Julie Fedor
On June 20, 1980, following the evening news, Soviet Central Television screened a remarkable “telerepentance” by the famous nonconformist Orthodox priest Father Dmitrii Dudko. Six months earlier he had been arrested by the KGB on suspicion of anti-Soviet activities; now, dressed not in his priest’s robes but in an ill-fitting civilian suit, he proceeded to address the Soviet people with a confession, in which he declared himself guilty of anti-Soviet activities, condemned such activities, and pledged to give them up. This episode, remembered by many former Soviet citizens as an emblematic moment, occurred in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in the lead-up to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, during what is sometimes called the “Second Cold War” of the early 1980s.1 The Second Cold War has received little attention from scholars of Cold War culture and propaganda, yet this was a period marked by important changes in the superpower relationship and in the discursive construction of their ideological struggle. It was a period in which the notion of human rights, now elevated to a prominent position in global politics, became securitized, and both sides fought to control the way in which Soviet dissidents were depicted on the world stage.2 Were dissidents who passed information on human rights violations in the USSR to Western correspondents heroes, or were they traitors? Was this heroic resistance or duplicitous and base espionage and subversion?
The Dudko episode, which was carefully stage-managed by the KGB, offers insights into the Soviet attempt to challenge the heroic image of the dissident and to reclaim the moral high ground by recasting the figure of the dissident as the puppet of Western special services. The case thus illuminates Soviet Cold War culture and ideology, which has generally been less widely studied than its U.S. variants to date. On the whole we know more about Western Cold War culture than we do about its Eastern counterparts. Numerous studies have been done in recent decades, for example, on Hollywood and propaganda or on the CIA’s cultural interventions and psychological warfare strategies (see, for example, Hixson 1998; Shaw 2001; Rosenberg 1993). By contrast the study of the KGB side of the struggle is in its infancy and has been further hampered by the fact that declassification of the Russian state security archives has been moving in a reverse direction since the mid-1990s. The situation is different in some of the former Soviet republics, notably the Baltic states and more recently Ukraine, and scholars are beginning to take advantage of the greater openness of the archival regimes in these countries (see, for example, Cohn 2017). Meanwhile, great strides have been made when it comes to advancing our knowledge of state security operations and discourses in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania in particular (see, for example, Szwagrzyk 2005; Graczyk 2007; Piotrowski 2006; Piotrowski 2008; Glajar, Lewis, and Petrescu 2016). Yet scholars working in the security archives in these countries still face the challenge that was identified by historians at a 2005 Warsaw international conference on this topic, namely, the task of developing scholarly tools for “translating” the archival and other materials produced by the Soviet secret police and the filials it created through the socialist bloc (see further Fedor 2011; Glajar, Lewis, and Petrescu 2016, 1–23).
Those KGB documents that have come to light, mostly through the efforts of scholars and activists who were granted access during the short-lived thaw of the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin eras, have only confirmed the urgency of the need for such interpretive tools. Historian of the Cold War Vojtech Mastny commented in the mid-1990s that “perhaps the greatest surprise to have come out of the Russian archives is that there was no surprise: the thinking of the insiders conformed substantially to what Moscow was publicly saying. Some of the most secret documents could have been published in Pravda without anybody’s noticing. There was no double bookkeeping” (1996, 9). The human rights activist Ludmilla Alexeyeva was also struck by this after reading declassified KGB documents: “They sounded exactly like the newspaper articles they used to denounce us. . . . We always thought that among themselves, Soviet officials used plain language about what we were trying to do. Who would have guessed that they talked about us in private in the same way they did in public” (Rubinstein and Gribanov 2005, 3).
Others have claimed that it is possible to identify a distinctive style associated with the Soviet state security apparatus. The writer Vasilii Aksenov, analyzing another dissident recantation that was evidently ghostwritten by KGB officers, comments that the KGB “didn’t make much of an effort to camouflage themselves; every phrase is marked by their special style” (“V beskonechnom ob”iatii” 2011).3 The question of the specificity of this style and its relationship to content is one that is ripe for historical and literary interpretation, and it is especially well suited to an interdisciplinary approach.4 The boundaries between history, politics, fiction, and theater are particularly blurred when it comes to the history of Cold War espionage and intelligence.5
Paul Fussell famously argued that many of the key metaphors, modes, and habits of imagination of modernity could be traced back to the seminal twentieth-century experience of World War 1 (Fussell 1975, 75–77). A similar claim could be made for the Cold War and the “secret world” of espionage and counterintelligence to which it gave rise. This was in many ways a deeply theatrical (and indeed, cinematic) world, with its props and its clichés; the poisoned umbrellas, newspapers, and flowers in buttonholes; the passwords, codenames, and anonymous encounters in exotic locations; the glamour, the paranoia, and the brutality. Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 and now master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, has argued that the Soviet side played the leading role in shaping the trappings and practices of this world. The Soviet security apparatus is also important from a broader historical perspective. Anne Applebaum (2012) has recently made the case for viewing the process of setting up clones of the Soviet state security apparatus in the East European satellite states as central to the installation and survival of the postwar regimes in the region; yet, again, our knowledge of the history of the functioning, development, and culture of the Soviet state security apparatus remains very patchy.
At one level this chapter engages with the ongoing task of examining the worldview of the chekist—to use the Russian term designating staff of the Soviet and now the post-Soviet Russian security apparatus.6 Exploring the categories and filters through which the chekist perceived, described, and classified Soviet citizens and their actions can advance our understanding of the distinctive moral universe in which the KGB operated and over which it sought to hold sway. In this chapter I approach this topic from the perspective of the chekist’s victim, via an examination of a rich body of autobiographical writings produced by Dudko throughout the decades following his arrest and recantation. For the remainder of his life, Dudko returned again and again to the pivotal moment of his encounter with the Soviet state security apparatus in 1980, reflecting on it in a range of different texts, which offer insights into the workings and categories of Cold War chekist discourse, in this case, as refracted through the life-writing of a former dissident turned loyal supporter of Soviet power. I focus in particular on repentance, a key but understudied trope in the Soviet state security discourse, and one that was central in the framing of Dudko’s case, both in Dudko’s autobiographical writings and in the accounts produced by his contemporaries.7 The writer and Gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov highlighted the importance of what he called a “repulsive [Soviet] tradition of ‘repentance’ and ‘confessions’” (Makarov 2016). The Dudko case marks an important milestone in this tradition, but one that has been understudied to date.
In the second half of the chapter, I explore the post-Soviet life of this Soviet Cold War story. I show how, more recently, Russian nationalists have adapted and used Dudko’s story to underpin ideological projects aimed at renarrating Cold War history in the service of an authoritarian vision of Russian history and identity, in which the only rightful position that a loyal Russian could take during the Soviet era was that of obedience to the KGB as the defender of Russia’s interests in the struggle against the West. In these post-Soviet texts, Soviet Cold War categories of subversion, loyalty, repentance, and redemption are revived and reconstituted, and the Cold War itself is recast as a mere episode in an epic, eternal spiritual struggle between Russia and the West. Conveniently for the Putin regime with its strong KGB roots, this narrative also allows the figure of the Soviet chekist to be reclaimed—improbable as this might seem—as a sacred custodian of Russian spirituality.
At the time of his arrest in January 1980, Dmitrii Dudko was one of the leading lights of the Russian Orthodox religious renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in 1922 and imprisoned in the gulag during the late Stalin era, he was one of several nonconformist Orthodox priests who rose to prominence and attracted a large following from the late 1960s (Shkarovskii 2010, 277) via his writings published in samizdat, and his sermons and interviews broadcast to the USSR via Western radio “voices” such as Voice of America. He was also the spiritual father of many of those who converted to the Orthodox faith during this period and who would go on to become leaders of the religious and other human rights–based dissident movements, such as Zoia Krakhmal’nikova (Iliushenko 2009) and Lev Timofeev (News.ru 2005).
Dudko’s growing popularity and standing, and especially the attention he was attracting abroad, was a source of alarm for the KGB, and a long campaign of chekist surveillance and harassment was duly conducted against Dudko with the aim of silencing him.8 Finally, in early 1980 the KGB took him into custody, as part of the wave of crackdowns on religious and other dissidents that took place in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in the lead-up to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Dudko’s appearance on Soviet television came just a few weeks before the games opened on July 19. It followed Andrei Sakharov’s banishment into exile in Gorky in January 1980 and the arrests of other religious dissidents such as Viktor Kapitanchuk, secretary of the Christian Committee for the Defence of Rights of Believers, who was arrested on March 12, 1980, and pressured into making a public recantation the following October (“Sud” 1980).9 According to Aleksei Smirnov, director of the Moscow Research Center for Human Rights, rumors circulated in the Soviet prison system in 1980 that the KGB was aiming to “cleanse” the country of all dissidents by 1983 (Levi n.d.).10
Dudko’s television appearance was an uncanny fulfillment of Khrushchev’s 1960 pledge that “the last Soviet pop” (a derogatory colloquial term for priest) would be shown on Soviet television in 1980, as a kind of last surviving specimen of a species that was about to become extinct (Vigilianskii 2001). It made a deep impression on those who saw it, since Dudko had been so important symbolically as “a moral counterweight to the supine and passive Patriarch Pimen of Moscow” (Dunlop 1983, 190). It is striking just how often the intense experience of watching Dudko on TV is recounted in detail in the dissident memoir literature. For Dudko’s followers, many of whom learned of his recantation from behind bars or barbed wire, this was a huge blow, in some cases experienced as nothing less than a personal tragedy (Levi n.d.; Kevorkova 2004; Pomerants 1984; Nikol’skii n.d.). Some viewers speculated that Dudko might have made this television performance under the influence of psychotropic drugs, presumably administered by his KGB handlers (Aver’ianov [1998] 2004). For Leonid Borodin Dudko’s television appearance represents “the most resounding of the KGB’s victories” during this period (Borodin 2003).
The shock was surely intensified by the fact that Dudko was one of an increasing number who raised their voices precisely against the secret police’s effective enslavement of the church through the recruitment and deployment of secret informers. In a 1975 samizdat text, for example, Dudko quoted one KGB officer as summarizing the Brezhnev regime’s strategy when it came to the Orthodox Church: “We don’t persecute [gonim] [the church] these days; that was before. Before we demanded that people renounce their faith, but now we don’t demand it. Just so long as they collaborate with us. The church is ours now. And we can arrange everything for you. If you want—you’ll be a bishop. Whoever you like, just help us” (Dudko 2004). In the 1960s and 1970s, this was a key issue mobilizing religious dissent—again, as Dudko put it in 1976, because of widespread rumors that priests at the time were all just chekists in disguise (pereodetye chekisty) (Dudko 2004). Opposition to the KGB’s infiltration of the church had broken out into open protest in the mid-1960s with a series of famous petitions issued by nonconformist priests (Shkarovskii 2010, 273).
Contrary to the charges leveled against him, Dudko did not in fact generally raise political issues in his sermons (Shkarovskii 2010, 277). But he was a vocal proponent of the need for the church to take a strong moral stance on two issues in particular: the KGB’s current infiltration of the church (which he lamented as a catastrophe that was destroying the church) (Shkarovskii 2010, 277; Dudko 2004); and the need for the church to repent and honor the memory of those priests who had been murdered by the Soviet state in the early decades of Soviet power. His position on the latter issue, that of the so-called new martyrs, is no longer controversial and has become firmly established as the hegemonic position within the Russian Orthodox Church now (see further Fedor 2014). The first of these two issues, that of the church’s complicated and ambiguous relations with the secret police during the late Soviet period, remains something of a “blank spot” in the church’s history. The issue of the presence of KGB informers at the very top of the church hierarchy exploded in the media in the wake of the failed August 1991 coup, after a parliamentary commission investigating the coup uncovered KGB documents confirming the extent of the KGB’s penetration of the church hierarchy. While this issue had already been raised in samizdat and later in press articles published during the late Gorbachev period, this was the first time that the claims had been supported by documentary evidence from the KGB archives (Fedor 2011, 171n98).11 The church did set up an internal commission to investigate this issue, but its work more or less fizzled out. It apparently met only once and did not do any real work (Komarov 2002, 1).
Dudko’s televised capitulation to the state in 1980 made such a powerful impact that his name became virtually a synonym for submission to the KGB, such that more than half a decade later it was possible to talk of being “dudko-ized” by the KGB. In 1986, for example, the prominent nonconformist priest Father Aleksandr Men’, at a time when he was under intense pressure from the KGB to make some kind of public recantation of his views, reportedly said, “They [the KGB] want to ‘dudko-ize’ me” (Bychkov 1992).12 Dudko had become an emblematic figure symbolizing the Soviet state’s power to break its opponents and to manipulate them into orchestrated public displays of penitence and also a symbol of the weakness of the Orthodox Church.
This KGB operation was clearly also intended to destroy Dudko’s reputation, and in this sense it was successful, at least in the short term. The period immediately following his recantation and subsequent release was among the most difficult in his life, as his former parishioners and other supporters turned away from him in large numbers. This experience caused Dudko a great deal of pain, and he would later describe this period as much more difficult than his time in prison (Smyk 1990).
The day after Dudko’s television appearance on June 20, 1980, a full written version of his recantation was published in the newspaper Izvestiia (Dudko 1980). The text was prefaced by a brief, unsigned official summary, stating that the investigation had established that Dudko had “maintained a criminal link with representatives of foreign anti-Soviet organizations, [and] passed to them slanderous materials demeaning the [Soviet] state and social system, [materials] which were widely used in conducting hostile activities against the USSR. Dudko himself ha[d] confessed his guilt, condemned his anti-Soviet activities, and pledged to renounce them henceforth” (preamble to Dudko 1980). This preamble was followed by a lengthy personal statement by Dudko. This took the form of a confession, in which he also traced the process of reflection that had led him to see his errors. Dudko wrote:
At first, I denied my guilt and declared that I had never acted against the Soviet regime, but was rather waging a struggle against godlessness as a priest. Later, I understood that I had been arrested not for my faith in God but for a crime. Even before my arrest I had doubts about the rightness of my actions, which, of course, had not only a religious meaning. Reflections have helped me to reach what I am now sure are the correct conclusions. I understand what harm I have brought to my country and my church. And at the same time I recognize, despite my conflict with the law, how long and patiently the Soviet regime has treated me, has had mercy on me, has made concessions to me, has tried repeatedly to guide me onto the true path. (Dudko 1980)
The text of Dudko’s statement was surely at least partly scripted by Dudko’s investigator—later, as we shall see, Dudko would write gratefully about having been gifted a typewriter by his KGB investigator—but it also seems to have been important that Dudko should physically produce and sign off on the text himself. This long and rather rambling text is mostly written in the first person, but at times it shifts to the second person. We can read it as an example of what Cristina Vatulescu has called the “ventriloquized confession” (2010, 39) typical of the Soviet secret police file, whereby the suspect was “coopted in the penning of a life story whose definitive version the file aimed to record,” his or her voice ultimately “blend[ing] . . . with the language of the secret police” (40–41, 44). Indeed, according to Viktor Sokirko, a dissident who was also caught up in the same wave of arrests in January 1980, many dissidents objected precisely to the fact that Dudko had “agreed to speak in the TV statement and in print ‘in their language.’”13
In his written confession, Dudko attempted to reconcile his calling as a priest with loyalty to the Soviet atheist state. He recounted his arrival at the realization that the aims pursued by the church and the state in fact had much in common: both struggled against “drunkenness, hooliganism, moral corruption, [and fought for] the strengthening of the family, and thereby also of society” (Dudko 1980). He also described the shame he felt over his past oppositional activities: “In my reflections I went ever further and further; I recalled what I had written and published abroad. The content of my books and articles aroused particular distress. It was awkward for me to recall those anti-Soviet expressions, the slander that was in them. I blushed, I became distressed, I felt guilt. Can’t you see [he wrote, slipping into the second person as he does from time to time in the text] that for all your good intentions . . . you turned out to be spitefully minded? And so, repent!” (Dudko 1980).
Not only Dudko himself but also both Soviet officials and Soviet dissidents, religious or otherwise, tended to use religious language to depict Dudko’s capitulation to the KGB, describing it as an act of repentance (raskaianie, pokaianie) or apostasy (otstupnichestvo).14 The preoccupation with this religious concept might seem unexpected for a society living under a militant atheist state, but as many scholars have argued, Soviet ideology borrowed widely from Christian discourse and practices (see, for example, Brooks 2001). As I have argued elsewhere, the figure of the chekist featured in Soviet official discourse as a kind of spiritual shepherd replacing the priest, and the notion of caring for those who had “strayed from the path” was an important part of the official rationale of the KGB’s notorious antidissident Fifth Directorate, created by KGB chief Yurii Andropov in 1967 with the aim of countering the increasingly active dissident movement (Fedor 2011, 54; Sokolov 1997). The notion of repentance was also central to the ethos of Soviet dissent (Boobbyer 2005), and later repentance would also become an important catchword of the Gorbachev-era prodemocracy movement, lending its name, for example, to the taboo-breaking film about the trauma of the Stalinist past, Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance.15 This motif was especially powerful because it resonated with the traditional focus in Russian thought on issues related to morality and spirituality and the centrality of the idea of moral purification in the Russian democratic movement (Lukin 2000, 61; Averintsev 2001). It also reflected a traditional Soviet chekist preoccupation. As Igal Halfin puts it in his discussion of early Soviet trials for subversion, “the object of investigation was the soul of the accused, its moral inclination” (2007, 1).
Dudko’s was not the first such telerepentance that the KGB had staged. A number of prominent dissidents were forced to perform in this way on Soviet television in the 1970s.16 Reportedly this practice was the brainchild of General Colonel Filip Bobkov, the former head of the KGB’s antidissident Fifth Directorate (Sokolov 1997). According to Aleksei Smirnov, the KGB was “skilled at using the press and television to create a big noise around each repentance” (Levi n.d.). Smirnov recounted one such case in which the prisoner in question, Aleksandr Bolonkin, was reportedly still wearing his prison-camp trousers and footwear under the desk, having been hurriedly dressed in “civilian” wear only on the top half of his body visible during the TV performance (Levi n.d.).
The most famous of these cases was that of human rights activists Petr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, whose recantation at a televised press conference in 1973 dealt a massive blow to the Soviet human rights movement and attracted attention worldwide (Barbakadze n.d., http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/yakir/).17 The issue of how to respond to this case and, in particular, what attitude should be taken to Yakir and Krasin brought about a damaging split in the Soviet human rights movement. The human rights activist Sergei Kovalev has recounted, for example, the criticism he faced from other dissidents over his call to refrain from harsh condemnation of Yakir and Krasin (Svetova 2013).
At least some of these performances were reportedly made under pressure of threats; in some cases the protagonists were told that they would be executed if they refused or that their families would be harmed.18 Sometimes they also involved deals whereby a lighter sentence was offered in exchange for a public display of loyalty and for testifying against fellow dissidents.19 While there are documented cases in which such testimony led to additional arrests and convictions, some dissidents have argued that the latter aim was secondary. According to prominent former dissident Aleksandr Podrabinek, writing on the basis of his own experience of numerous encounters with the secret police, “for the KGB the public repentance of dissidents was much more important than their testimony against their friends” (2014).
Other former dissidents, too, have asserted that these chekist-choreographed performances of repentance were designed above all else as public displays of Soviet state power and its triumph over the individual will. The famous Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovskii, for example, who had dealings with chekists at close quarters for decades, has commented that the KGB “wanted from people only one thing: repentance” (Novodvorskaia 2012). Showing the state’s ability to break the will of leading dissident heroes was a highly effective way of undermining the dissidents’ moral authority and credibility; the spectacle of a former hero now cowed and in shackles made for powerful propaganda. The journalist Yevgeniia Al’bats recalls that each dissident telerepentance would be followed by a propaganda campaign whose key message was “‘look, even those who only yesterday were pouring filth over the achievements of the great Soviet power, even they have now come to their senses’” (2001). It would appear that some chekists also derived personal satisfaction from these shows of the secret police’s strength. Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, a former follower of Dudko who was serving a prison-camp sentence at the time of Dudko’s telerepentance, has noted of his chekist overseers in the camp: “[They] even wanted to take me to a television so as to show me: look, there’s your dissident” (Nikol’skii n.d.).20
It seems likely that Dudko’s performance was also designed to convey a different message to external, Western and global audiences. Vitalii Aver’ianov reads the episode as follows: “What [the Soviet regime] needed from father Dimitrii . . . was that he recognize that freedom of conscience was inviolate in the Soviet Union” ([1998] 2004). In other words Dudko’s statement was called on to support the Soviet Union’s image on the world stage as a progressive state that had enshrined civil liberties in its constitution. At first glance these two messages might seem mutually exclusive—but not from the perspective of Soviet citizens, skilled in the arts of reading the Aesopian language of Soviet official-speak. On the contrary, from this perspective the fact that Dudko was now mouthing the false slogans of the Soviet state was inherent to the main message of this public relations stunt: anybody could be broken in the end.
Dudko’s public confession also reproduced chekist categories of subversion, redefining his own past activities in these terms. He recounted his realization that he was a mere puppet of Western masters: “My activities . . . were incited and later essentially directed from abroad. Slanderous materials received from me by the New York Times correspondent C[hristopher] Wren, American professor A[rcadi] R. Nebolsine, archbishop of Brussels and Belgium Vasilii and other foreign citizens were used in hostile propaganda against our state. If previously too I was no fan of foreign places [zagranitsa, lit. that which is ‘beyond the border’], then now I am convinced that foreigners interfering in our internal affairs bring us nothing but harm” (Dudko 1980). A key moment in this conversion narrative hinges on Dudko’s revelation that there could be no true understanding or friendship with people in “the West.” In an emotional passage, he appeals to his readers to give up any naive dreams of solidarity with activists in Western countries:
Do you really think that in the West they’ll understand us better than we understand ourselves? . . .
God has decreed that you live not just anywhere, but here, in the Soviet Union. . . . It is no accident that you live here. And you need not to be away with your head in the clouds, dreaming, but to be present here, doing work that is useful for everyone. . . .
Do you think they [people in the West] need you? People who left [the USSR for the West] and have been disillusioned with the way of life there have already been writing to you, [warning you that] the West is chasing sensations, it’s amusing itself with you, once it’s had its fill of amusement it will abandon you—even now they’ve started closing ranks against you there. So whom are you serving? Do you understand now? (Dudko 1980)
The peculiar emotional tenor of this passage, suggesting a complicated and intense set of feelings towards “the West,” captures another dimension of the Soviet Cold War experience. The sense of disillusionment, sadness, even unrequited love that Dudko’s confession conveys is reminiscent of the Soviet Cold War fantasy image of the West described by Svetlana Boym (1994, 23–24). Here, however, this wistfulness is transformed into bitterness and a distinctive kind of performative and stylized righteous anger characteristic of Soviet Cold War discourse.
I will now examine a curious body of autobiographical writings produced by Dmitrii Dudko throughout the remainder of his life until his death in 2004. In these texts Dudko not only wrote and rewrote his own life story, but he also participated in a broader project characteristic of a strand of radical nationalism in post-Soviet Russia aimed at retrospectively sacralizing the Soviet state and its security agencies in particular. According to this view, the Soviet state was only superficially godless, and the visible surface of the chekist campaign against dissent in fact masked a deeper reality and a deeper truth. In this vision of the Soviet past, the true Russian patriot and martyr was not the dissident resisting Soviet state power, but he who had been willing to risk public disgrace by collaborating with the Soviet security organs and thus supporting Russia’s interests in the Cold War struggle. The figure of the chekist, in turn, features in this account as the unjustly maligned and misunderstood sacred custodian of Russian statehood.
In his post-Soviet incarnation, Dudko became a celebrated figure in the radical nationalist circles of the so-called spiritual opposition to the Yeltsin regime from the early 1990s. According to Gleb Yakunin, the ex-prisoner of conscience and nonconformist priest, the extreme nationalist milieu offered Dudko a kind of refuge in the aftermath of his public disgrace (Portal-credo 2004). Dudko became the confessor for the ultranationalist newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow). He used the newspaper and other organs of the right-wing nationalist press, such as the journal Nash sovremennik (Our contemporary), as a forum for his distinctive and indeed often quite idiosyncratic meditations on his encounter with the Soviet security apparatus and the meaning of the Soviet period for Russian history more broadly. Aleksandr Prokhanov, Zavtra’s editor in chief, has in turn cited Dudko’s association with his newspaper as evidence that the emerging statist ideology aimed at creating a new synthesis out of the “great white monarchist idea and the red, soviet imperial idea” had gained a “spiritual” core to complement and underpin its intellectual components (Prokhanov 2010). Dudko’s works have also been mentioned by former high-ranking chekist memoirists, such as Nikolai Golushko, former head of the Ukrainian KGB between 1987 and 1991 (among other high-ranking posts), who has cited Dudko as vindication of the KGB’s approach to the religious issue (Golushko 2012, 204).
In his writings Dudko produced what amounts to an elaborate and prolonged public apologia for his capitulation to the KGB. One of his former followers, Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, has reflected that “later, after coming out of imprisonment, he [Dudko] effectively devoted all his creative activity [tvorchestvo] to justifying this, so as somehow to justify himself, why he had done this, how this had come about” (Nikol’skii n.d.). In these writings Dudko was concerned not only with justifying his actions in 1980 but also with sharing the privileged knowledge, the insights into Russia’s fate, that he believed he had acquired through this experience.
From the mid-1990s, various patriotic commentators and ideologues exploited these writings, frequently making quite extravagant claims for the significance of Dudko’s submission to the Soviet state security apparatus. Orthodox philosopher and patriotic ideologue Vitalii Aver’ianov describes this episode as “one of the most symbolic pages of [Russians’] shared history,” and as an example on which future generations would judge the twentieth century and the meaning of the events of that century (Aver’ianov [1998] 2004), and the writer Vladimir Smyk, a former follower of Dudko, has asserted that Dudko’s personal drama, his public disgrace, and the insights it brought him are emblematic of the history of Russia itself (1996).
Post-Soviet Russian patriotic press commentators often celebrate Dudko precisely and explicitly for his capitulation to the KGB in 1980. This act of submission, they claim, far from being a manifestation of weakness or a source of shame, was in fact an act of rare courage, moral fortitude, and prescience. Thus one such newspaper article on the subject was titled “Ne padenie—triumf” (Not a fall—a triumph; Smyk 1996), while another claimed that Dudko’s chief moral feat lay in the fact that he had “embarked upon collaboration with the [security] organs” (Zavtra article, cited Borodin 2003).
Dudko’s post-Soviet writings prompted renewed debates in the Russian press over the moral admissibility of collaborating with the KGB and the correct relations that should obtain between society and the state security apparatus more broadly. These debates took place against a background of several scandals and legal suits launched by public figures accused of having acted as collaborators in the Soviet period. In one particularly odd case, the KGB defector Oleg Kalugin, who was being sued after “outing” an ex-informer, attempted to defend himself against slander charges by citing KGB documents listing the positive characteristics that agents must possess, with a view to demonstrating that there was nothing shameful about informing for the KGB.21 Meanwhile, some Russian nationalist writers attempted to transform Dudko’s story into the cornerstone of a new ethical justification for collaboration with the Soviet security organs, whereby chekists and collaborators alike feature as the true unrecognized saints and martyrs of Russian history.
Of the numerous published works in which Dudko reflected on his 1980 public recantation, it was his 1996 book on the subject, Propoved’ cherez pozor (Sermon through shame) that touched a nerve and generated the most media commentary. A recurring motif in the debates that followed the publication of this book was the notion that Dudko’s submission contained hidden layers of meaning—a lesson that could not be grasped rationally or fully absorbed at the time, yet whose presence had nevertheless been sensed at some deeper, intuitive level. Vitalii Aver’ianov asserted that for many Soviet people the memory of Dudko’s public repentance in 1980 had lingered ever since, leaving “a vague sense of something else that had not been made sense of completely, not cleared up completely, not absorbed into consciousness. This story had not been understood, but it had stuck in many people’s memories” ([1998] 2004). Sergei Baburin, writing in Zavtra in 1997, couched the topic in similar terms, speculating that the Russian people had yet to become fully “conscious” of Dudko, as “a spiritual phenomenon of [their] life [and] as a very important criterion of the Russian national spirit” (Zavtra 1997b).
In these and other examples, the commentary is often obtuse when it comes to elaborating on the content and message of Dudko’s lesson. But the chief thrust of this lesson would appear to be twofold: first, the role played by the Soviet secret police in Russian history should be radically reassessed in a positive light; and second, there must be a reckoning of the profound culpability of the Soviet dissidents for the Soviet collapse and other catastrophes befalling Russia in the 1990s. Both of these themes are treated at some length in Dudko’s writings.
Central to Dudko’s writings is the motif of the chekist as a kind of disguised guardian angel. Dudko focused especially on the nature of his relationship with his chekist investigator.22 Over the years Dudko set forth these relations in a series of parables relating scenes and dialogues from his interrogation and imprisonment (see esp. Dudko 2001). Here we can situate Dudko within the Soviet tradition identified by Eric Naiman and Anne Nesbet (1995, 53, 56), whereby the trope of the interrogation provided not just “an arena for the demonstration both of personal integrity and historical ‘truth’” but also “the metaphysical occasion for a grander, metaphorical investigation of history.”23
Dudko’s writings are also an idiosyncratic example of the Soviet confessional autobiographical genre. In his reminiscences Dudko charted a highly distinctive radical transformation of self—one that is engendered precisely by his intimate and intense encounter with his KGB investigator. In many respects the text resembles a conversion narrative recording the path to spiritual rebirth and transformation into a new person. But what is striking about Dudko’s epiphany is that it comes about precisely through his contact with chekists, his communion with them. Chekists were the agents or catalysts of Dudko’s spiritual growth. In some mysterious way, Soviet chekists, despite their external superficial appearance as agents of an atheist state and as persecutors of believers, actually functioned as the vehicles of God’s will, as disguised manifestations of virtue.
Dudko first mentioned his bond with his chekist captors during his television address in 1980, when he said: “My investigator and I have a single patronymic: Sergeevich. [Does this not point to the fact that we are in fact brothers?] My investigator and I, it turns out, are brothers?” (2001, 222). In later writings he described the process whereby he had become imbued with love for his investigator during his stay in prison (Smyk 1990; Dudko 2001, 218–23). This deep identification with the chekist is a consistent feature of Dudko’s writings, to the point where, indeed, we might even think of this as a case of Stockholm syndrome.24 At one point, for example, Dudko imagined his interrogator as the physical embodiment of Dudko’s own conscience (2001, 218–19). More conventionally in his written press statement issued the day after his television appearance, Dudko (1980) further described how in prison he had finally arrived at the realization that despite his crimes, the Soviet state had shown great patience and mercy, making concessions for him and making repeated attempts to steer him onto the true path before being forced to resort to arresting him.
Dudko elaborated on his encounter with his investigator in greater depth in texts produced the year after his arrest. By Dudko’s own account, it was in fact his KGB investigator who encouraged Dudko to write up his reflections on his encounter with the KGB, even providing him with a typewriter and a kind of writer’s retreat in order to do so (Dudko 2001, 223). The result was a text in which Dudko outlined what was to become a key motif of his writings: the notion of the “Christlike” attributes of the chekist.
Dudko drew a direct link between the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of the chekist—the sacrifices that the chekist makes, his suffering at the hands of those who slander him and turn away from him. He painted a picture of the chekist as gentle, as tender toward the weak (Dudko 2001, 223–24), and he suggested that the chekist will be rewarded for his meekness and humility and may be the first to enter the kingdom of Heaven (Pomerants 1994, 211).25 Dudko’s chekist will be rewarded for his sufferings and the contempt and hostility he has endured; he calls upon the “haters” to recall that Christ was also hated and to look within themselves, to ask themselves whether they might not be Pharisees (Pomerants 1994, 211).
More broadly Dudko also made a case for viewing the entire Soviet state as a kind of crypto-Christian enterprise, only nominally “godless.” He emphasized, for example, the fact that the chekists whom he met in prison secretly observed Christian rites. His investigator and his wife and children had all been baptized, and his investigator accepted Dudko’s blessing (Dudko 2001, 219). Dudko further stated, “[The chekists] even asked forgiveness for having arrested me. And they accept[ed] my blessing” (1999, 3). Here, then, this becomes a two-way relationship, where close contact between the church and the Soviet state transforms and purifies both parties. One 2009 article on Dudko says: “People were drawn to him. The most diverse people, even his persecutors. Even the investigators who put him in prison later, at the end of life, would come to him and repent; they asked forgiveness; they turned to faith and to God” (Literaturnaia Rossiia 2009).
Dudko would further continue this theme of retrospective sanctification and extend it to various Russian World War II heroes, arguing that even if they were technically atheists, they had been baptized through their blood sacrifice and should be classified and canonized as Christian martyrs (Prokhanov 2010). Dudko also spoke in favor of what he called the “spiritual rehabilitation” of Stalin, who he also claimed was a secret believer and a secret champion of the church, citing various apparently fictitious archival documents in support of this thesis (see, for example, “Polveka bez vozhdia” 2003 and Kurliandskii 2007). Dudko described the caritative traits of the chekists in terms reminiscent of saints’ lives. He noted, for example, a “very meek and cautious” chekist who brought Dudko timber to fix his house after he had been released and went to live in the countryside (2001, 223). This example then spread to other local chekists who also began to help others in the village (224). Dudko’s chekists are instinctively and naturally Christian. They live for others; they care for their prisoners spontaneously and selflessly.
For Dudko many of his investigator’s words and questions took the form of enigmas whose meaning had only become clear with time. Dudko recalls, for example, how the chekist said to him: “You don’t know what a friend I am to you”—words that Dudko understood only years later (Dudko 2001, 218). Here again, Dudko’s encounter with his interrogator is a trial, a test arranged by God, intentionally obscure and allusive. The clues to the meaning of this divine test are contained partly in small, spontaneous acts of mercy and kindness shown to him by his chekist interrogator (Dudko 2001, 218). In one fanciful passage, Dudko imagines that after he dies and goes to heaven, the first to rush to meet him will be his investigator, who will continue to help him even beyond the grave: “He will grab my hand and say: ‘It’s hard for you to walk, let me help you’” (218–19).
In an interview posted in 2006 on the official website of the key body responsible for relations between the Orthodox Church and the military and law enforcement agencies, the Moscow Patriarchate’s Synodal Section for Mutual Cooperation with the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Institutions, Dudko said: “The chekists beat us, beat us sincerely, without mercy, but at the same time, these were . . . our people [svoi liudi], who had simply strayed on life’s path” (Murzin 2006). He returned to this theme of chekist state repression as a kind of vehicle of national salvation elsewhere, writing: “I was arrested three times, twice condemned, they exhausted me with constant searches. But now I thank God sincerely for this. The chekists were our saviors. They beat us and thus they saved us” (quoted in Murzin 2006). Because of their shared suffering, he declared, “the chekists and the Russians will be the first to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the first to lay down a path for mankind” (quoted in Pomerants 1994, 211).
In one 2002 article, Dudko presented his friendship with his KGB investigator as a kind of riddle or paradox and a jumping-point for reflecting on the Russian national identity:
I want to ask you, readers, what is a Russian person? Do you know?
We used to live among Russian people; nowadays in Russia we live among foreigners. But after all a Russian person—both chekist and zek [a Soviet shorthand term for “prisoner”]—these are one and the same Russian people; it’s only foreigners who tell us that chekists cannot be Russians; they’re hell-spawn, they say, and when I say that I had two friends: a chekist-investigator and a political activist, whom the chekists were persecuting . . . foreign-minded people, even Russian people, perhaps, will say: how can this be combined? (quoted in Divnich 2002)26
For Dudko, then, the unique, seemingly illogical potential for a loving friendship between chekist and zek, between prison guard and prisoner, constitutes an essential marker of Russianness. Prison guard and prisoner are joined in a kind of sacred pairing, locked into a joint martyrdom, whereby both are purified through their suffering and their compassion for each other.
This anomaly or paradox of the love between the chekist and his prisoner is also something that we find in the Soviet tradition. The notion of a vital affinity between chekist and prisoner and the trope of the chekist’s sorrowful love for and intense empathy with his prisoner were present in early Soviet representations of the Cheka. This was encapsulated in one of the famous aphorisms attributed to the founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky: “He is not a chekist whose heart does not engorge with blood and contract with pity at the sight of a man imprisoned in a prison cell” (Semenov 1977, 34). In another example, on the fifth anniversary of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky proclaimed: “Those of you who have become callous, whose heart cannot relate sympathetically and considerately toward those undergoing imprisonment, [should] leave this institution. Here more than anywhere else, one must have a kind heart, sensitive to the sufferings of others” (Sobolev et al. 1999, 178). Mikhail Geller has argued that this new Soviet code of morality with its glorification of the figure of the chekist represents a radical departure from the prerevolutionary traditions of Russian literature in which the perspective of the humiliated and the wretched was valued above all. For the first time in the history of Russian culture, Geller writes, it was the prison guard, not the prisoner, who had become the hero (Geller [Heller] 1996, 288). It was Dudko’s own past as a prisoner of the camps in the late Stalinist period that gave him the moral standing and credibility to pronounce on these issues. The fact that Dudko was not only a strong statist but also a former prisoner was often held up in the patriotic press as giving him a special right to speak (see, for example, Prokhanov 2010; on Dudko’s term in the camps, see Shkarovskii 2010, 277).
When Dudko died in 2004, his obituary in Nezavisimaia gazeta (The independent gazette) was titled: “He was a hero of faith and a repentant dissident.” This phrase “repentant dissident” became a key label applied to Dudko, who is often said to have been the first of a wave of “repentant dissidents.” As one Zavtra journalist put it, “Dmitrii Dudko was, perhaps, the first of those who had thrown down a challenge [to the Soviet—G.S.] regime who understood [that] . . . in fighting with the KGB, CPSU, with the state Soviet machine—they were fighting with Russia” (Zavtra 2009). This trope of the epiphany of the former dissident who comes to understand the harm that he has inflicted on his nation is encapsulated in the catchphrase “We were aiming at Communism, but we hit Russia”—a formulation usually attributed to the writer Aleksandr Zinov’ev and used frequently in texts criticizing the dissidents of the Soviet era.27 Smyk’s 1996 text reflecting on the Dudko case is a typical example of the genre: “Many former dissidents—the best of them—after seeing the fruits of perestroika and reforms: a ruined great power and a dying, destitute nation carried out a reevaluation of their activities. . . . In this sense, f. Dmitrii’s repentance was prophetic. He was the first to leave the ranks of the dissidents, so as, in the tragic denouement that Russia is undergoing at the end of the second millennium, to be in the same rank as her defenders.”
We might read this nationalist trope of the “repentant dissident” as representing an attempt to reappropriate and redefine the concept of “repentance.” Democratic activists in the late Soviet period had used the term as a rallying cry for a radical confrontation with and critical evaluation of the Soviet past, including the history of relations between the Orthodox Church and the security apparatus. For Smyk (2002) such activists had led both Dudko and Russia itself “down the path of shame, spitting on [Russia’s] past, arrogantly demanding repentance of the Russian people.” Smyk draws a connection between Dudko’s path of shame or disgrace and Russia’s, and rejects the democratic dissident emphasis on repentance: “After all,” Smyk writes, “Russia too was led down the path of shame, spitting [opleyvaia] on her past, arrogantly demanding repentance of the Russian people.” In such texts post-Soviet Russian nationalists have set out to reclaim the notion of “repentance” and to turn its moral force against those who had resisted the Soviet regime. This move in turn enables rehabilitation of the figure of the chekist, whose persecution of the Soviet dissident movement is thus reconstituted as a noble struggle in defense of the nation.
In 2001, a year into former chekist Vladimir Putin’s first term as president of the Russian Federation, Dudko looked back on the negative attitudes to the KGB that prevailed in the late Soviet period: “I remember when I was released and I wrote that the chekists had conversed with me as friends, people laughed at me” (2001, 219). By the time he wrote this sentence, the rising currency of the modern-day security apparatus seemed to vindicate his position. The rise of Putin had meant that many patriots moved out of opposition and began to align themselves with the Putin regime, or at least to offer it cautious support and qualified loyalty. This shift also appears to have been connected to a tendency within religious nationalist circles toward venerating the special services as defenders of the Russian spirit (see Tabak 2004).
There is a certain amount of ideological convergence between Dudko’s writings on the history of the chekist campaign against the dissident movement and contemporary official mainstream discourse in Russia, especially when it comes to public statements made over the past decade by ex-chekists on the subject of the history of the KGB’s infiltration of the Orthodox Church. For example, in 2003 Georgii Poltavchenko, former KGB officer and now governor of St. Petersburg, then Putin’s plenipotentiary in the Central Federal District, commented that during the Soviet era, priests collaborated with the KGB out of patriotic considerations, as opposed to Judas, who “worked not in the interests of his own government” (Kevorkova 2003). Viktor Cherkesov, a famous KGB “dissident hunter” in Leningrad in the 1970s and 1980s, has also reflected publicly on the topic of “repentant dissidents.” In a programmatic 2004 article in the tabloid newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda (Komsomol [Communist Youth] truth), Cherkesov describes the journey of the writer Aleksandr Zinov’ev: “One day, Aleksandr Zinov’ev, a prominent figure in Soviet and post-Soviet political literature, saw the light. And he squeezed out of himself the tragic confession: ‘We were aiming at Communism, but we hit Russia.’” Now, in the post-Soviet period, former dissidents had realized that they were in fact nothing but the puppets of “an alien . . . hand. . . . A hand for whom ideological conflict is a screen, a pretext for settling not ideological accounts but other ones. [Accounts that are] in some sense eternal, fundamental, definitive” (Cherkesov 2004). In the context of this new narrative, Dudko’s public recantation of his dissident views in 1980 is a sign of his prescience. Thus the writer Mikhail Lobanov observes that while Dudko’s television confession had caused Dudko a “deep emotional trauma” at the time, “there was also something providential in this”—subsequent events had demonstrated that Dudko had been right to take the path that he did (2002, 108). In particular “his break with dissidents even before so-called ‘perestroika’ was providential,” Lobanov claimed (quoted in Prokhanov 2010).
Orthodox philosopher and nationalist ideologue Vitalii Aver’ianov reflects on the Dudko story at length in a passage that is sufficiently rich to warrant quoting in full. Aver’ianov sees the lesson of Dudko’s experiences with the chekists as follows:
Father Dmitrii’s wisdom after his arrest was expressed in the fact that he sensed the course of history. In his contact with the investigator chekists, with high leadership, which acknowledged that the state was not correct in everything with regard to the church, he sensed that in life everything is much more complex than it seems to political dissidents. Much had changed over the decades of Soviet power; much was changing and would still change. The historicism of what was occurring, the three-dimensional meaning of events, was revealed. The face of the Russian narod was revealed, of Russian statehood, which had not been erased definitively over 70 years but in a paradoxical way was beginning to show through from underneath the crimson mask of “totalitarianism.” The Russia narod had proved to be much more living and expansive in its possibilities for assimilating alien and imposed laws than those who despaired had thought. The Russian narod proved capable of swallowing the seemingly fatal poison of Marxism and atheism without taking it into its spiritual system. Most important of all—the Russian narod had taken these 70 years precisely as a great divine test [popushchenie] and despite everything had continued the age-old process of manufacturing its own narodnyi character, its own national spirit. It had survived. (Aver’ianov [1998] 2004)
In this passage Aver’ianov makes explicit the role of the chekists in bringing about Dudko’s enlightenment. It was precisely his contact with them that enlarged Dudko’s perspective on the Soviet regime and on Soviet history more broadly, as compared to the black-and-white view of political dissidents. According to this reading of the Soviet past, it is now clear that Soviet ideology had been grafted onto the Russian spirit only superficially. The Russian spirit proved to have mysterious reserves of strength; ultimately it rejected the alien transplant and preserved its own integrity. This notion is encapsulated in Aver’ianov’s text in the image of the true face of Russian statehood, showing through from under the “crimson mask” of totalitarianism. This image, suggesting a pale and angelic Russian countenance shining mysteriously through a ruddy and crude veneer, is a curious inversion of the Soviet trope of “unmasking” the enemy.28 It is also reminiscent of National-Bolshevik ideas about the superficially repellent, bloody, and brutal face of the early Soviet regime as concealing the new face of a great Russia.29 This true face had miraculously survived the Soviet period, and according to Aver’ianov, it had been revealed to Dudko through his ordeal in the early 1980s. Again, the figure of the chekist plays a crucial role in this account, functioning as a vehicle for an authentic Russian essence that had survived and outlived Soviet totalitarianism. The chekist sprang from Russian soil and acted as custodian of Russian statehood, ensuring its survival throughout the Soviet period.
Aver’ianov’s account, like many others in this genre, offers a consolatory message: as a nation Russians have survived the Soviet catastrophe. At the same time, we might also read Aver’ianov’s text as an attempt to reclaim the Soviet past—to find a way to recognize oneself in the bloody history of the twentieth century and to find a way to contemplate this past with equanimity. Perhaps one reason why such accounts tend to fall back on elements of the Soviet mythology of the Cheka is that this mythology shared the same basic drive to make bloodshed comprehensible and bearable.
Tracking the Soviet Cold War spy story of Dmitrii Dudko across the post-Soviet transition, we see how the stuff of Soviet chekist discourse is being used today to spin a set of new, national spy stories, as the legacy of Russia’s Soviet experience continues to unfold in unexpected ways. At one level the case of Dmitrii Dudko is a story about ideological instrumentalization and exploitation. Dudko was used twice over: first by the KGB, as a tool in the Soviet Cold War struggle, and then once again by the ideologues of the emerging ultranationalist discourse of the post-Soviet era who turned to Dudko’s case in their search for a spiritual core for their vision of Russia’s past and future. This story is also part of an ongoing process of forging new historical narratives about the Soviet past, aimed at synthesizing and reconciling the Soviet period with the wider stream of Russian history and creating a historical pedigree for the current chekist-led Putin regime. The renarration of Dudko’s submission to the KGB as an act of heroism dovetails with a broader drive to weave the Soviet past, and the history of the Soviet secret police in particular, into a seamless unbroken national narrative of Russian history. In this narrative the figure of the chekist plays a crucial role, bridging the gulf between the Soviet and the Russian eras and anchoring new visions of the Russian national identity.
Research for this chapter was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Awards (DECRA) funding scheme (project DE150100838). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council. I would like to thank the volume editors for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of the text. I am also grateful to Rustam Alexander for his speedy and efficient assistance in locating some misplaced references for the chapter.
1. Carole K. Fink writes that the Second Cold War “arose . . . when the new U.S. administration took the offensive—ideologically and strategically—against the Soviet Union. Unlike his immediate predecessors, who had viewed the USSR as a permanent presence in international affairs and an unavoidable if difficult partner, Reagan viewed the Soviet Union as an incorrigible adversary that he was determined to vanquish” (2013, 204).
2. On the use and significance of human rights issues in U.S.-Soviet relations on the global stage during this period, see Peterson 2011.
3. All translations from the Russian cited in this chapter are my own unless otherwise stated.
4. There is a growing body of scholarship in this area; see especially Cristina Vatulescu 2010 and István Rév 2005.
5. See further Glajar, Lewis, and Petrescu 2016, 9–17. The Russian scholar Mikhail Geller has even claimed that there is a sense in which “the history of spy literature is the most precise history of the twentieth century”; see Geller [Heller] 2000, 318.
6. The term “chekist” is derived from the title of the original Soviet security and intelligence apparatus, the Cheka, created in December 1917. This term has remained in use ever since to designate employees of the Soviet and now the post-Soviet Russian security apparatus. The term has a distinctive set of meanings that is not adequately captured by the available English-language equivalents, as I argue in Fedor 2011, 2–6.
7. For a fascinating history of the trope of repentance in the early Soviet and Stalinist periods, see Halfin 2007.
8. On Dudko’s biography and significance, see further Dunlop 1983, 49–51, 190–95; Ellis 1986; Borodin 2003; Kevorkova 2004; and Nezavisimaia gazeta 2004.
9. Prior to Sakharov’s banishment, in late 1977 another prominent dissident, Petr Grigorenko, had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Dudko presided over Grigorenko’s marriage shortly before Grigorenko left for the United States to undergo medical treatment.
10. Smirnov did not explain the significance of the year 1983 as a deadline for the completion of this operation.
11. On KGB-church relations, see further Ellis 1996, 133–38.
12. Aleksandr Men’ was eventually murdered with an ax on September 9, 1990, under circumstances that remain unclear.
13. In a sympathetic personal letter to Dudko in 1982, Sokirko wrote, “The fact that many ‘dissident-minded’ people choose not to speak a language in common with the authorities and to turn their backs on you is entirely understandable and inevitable; one must regard this without anger, even though it is impossible to regard it without pain” (Sokirko 1982).
14. See, for example, the entry on Dudko in Barbakadze n.d., http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/Dudko/.
15. The film was completed in 1984 but only released to a mass audience during glasnost; see further Davies 1989, 8, and Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh 1993, 228. The need for repentance was also a key theme, for example, of the TV debate between dissident Vladimir Bukovskii and new KGB chief Vadim Bakatin in September 1991 (Bukovskii 1996, 45).
16. Another prominent example was that of the Georgian dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdiia, whose public recantation took place in 1978, on which see Chevtaeva 2012.
17. The dissident Petr Grigorenko later said that the spectacle of Yakir’s repentance had a “strongly oppressive effect” on him (Reif 2009).
18. For example, Petr Yakir and Viktor Krasin both stated that they were threatened with the death penalty in the event that they refused to publicly recant; Yakir’s interrogators also told him that his daughter would be arrested if he did not cooperate (Zubarev and Kuzovkin 2017).
19. The case of Gleb Pavlovskii is a notorious example. For Pavlovskii’s own account, see Morev 2014.
20. Ogorodnikov has also noted that Dudko’s recantation led to a drying up of Western support for Russian religious dissidents, since “people in the West decided that if such pillars as father Dimitrii Dudko were being broken, then what could one expect of [his younger followers]” (Nikol’skii n.d.).
21. Incidentally, while chekists tended to shout most loudly about the dangers of unleashing witch hunts against ex-collaborators, they were also the ones stoking the fires, especially when it came to pointing the finger at ex-informers and spreading disinformation. In 1997, for example, the former KGB general Aleksandr Korzhakov “outed” TV current affairs anchorman Yevgenii Kiselev as an ex-informer, apparently in revenge for Kiselev’s negative media coverage (see Gerasimov 1997).
22. According to Andrew and Mitrokhin (1999, 647), Dudko’s investigator was Vladimir Sorokin; according to Yakunin, his investigator was Podkopaev, and he was decorated after breaking Dudko. Portal-credo interview available at Krotov site, http://krotov.info/spravki/persons/20person/1922dudk.html.
23. More recently Vatulescu (2010) has also written on this subject in her study of interrogations in Soviet literature and on literary works stimulated by encounters with the secret police.
24. My thanks to Alison Lewis for pointing this out.
25. These qualities of meekness and humility make the chekist the direct opposite of the figure of the dissident, whose chief sin is pride.
26. For additional commentary on Dudko’s writings about the figure of the chekist, see a personal letter sent to Dudko in 1982 by Viktor Sokirko, in which the author comments that many dissidents broke with Dudko because “they did not wish to listen to the truth, difficult for them to face, that chekists are also human beings, and that the real cause of being released from prison was not so much ‘weakness’ as the beginning of a conversation in prison about understanding and compromise [ . . . ] I consider that you did the right thing when you did not renounce a human relationship with the prison guards, you tried to understand them, to converse with them, to inspire them to do good, you accepted help from them and managed to reach an agreement on leaving prison and [being granted] normal conditions of life and work after prison” (Sokirko 1982).
27. The phrase is sometimes also attributed to Vladimir Maksimov. Zavtra claims that Zinov’ev and Maksimov coined the phrase together in a conversation first printed on the pages of Zavtra; see, for example, Zavtra 1997a and Bondarenko 2000.
28. On this trope, see Fitzpatrick 2005.
29. On which see Dobroliubov 2007. On post-Soviet Russian nationalist reinterpretations of the Soviet project as an “emanation of the Russian spirit,” see further Verkhovskii 2007.
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