as foreign minister and later as prime minister, Primakov remained in close touch with his former deputy, Trubnikov, who succeeded him as head of the SVR.65

  The SVR is also more assertive behind the scenes than the FCD dared to be. The FCD regularly swore slavish obedience to the Party leadership—as, for example, in the typically ponderous preamble to its “work plan” for 1984:

  The work of residencies abroad must be planned and organized in 1984 in strict accord with the decisions of the Twenty-sixth Party Congress, the November (1982) and June (1983) plenary sessions of the CPSU Central Committee, and the program directives and fundamental conclusions contained in the speeches of the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee, Comrade Yu. V. Andropov, as well as the requirements of the May (1981) All-Union Conference of the leadership of the [FCD].66

  Today’s SVR has abandoned such bureaucratic sycophancy. It reports direct to the president and sends him daily digests of foreign intelligence somewhat akin to the President’s Daily Brief produced by the CIA in the United States. Unlike the CIA, however, the SVR lists policy options and does not hesitate to recommend those which it prefers.67

  How many SVR reports the ailing Yeltsin bothered to read during the final years of his presidency is uncertain. By the mid-1990s, when presented with his paperwork, he was already said to be frequently telling his long-suffering chief of staff, Viktor Ilyushin, not to bother him with “all that shit.”68 Like Primakov before him, however, Trubnikov had direct personal access to Yeltsin. In 1998 he helped to shape Russian policy during the dispute over UN weapons inspection in Iraq. Soon afterwards he was present at the Moscow talks on Kosovo between Yeltsin and Slobodan Milošević.69 Unnoticed by the media, Trubnikov also accompanied Primakov on a visit to Belgrade in March 1999 for further discussions with Milošević. Trough the SVR is not a supporter of Saddam Hussein or Milošević, it does not wish either to be defeated by the West.

  By the mid-1990s, the internal security service (then the FSK, now the FSB) had recovered some of its former influence, though only a fraction of its previous authority. Sergei Stepashin, who became its chief in 1994, was one of Yeltsin’s closest advisers. A centrist politician with reformist credentials, he had declared in 1991, “The KGB must be liquidated.” Once head of the FSK, however, he complained that his service had been “castrated” and was demanding greater powers. His influence was clearly evident in the crisis over Chechnya. In the late summer of 1994 Stepashin persuaded Yeltsin that an attack on Grozny, the Chechen capital, would overthrow its rebellious president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, almost overnight and bring Chechnya back under direct control from Moscow. The attack was to be mounted by Dudayev’s Chechen opponents, armed and financed by the FSK. When most of the Chechen opposition pulled out of the operation at the last moment in November, however, the FSK went ahead using Russian troops instead—with (as Stepashin later acknowledged) disastrous consequences. Dudayev repulsed the initial attack and paraded captured Russian soldiers before the world’s television cameras. Though Grozny later fell to Russian forces, the Chechens mounted a determined resistance from the countryside in a brutal war which, over the next two years, cost 25,000 lives. Yeltsin’s reputation never recovered. Stepashin was sacked in June 1995 in an attempt to appease critics of the war in the Duma, but remained close to Yeltsin and was brought back into the government two years later, first as minister of justice, then in March 1998 as minister of the interior. In May 1999 Yeltsin chose him to succeed Primakov as prime minister.70

  Yeltsin caused further incredulity by declaring that Putin would be the next President. The incredulity swiftly disappeared, however, when Putin launched a brutal, full-scale attack on the breakaway republic of Chechnya which achieved far greater short-term success than Yeltsin’s offensive five years earlier. Putin’s popularity in the opinion polls soared in only three months from 2 to 70 percent. On New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin sprang his final surprise on Kremlin-watchers by stepping down from the presidency before the end of his term and announcing that Putin was succeeding him as acting president. The striking contrast between the infirm and alcoholic leadership of Yeltsin’s final years in office and the tough no-nonsense leadership style successfully cultivated by Putin during his first months in the Kremlin won him victory at the presidential elections in March 2000.

  THE SVR AND FSB ARE GUARANTEED powerful roles under the Putin presidency. Neither foresees a return to the Cold War. Both, indeed, now have well-established, though little-advertised, liaison arrangements with the main Western intelligence agencies. The SVR and FSB none the less expect a continuing conflict of interest with the West.

  They have good reason to do so. The co
llapse of the Soviet system has revealed a much older East-West faultline which has more to do with events in the fourth century AD than in the twentieth century. It follows the line not of the Cold War Iron Curtain but of the division between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity which began with the establishment of Constantinople as the New Rome in 330 and was made permanent by the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches in 1054. Though the Orthodox East was invaded by Islam and the unity of the Catholic West fractured by the Protestant Reformation, the cultural divide between East and West persisted. “From the time of the Crusades,” writes the historian Norman Davies, “the Orthodox looked on the West as a source of subjugation worse than the infidel.”71 It is precisely because the faultline is so deeply entrenched that it is so difficult to overcome.72 Those east European states joining NATO at the end of the twentieth century, those likely to do so early in the twenty-first and the most probable future entrants into the European Union are all on the western side of the divide.73 There is still no very promising candidate in Orthodox Europe.

  To most Russians, the welcome given by Western statesmen in the late 1980s to Gorbachev’s ambition of establishing Russia’s place in the “common European home” now seems hollow, if not hypocritical. “A Russia shut out and disconnected,” argued historian Jonathan Haslam, “will inevitably be troublesome.”74 Despite Russian membership of the Council of Europe, the Russia-NATO Joint Council and other Western attempts to bridge the East-West divide, the enlargement of NATO and the planned expansion of the European Union confirm Russia’s relegation to the margins of Europe. The SVR, unsurprisingly, is resolutely opposed to both. Its opposition is strengthened by resentment at Russia’s national decline. In the space of a few months in 1989 the revolutions in eastern Europe destroyed the Soviet Bloc. Two years later Russia lost, even more suddenly, almost half the territory previously ruled from Moscow and found itself smaller than in the reign of Catherine the Great. The signs are that some—perhaps many—SVR officers share the belief of the current leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, in a long-term Western plan first to destroy the Soviet state and then to prevent a revival of Russian power. Russia’s historic mission, they believe, is to bar the way to American global hegemony and the triumph of Western values.75

  The Yeltsin presidency was far too short a period for Russia to adjust to the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Like post-war Britain, post-Communist Russia has, in Dean Acheson’s famous phrase, “lost an empire and not yet found a role.” But, whereas for Britain the loss of empire came at a time of political stability and economic recovery, in Russia it has been accompanied by economic collapse and political disintegration. Russia is in the unusual position at present of having a national anthem but little prospect of agreeing on words to go with it—one sign among many of its current crisis of national identity.76

  In the search for its own identity at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the SVR looks back to a heroic, reinvented version of its Soviet past. On December 20, 1995 it celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka’s foreign department as its own seventy-fifth birthday, and marked the occasion by publishing an uncritical eulogy of the “large number of glorious deeds” performed by Soviet foreign intelligence officers “who have made an outstanding contribution to guaranteeing the security of our Homeland.” The SVR copes with the unfortunate fact that some of its past heroes perpetrated or collaborated in the atrocities of the Great Terror by denying, absurdly, that they played any part in them. In the SVR version of the Terror, the sole involvement of foreign intelligence was to produce martyrs who “perished in the torture chambers of Yezhov and Beria.”77 As head of the SVR, Primakov became “editor-in-chief” of a multi-volume history of Soviet foreign intelligence designed to demonstrate that Soviet foreign intelligence “honorably and unselfishly did its patriotic duty to Motherland and people.”78 Though Primakov’s history has yet to reach the Cold War era, it is already clear that there will be no place in it for any account of FCD involvement in the persecution of dissidents and the abuse of human rights.

  In 1996 the SVR issued a CD-ROM in both Russian and English, with the title Russian Foreign Intelligence: VChK [Cheka ]-KGB-SVR, which claims to give “for the first time… a professional view on the history and development of one of the most powerful secret services in the world.” The aim throughout its multimedia celebration of past successes, such as the recruitment of the Magnificent Five and atomic espionage, is to emphasize the direct links between Soviet foreign intelligence and today’s SVR. The cover of the CD-ROM depicts the statue of Dzerzhinsky which the SVR and FSB now hope to see re-erected on its former pedestal outside the Lubyanka. Nothing better illustrates the continuity between the Soviet and Russian foreign intelligence services than the attempt by the SVR to reclaim its KGB past.

  APPENDIX A

  KGB CHAIRMEN, 1917-91

  Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky 1917-26 (Cheka/GPU/OGPU)

  Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky 1926-34 (OGPU)

  Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda 1934-6 (NKVD)

  Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov 1936-8 (NKVD)

  Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 1938-41 (NKVD)

  Vsevelod Nikolayevich Merkulov 1941 (February-July) (NKGB)

  Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 1941-3 (NKVD)

  Vsevelod Nikolayevich Merkulov 1943-6 (NKGB/MGB)

  Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov 1946-51 (MGB)

  Semyon Denisovich Ignatyev 1951-3 (MGB)

  Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 1953 (March-June) (MGB)

  Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov 1953-4 (MGB)

  Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov 1954-8 (KGB)

  Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin 1958-61 (KGB)

  Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny 1961-7 (KGB)

  Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov 1967-82 (KGB)

  Vitali Vasilyevich Fedorchuk 1982 (May-December) (KGB)

  Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov 1982-8 (KGB)

  Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov 1988-91 (KGB)

  Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin 1991 (August-December) (KGB)

  APPENDIX B

  HEADS OF FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE, 1920-99

  Yakov Kristoforovich Davryan (Davydov) 1920-1 (Cheka)

  Solomon Grigoryevich Mogilevsky 1921 (Cheka)

  Mikhail Abramovich Trilisser 1921-30 (Cheka/GPU/OGPU)

  Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov 1930-6 (OGPU/NKVD)

  Abram Abramovich Slutsky 1936-8 (NKVD)

  Zelman I. Pasov 1938 (NKVD)

  Sergei Mikhailovich Shpigelglas 1938 (NKVD)

  Vladimir Georgiyevich Dekanozov 1938-9 (NKVD)

  Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin 1939-46 (NKVD/NKGB/NKVD/MGB)

  Pyotr Nikolayevich Kubatkin 1946 (June-September) (MGB)

  Pyotr Vasilyevich Fedotov 1946-9 (Deputy Chairman, KI, 1947-9)

  Sergei Romanovich Savchenko 1949-52 (Deputy Chairman, KI, 1949-51)

  Yevgeni Petrovich Pitovranov 1952-3 (MGB)

  Vasili Stepanovich Ryasnoy 1953 (March-June) (MGB)

  Aleksandr Semyonovich Panyushkin 1953-6 (MGB/KGB)

  Aleksandr Mikhailovich Sakharovsky 1956-71 (KGB)

  Fyodor Konstantinovich Mortin 1971-4 (KGB)

  Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov 1974-88 (KGB)

  Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin 1988-91 (KGB)

  Yevgeni Maksimovich Primakov 1991-6 (SVR)

  Vyacheslav Ivanovich Trubnikov 1996- (SVR)

  APPENDIX C

  THE ORGANIZATION OF THE KGB

  Source: Desmond Ball and Robert Windren, ‘Soviet Signals Intelligence (Sigint): Organisation and Management,’ Intelligence and National Security, vol. 4 (1989), no. 4; Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, paperback edition (London: Sceptre, 1991); and Mitrokhin.

  APPENDIX D

  THE ORGANIZATION OF THE KGB FIRST CHIEF DIRECTORATE (FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE)

  Source: Desmond Ball and Robert Windren, ‘Soviet Sig
nals Intelligence (Sigint): Organisation and Management,’ Intelligence and National Security, vol. 4 (1989), no. 4; Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, paperback edition (London: Sceptre, 1991); and Mitrokhin.

  APPENDIX E

  THE ORGANIZATION OF A KGB RESIDENCY

  NOTES

  Chapter One

  The Mitrokhin Archive

  1. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, December 10, 1996; Reuter reports, December 10, 1996.

  2. Unless otherwise indicated, the account of Mitrokhin’s career is based on his own recollections. Because of concern for his relatives in Russia, he is reluctant to reveal details of his family background. The SVR is still ferociously hostile to KGB defectors, whatever their motives. Most, even if—like Oleg Gordievsky—they betrayed not Russia but the now discredited Soviet one-party state through ideological conviction, remain under sentence of death. Though their relatives no longer face the overt persecution of the Soviet era, many understandably prefer not to have them identified.

  3. For personal reasons, Mitrokhin does not wish to make public the location of this foreign posting, where he operated under an alias.

  4. On the fall of Beria, see Moskalenko, “Beria’s Arrest”; Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, pp. 185-93; Knight, Beria, ch. 9.

  5. The FCD Archives, known in 1956 as the Operational Records Department (Otdel Operativnogo Ucheta), were subsequently renamed the Twelfth (later the Fifteenth) Department.

  6. Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, p. 194.

  7. Fleishman, Boris Pasternak, chs. 11,12; Levi, Boris Pasternak, chs. 8, 9.