We can now turn our attention to one of the key law-enforcement agencies – the secret police – and the way it dealt with political opponents. As yet, we possess no authoritative history of the KGB and its archives are, at time of writing, still closed to researchers. We shall therefore have to make do with some of the information that has emerged.
In its various pre-Khrushchevite incarnations – Cheka, GPU, NKVD – the secret police had a chequered history that has been recounted by historians. From the creation of the Cheka (Chrezvychainaia Kommissiia) in 1917, its agents have always been officially referred to as ‘chekists’ (chekisty) – and still are in post-Soviet Russia. This unfailing attachment to a prestigious title, which is explained by the role of these agents in the revolutionary period, possibly served the tacit purpose of distancing the agency from the Stalinist period. Chekists fought for a great cause, risked their lives and died for it, whereas under Stalin NKVD operatives (nkvdisty) tortured and killed masses of innocent people. They too risked their lives, but not heroically: they might be eliminated by their patron to blot out the traces of the criminal deeds he himself ordered them to commit.
It is worth recalling that when, in 1934, the GPU was supposedly absorbed by the NKVD (Commissariat for Internal Affairs), it was in fact the reverse that occurred. The NKVD was taken over by the leadership of the GPU, which was kept intact inside the commissariat as the GUGB (General Directorate of State Security). In that way, the complex of political security and intelligence services, domestic and international, could at a moment’s notice become an independent agency (of the MGB or KGB variety), or return to being a component of the NKVD-MVD. It should also be remembered that under Stalin the latter was headed by the chief of the security services, and that the ‘part’ was therefore in control of the ‘whole’. Why such frequent, successive restructurings were required is a question for experts. For us, the key point is that the secret police and intelligence services remained substantially intact, even if the great purges took a heavy toll on them and numerous changes post-Stalin created agitation – sometimes chaos – in their ranks.
At one stage, the MVD – a bureaucratic ‘superpower’ – ruled over the Gulag, the whole intelligence complex and substantial military special forces, as well as border guards. In addition, it had all the usual functions of an interior ministry – public order, public records, local government supervision. After Stalin’s death its power was seriously curtailed, and in 1962 it was abolished as a Union ministry. On 10 February 1954 the MGB (Ministry of State Security) once again became independent of the MVD – this time for good. It was placed under the authority of General Serov, previously MVD deputy minister, and several MVD functions were transferred to it. Serov was moved from this position on 8 December 1958, having been appointed head of military counter-intelligence (GRU) and deputy chief of staff of the armed forces. The MGB, which in the interim had become the KGB (K for Komitet), was entrusted to A. N. Shelepin, who had started his career in the Komsomol, before heading the Central Committee department responsible for supervising republican party organizations. On Khrushchev’s instructions, Shelepin simplified the KGB’s sprawling organizational structure and proceeded to substantial staff reductions. These changes have been seen by some historians as ‘cardinal’ and are summed up in Khrushchev’s anti-militaristic phrase: ‘tearing off their pompous epaulettes and trouser stripes’ (it sounds more pithy in Russian: raspogonim, razlampasim). This was why neither Shelepin nor the new Interior Minister Dudorov was entitled to the military titles and uniforms so highly coveted by some leading figures.
Things fell slowly into place in the KGB’s Moscow headquarters on the Lubianka. The secret police found its bearings once again, though not without some significant changes in its modus operandi (which fell far short of what liberal-minded citizens, jurists and intellectuals wanted to see). The KGB’s internal structure remained unchanged from 1958 until the mid-1960s. At the same time, however, changes affecting the character of the regime – the growing importance of laws and legal codes, the considerable role of the legal professions, the diminished effectiveness of coercive measures in an increasingly urban society – were bound to have an impact on it. It is true that in this treacherous sphere there were ‘natural’ limits to change – notably because the same was true of the regime as a whole – and it is important not to forget them. Even so, the changes that did occur were substantial.
To begin with, curtailing the powers of Stalin’s secret police was carried out in stages, but amounted to a thorough cleansing operation. Disbanding such extra-judicial bodies as the special conferences, the kangaroo courts operated directly by the political police, or the sinister local ‘troikas’, marked a decisive step, which was followed by obliging the KGB to hand over the results of its investigations to the regular courts. This move eliminated some of the most shocking potential for arbitrariness, which the security services had been instructed to exploit to the full. The abolition of the Gulag as an industrial labour pool for the secret police, and the latter’s consequent disappearance as an economic actor, was another crucial turning point. The ongoing campaign against the venality and brutality of the police, whether secret or in uniform, tended in the same direction. In Part One we indicated how, as early as the 1920s, the GPU had bridled at supervision by public prosecutors – derided as ‘legalistic hair-splitting’ by the chekists, who preferred to have a free hand to pursue the regime’s enemies. The prosecutors had lost out at the time, and many of them later perished. Now, the restoration of supervision of KGB investigations by prosecutors was in train, though it was not without its ups and downs.
Among the significant measures taken under Khrushchev to rein in the Stalinist monstrosity and change the climate in the secret services was the introduction of new people to lead them, selected from the party apparatus. In his autobiography,1 Mikoyan, who in reality was second in importance in the regime after Khrushchev, approved of this move, but criticized him for the appointment of General Serov, who had been NKVD head in the Ukraine from 2 September 1939 until 25 July 1941, at the time when Khrushchev was Central Committee first secretary there. The new ruler in the Kremlin trusted Serov in a way no one else did – at least if we are to believe Mikoyan, who claims that Khrushchev was easily manipulated by skilful sycophants. When finally forced to remove Serov by irrefutable arguments (they actually derived from opponents of Khrushchev), he still appointed him to an honorific position.
The MGB had been reconstructed in 1954 as an agency (the KGB) with jurisdiction over the whole USSR, and it absorbed a growing number of functions that had previously fallen to the MVD – border guards, among others. Unlike the MVD, however, it no longer ran an enormous prison system (that remained with the MVD) and operated only a smaller number of prisons for suspects under investigation. It is possible that it also possessed a larger camp or colony, but I have come across no clear evidence for this. On the other hand, the KGB constituted a formidable machine, concentrating intelligence, counter-intelligence and communications and transport security under one roof, and equipped with massive technical resources for surveillance, a typical detective service (‘external surveillance’ in its jargon), a whole host of other departments and subdepartments, and a large staff – not to mention stukachi, unpaid informers, recruited in any sector the KGB deemed sensitive. Such concentration of power was characteristic of the deeply ingrained Soviet belief in the virtues of centralization. It is yet more obvious if we round off this sketch by adding that the KGB was responsible for the security of Soviet leaders and, to a large extent, for what they knew (or what the KGB wanted them to know) about the USSR and the rest of the world. Hence the KGB was an administrative giant – but different from its predecessor under Stalin.
Finally, let us note that KGB chiefs were dependent on the power constellation at the top, and were doubtless tempted to support a preferred leader against some other figure. Thus, the KGB unquestionably played a role in the ousting of Khrushchev in 1964, as surmised by the well-informed R. G. Pikhoia. According to him, the ease with which the plot proceeded must have had something to do with Khrushchev’s tense relations with the security services. After Beria’s arrest in 1953, his deputy, S. N. Kruglov, had become head of the MVD, and many had interpreted this as a sign that Stalinist methods were on the way back – especially since various military industrial branches that had just been removed from the MVD were being restored to them. In fact, these ominous signs were generated by a partial and temporary short-circuit in the top leadership, and the purge of Beria’s old accomplices continued. At the end of August 1953 the head of the MVD reported that the mopping-up operation in regional directorates was over (certain officials were condemned to death or lengthy prison sentences). Taxed with all the ‘pogroms’ of the 1930s, the MVD’s influence was on the wane, while the future KGB’s star was rising.
A year later, an MVD was created for the Russian republic, which had not possessed one since 1930, when an all-Union Internal Affairs Ministry based in Moscow was deemed sufficient. This presaged further changes. In 1956, Kruglov was replaced at the top of the MVD by Dudorov, head of the Central Committee’s construction department. In 1956–7, many MVD cadres were dismissed as a logical prelude to the abolition on 13 January 1962 of the MVD of the USSR, whose functions were turned over to its republican namesakes. In Russia, even its name changed: it became MOOP (Ministry for Public Order). But the reader need not worry: it soon reverted to its old name, for in an authoritarian state such powerful traditions are not so readily blotted out.2
The KGB’s so-called ‘political’ functions were defined by its statute, approved by the Central Committee Presidium on 9 January 1959. It was a ‘political organ’ responsible for defending the system from internal and external enemies. With Shelepin’s appointment in 1958, a further thinning out of its ranks was conducted, extending the measures that had been taken since Khrushchev’s arrival in power. In January 1963, Shelepin was promoted to the Politburo and replaced at the head of the KGB by Semichastny (an old Komsomol comrade). That same year, Semichastny reported that 46,000 officers had been dismissed (half of them before 1959), and that more than 90 per cent of the generals and officers in military counter-intelligence had been transferred to civilian jobs ‘in the course of the last four years’ (he probably meant 1959–63). New agents arrived with party and Komsomol references. On the other hand, many former KGB operatives were redeployed to work in the party, soviets, or in the Prosecutor’s offices. Shelepin and Semichastny’s KGB, strengthened by party cadres who were supposed to rekindle its ideological fervour, once again regarded itself as an ‘armed detachment of the party’ (Stalin’s formula), and not necessarily as pro-Khrushchev. But many of the old cadres who survived must have been upset by the dismissal of tens of thousands of agents, the reduction in their salaries, and the elimination of several perks (free medicine, privileges for length of service).
The KGB could not but inherit a sinister reputation from the Stalinist NKVD. In the USSR and throughout the world, it ‘enjoyed’ the image of the repressive agency of a regime whose foundations largely rested on repression (it is enough to refer to the list of its duties). In reality, however, its activities in this sphere did not have much in common with those of the MVD during the Stalinist period. We now possess data on the number of arrests and types of sentence meted out to opponents in the broad sense. Not unlike the trend observed in other spheres, they were now on another scale, even though it should be specified that the level of repression was determined by the leadership decisions, not exclusively by the KGB. Horrified and fascinated by the absurdity of Stalin’s repression, and amply supplied with data about it, Western opinion readily accepted the idea that it continued on the same scale and with the same means after his demise. In fact, however, the two periods are not comparable – if only because the secret police, however powerful, had lost the outrageous power to judge and punish their victims themselves. Their cases now had to go to court. As for KGB investigations, as with the Cheka at the beginning of the NEP, they had to be registered with the Prosecutor General or local prosecutors. Their results had to be communicated to the special department of the Prosecutor’s Office that oversaw such investigations (the same applied at local level). The available evidence, albeit still scanty, indicates that these procedures were observed – although we may assume that the opening of the archives will disclose shortcomings in this supervision. Predictably, respect for procedures depended on the relative weight of conservative and reformist currents in the leadership. Moreover, the outcome of strictly political cases and trials, directly handled by the Politburo in accordance with the regime’s interests, was a foregone conclusion: judges and prosecutors would simply act out a scenario decided elsewhere, and the professed guarantees were cast aside. Since persons accused of political crimes, notably the dissidents, no longer faced the death penalty, national and international public opinion could play a role. Debate within the regime and considerations of high politics would not infrequently introduce some important correctives. In the case of less high-profile individual and group oppositional activity, legal proceedings followed their normal course. We now possess a great deal of information about the number of such cases and the sentences handed down, appealed, reduced or dismissed.
We shall start with the information supplied by the KGB to the government about anti-Soviet political activities. The KGB leadership was concerned about what it perceived as a growing mood of opposition in the country.3 In the first half of 1962, it amounted to nothing less than an ‘explosion of popular discontent with Khrushchev’s policies’ (this is Pikhoja’s conclusion, not the KGB’s own assessment). In this period, the number of anonymous anti-Soviet leaflets and letters in circulation was twice as high as in the first six months of 1961: 7,705 leaflets, produced by 2,522 authors, were seized. In the first six months of 1962, sixty anti-Soviet groups – invariably composed of only a few individuals – had been uncovered, compared with forty-seven for the whole of the previous year. After a lengthy interval, leaflets lauding the ‘anti-party group’ (Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov), which had been disbanded in 1957, began to appear. The chekists managed to identify 1,039 authors of 6,726 anti-Soviet documents: among them were to be found 364 workers, 192 employees, 210 students or secondary-school pupils, 105 pensioners and 60 kolkhoz members. More than 40 per cent of these authors had a secondary-school education; 47 per cent were younger than thirty; and some were party and military veterans. We leave it to readers to decide what conclusions to draw from these statistics. But other, more dramatic events were to jolt the Central Committee and KGB.
At the end of May 1962, reacting to a deteriorating supply situation, the government increased food prices and at the same time ordered factory managers to raise output norms without increasing wages. Given that kolkhoz members had just been prohibited from growing food on their private plots, Khrushchev’s popularity was at its nadir. The KGB recorded signs of growing popular discontent. At Novocherkask, in the Rostov-on-Don region, things took an especially dramatic turn. Between 1 and 3 June 1962, protest exploded in an important factory and spread to the whole city: demonstrations, blockades of trains, attacks on party and KGB offices, beating up of policemen. The local administration, party and military were paralysed: soldiers fraternized with the strikers and their officers did not issue orders to open fire. For them, as for the KGB, the situation was unheard of. But when it threatened to get completely out of control, Moscow dispatched troops and the rioting was suppressed, at the cost of twenty-three dead and numerous wounded. Many arrests and sanctions followed.4
Events like this were worrying, because they demonstrated that the system could break down and lose control throughout a city: the soviet officials and party secretaries were arrogant, unpopular bureaucrats who collapsed when it came to the crunch. They often had no local roots and no popular following.
Thereafter, further disorders, varying in kind and importance, required the intervention of troops. Hitherto they had not been taken too seriously, but now they were followed with particular attention and measures were adopted to prevent any recurrence. The protest movement in Novocherkask had caught the KGB unawares and unprepared, and it was reeling from its failure. The Central Committee decided to strengthen the secret police. Perhaps Khrushchev had reason to regret his policy towards the KGB and even, more generally, his anti-Stalinism.
Various documents from the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1963 allow us access to the KGB’s inner sanctum and to hear its chiefs talking, reasoning, organizing and acting. The new KGB head Semichastny reverted to the old-style repressive and aggressive attitude towards enemies. This approach, which his agencies tended to celebrate as authentically ‘chekist’, was in fact rooted in the ideology of the conservatives, shared by Semichastny when a Komsomol functionary. In July 1962 the Central Committee received a memo from a commission of seven senior officials (Shelepin, Semichastny, Ivashutin, Zakharov, Tikunov, Rudenko and Mironov – the last-named a party apparatchik with his eye on the KGB leadership). It offered a series of proposals for stepping up the struggle against anti-Soviet activities and possible mass disorder.5 It was argued that there was no need for any new decisions; existing directives from the Central Committee and Khrushchev personally were adequate for the task. The commission of seven merely wanted to propose some supplementary measures relating to the activity of certain administrative bodies – measures that featured in draft orders drawn up by the head of the KGB and the Prosecutor General. It added that the MVD of the Russian Federation intended to create reserve units within its existing internal armed forces, to be used, should the need arise, to guard public buildings, communication centres, radio stations, banks and prisons (in case of riots), and which would be equipped with special weapons and communications systems. To this end, the MVD of the Russian Federation had presented a draft to the Central Committee office that handled the affairs of the Russian party.
This text did not wish to be alarmist. The same is not true, however, of one written by Semichastny personally and sent separately, which was much more ‘activist’. His reference to the mass disorders occurring in different parts of the country possibly conveys genuine alarm. But it might also have been intended to present himself and the KGB as more indispensable than ever. In fact the few figures he provided were scarcely alarming – especially in a country as vast as the USSR.
The Presidium of the Central Committee approved the drafts of the decisions that Semichastny and Rudenko (the Prosecutor General) were to implement in their respective domains. The KGB was authorized to recruit a further 400 agents for regional counter-intelligence services. Parts of the text were to be communicated to party secretaries at regional and district level. But only key members of the Politburo and leaders of the MVD and KGB could have sight of the whole text; local officials were to be restricted to paragraphs 1 and 3, meaning that they were not to know that the KGB was recruiting an additional 400 agents (they did not always see eye to eye with the local KGB).
This text is followed by another document, marked ‘top secret’, containing the draft of an order by Semichastny to his agents enjoining them to ‘intensify the KGB’s struggle against demonstrations of hostility by anti-Soviet elements’. It begins with a report on the period between the Twentieth and Twenty-second Congresses (1956–61). According to Semichastny, links between the KGB and the population had been strengthened, allowing for an improvement in intelligence and ‘operational activities’. ‘Prophylactic’ measures (a notion we shall return to) had also paid off However, many KGB agencies had relaxed their guard in uncovering and suppressing anti-Soviet activities. Upright citizens were with the government, on the domestic and international fronts alike, but the fact that society still harboured anti-social elements was something not to be underestimated. Influenced by hostile foreign propaganda, they were spreading malicious slanders against the party and sometimes exploited temporary difficulties to incite Soviet citizens to riot. In recent years, such disorders had included the sacking of administrative buildings, the destruction of public property, attacks on state representatives, and other such excesses. The initiators or perpetrators were mostly criminals and hooligans, but all sorts of people hostile to the regime had also emerged from the shadows – former collaborators with the Germans, for example, or members of churches and sects. Having served their sentences, all these hostile elements were moving to the south, and they might have played a prominent role in the Novocherkask events. Dealing with the situation demanded both an intensification of the struggle against the subversive activities of foreign intelligence agencies and an improvement in KGB operations against the internal enemy. Moreover, in some KGB units, agents in leadership positions, or with responsibilities for operations on the ground, were guilty of a certain complacency and were not taking the requisite measures, which should include repression.
Semichastny mentioned other chinks in the KGB’s armour. Thus, enterprises in the military–industrial complex had intelligence agencies. However, in many important enterprises deemed non-strategic, even though they were formally assigned to KGB officers, no one was actually doing the operative work. They had no secret agents and no reliable informers, with the result that the KGB received no timely information on matters of operational interest. The same was true of many higher education institutions. Furthermore, counter-intelligence units were falling down on what should be a constant preoccupation – i.e. surveillance of suspect individuals after they had served their sentences: foreign agents, members of nationalist and foreign organizations, former Nazis and their collaborators, members of churches and sects. In numerous instances, even the residence of such people was not registered, making surveillance impossible; and many of those on file had been lost sight of.
Semichastny also deplored the lack of cooperation with the MVD and the absence of common plans for action against anti-social elements (who ‘live a parasitic existence’). The KGB had no information about where they gathered, and no measures were in place to deal with them in the event of them getting out of hand. This was one of the reasons why, in several cases, mass disorder had not been prevented, with far-reaching consequences.
These ‘mass disorders’ – a term and reality that were manifestly traumatizing for the KGB chief – had been the subject of KGB inquiries; in particular, to investigate how local chekists had dealt with them. What had emerged was that the latter were unprepared. As soon as the explosion occurred, contact between operational forces and intelligence agents was lost. The forces on the ground did not possess the requisite information and had no way of manipulating the rioters, because there were no agents planted in their ranks.
At this point we might pose a question: would the presence of plants have prevented the disorders? Only if the disorders were organized. But they were not – plants would not have made a difference. The disorders were provoked by the indolence of local leaders. The KGB chief did not raise such questions. His report was followed by a six-page order, beginning with the formula ‘I am therefore ordering that’, and containing thirteen points. Its general philosophy was this: without weakening the fight against foreign agents, it was imperative to strengthen the internal intelligence service and make it a priority issue. To the potentially dangerous elements he had already listed, Semichastny now added those who had been tried in the past for anti-state crimes, émigrés who had returned to the USSR, and any foreigners from capitalist countries. It was also necessary to make better use of technical services and the network of detectives; and to improve political training for secret agents and informers so that they were better equipped to identify people with hostile attitudes and intentions, potential fomenters of mass disorder and perpetrators of terrorist acts, as well as authors of leaflets and other anonymous material spreading provocative rumours and inciting people to riot. In liaison with party bodies, measures should be taken to isolate such individuals. It was also important to explain to cadres that preventive operations by the KGB should not replace or weaken the fight against enemies who had already been identified.
The KGB chief went on to list concrete organizational measures and plans for acquiring technical resources. He once again stressed the need to strengthen intelligence activity in higher education and special technical schools, as well as among the intelligentsia. This set of measures was aimed at preventing, with the party’s help, political errors and dangerous ideological deviations, which could easily lead to anti-Soviet activity. The long order closed on a ‘progressive’ note: make sure that no enemy goes unpunished and that no innocent people are subject to unjustified repression.
The available data still do not allow us to answer this question: How serious were the ‘increase in oppositional sentiment’ and ‘explosions of popular discontent’ referred to by one of our sources (Pikhoia)? We know that in 1962 the KGB flushed out more authors of anonymous letters than in the previous year and that Khrushchev’s policies were breeding widespread discontent. But that is not new. We also know of several mass riots that caught the KGB unawares (Novocherkask was the most dramatic). But we do not know how to interpret these events. In the third part of this work, we shall provide data that make it possible to compare mass riots under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. We shall discover that the system was never threatened, but that ideological hard-liners and the KGB may have had an interest in exaggerating the scale of the problem.
Conservative leaders like Semichastny, supporters of a hard line, painted a picture of a regime under attack: this was their way of thinking. But the kind of disorder he referred to was easily identifiable in advance and controllable, and its perpetrators were incapable of organizing politically. It is more than likely that his analysis was contested within the KGB itself. Semichastny himself may unwittingly have hinted as much when he confided that the recent influx into the KGB of a large squad of Komsomol and party officials (including himself) was not appreciated by older cadres. We know from other sources that these ‘malcontents’ regarded themselves as professionals and found the new arrivals from the Komsomol impertinent, unduly ideological, and incompetent. It therefore seems plausible that there were leaders, taxed with ‘insufficient vigilance’ by Semichastny, who had a different interpretation of the events and preferred different policies. Plenty of hints to this effect are to be found in the memoirs of ex-KGB senior officials. There were intelligent people in the KGB’s ranks, particularly in the agencies responsible for analysing intelligence, and they had no difficulty in seeing that Semichastny’s text lacked not only analytical content but also any self-critical reflection. It made do with a list of regrettable incidents, whose source could be traced to a few guilty individuals, and his response consisted in suggesting technical surveillance and intelligence measures – as well as the ‘bonus’ of 400 additional officers for the whole country.
This hard ideological-repressive line, which for Semichastny was self-explanatory, did not have to emanate from within the KGB itself. It came straight from the Komsomol, where opponents of Khrushchev’s earlier de-Stalinization policies began to show signs of rebellion. We find similar refrains in conservative discourse everywhere – in particular, a tendency to regard ‘immorality’ as a direct prelude to criminality.
For Semichastny, ‘vagrants’ were potential enemies of the state and anyone without regular work was, by definition, about to engage in an anti-Soviet plot. Believers were also potential culprits, not on account of their religious faith but because of their tendency to create organizations, which virtually amounted to a conspiracy in the making. All this explains why Semichastny’s KGB spied on citizens far beyond the remit of its statutes and at the expense of its actual tasks, which would have kept it fully occupied.
The background to the picture painted by the KGB chief suggested that the situation was more tense in the USSR than previously. Khrushchev was losing any sense of direction and vacillating. He had increased prices and work norms at a time of food shortages. Retreating from his initial anti-Stalinist ardour, which had proved too costly politically, he developed a more ‘conservative’ line just at the time when bold new initiatives were needed. (We shall return to these issues in due course.) Nineteen sixty-three was the year in which legislation against political opponents was reinforced by six articles in the criminal code redefining crimes against the state. This initiative led to a certain increase in the number of arrests, albeit a rather small one. From 1966 onwards, we even witness a clear decline in political persecution.
Laws against political critics, targeted at ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’, achieved notoriety during the Cold War when the phenomenon of dissidence emerged. Criminal prosecution of it was based on the following set of articles:
Article 64: flight abroad or refusal to return to the USSR – act of treason.
Article 70: anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.
Article 72: activity by organized groups leading to especially dangerous crimes against the state and participation in anti-Soviet organizations.
Article 142: violation of the law on the separation of Church and state, including in education, punishable by a year’s imprisonment or a fine of up to 50 roubles. In the event of a repeat offence, the maximum sentence was three years’ imprisonment.
Article 190: the circulation or composition of texts defaming the Soviet state and its social system (up to three years’ imprisonment or one year’s mandatory labour, or a minimum fine of 100 roubles).
Article 227: infringement of citizens’ rights under the guise of religious ceremonies (e.g. ‘forced’ baptism), punishable by three-five years’ imprisonment or exile, with or without confiscation of property. Active participation in a group, or active propaganda in favour of committing such acts, could mean up to three years’ imprisonment or exile, or a year’s mandatory labour. Note that if the acts and individuals pursued presented no danger to society, methods of social pressure were applied instead.6
Most cases of a political character were brought for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’, ‘organizational activities’, defamation of the state, or (in lesser numbers) violation of the law on separation of Church and state. According to the KGB, 8,124 trials were held for ‘anti-Soviet manifestations’ during the Khrushchev–Brezhnev–Chernenko periods (1957–85), most of them on the basis of the articles targeting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and the deliberate circulation of calumnies against the state – the two most widely used articles.7
For a period of twenty-eight years, the above figures seem ‘disappointingly’ low. Let us turn to a statistical table drawn up by an authoritative source,8 furnishing data on repression in four four-year periods: 1959–62, 1963–6, 1967–70, 1971–4. The total number of cases is greater than that given by the KGB for the period 1957–85, because it includes all convictions for crimes against the state based on the six articles of the criminal code. For the four periods, the respective totals are as follows: 5,413, 3,251, 2,456, and 2,424. In the first period, an average of 1,354 persons per annum were charged; the figure drops to 606 for the last period. The majority of the accused were pursued for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda: 1,601 in the first period and 348 in the last. Readers will find full details in Appendix 3. But we should also add the category of those who were not charged or convicted, but made subject to ‘prophylactic’ procedures: 58,291 between 1967 and 1970 and 63,108 between 1971 and 1974. The trigger for a ‘prophylactic’ intervention by the KGB was suspicious contacts with foreigners, treasonable intentions or harmful political manifestations. ‘Prophylaxis’ could be carried on in the workplace and take the form of an official warning. In the event of recidivism, cases could be referred to the courts (this occurred in only 150 cases over eight years). Some publications supply different figures, using different timespans and recording the various alleged offences. But Pikhoia’s data seem the most reliable (they doubtless derive from the presidential archive) and also provide information on categories of offence.
We know more about this curious procedure of ‘prophylaxis’ thanks to data from the KGB for the years 1967–72. Its then head was Andropov, and although its reports still bristled with the usual array of crimes despised by the regime, the emphasis on prophylactic work now became more pronounced. It consisted in ‘measures to prevent attempts at organized subversive activities by nationalist, revisionist and other anti-Soviet elements’ and to ‘confine the potentially dangerous groups that tend to appear here and there’.
This method was not without ambiguities and surprises. Already in use under Shelepin, or even earlier, it took its name from medical terminology, implying that anyone entertaining political opinions different from those of the regime was in need of ‘treatment’. Under Andropov it became a broader strategy, which was actually preferred to other means. We do not possess any sources on discussions about the validity of this option, but it is interesting to examine the report presented to the Central Committee by Andropov and the Prosecutor General Rudenko on 11 October 1972, which precisely deals with the way in which prophylaxis operated.9
It is described as being quite widespread. Between 1967 and 1972, 3,096 political groups had been discovered and 13,602 people belonging to them had been subject to prophylaxis. In other words, they had not been arrested, but summoned for an interview with a KGB officer who had explained the erroneous character of their positions or actions. Rather politely, but without concealing the danger they found themselves in, the officer had advised them to desist. In 1967, 2,196 people from 502 groups were ‘interviewed’ in this way; in 1968, 2,870 from 625 groups; in 1969, 3,130 from 733 groups; in 1970, 3,102 from 709 groups; and in 1971, 2,304 from 527 groups. Such groups, which typically comprised only a few people, had been uncovered in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Tula, Vladimir, Omsk, Kazan and Tiumen, as well as the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, and so on.
Thanks to these preventative measures, the number of arrests for anti-Soviet propaganda had fallen. The majority of interviewees left it at that, but others persisted in scheming that might induce them to commit a ‘crime against the state’. In order to strengthen preventative action against people contemplating criminal activity, and to suppress manifestations by anti-social elements more actively, the authors of the report recommended that the KGB should be authorized, if necessary, to issue a written warning to such people requesting them to desist from politically harmful activity and spelling out the consequences if they refused to comply.
Andropov and Rudenko believed that such a course of action might increase the sense of moral responsibility of those so warned. If they did then commit criminal acts, they should be arrested, subject to preliminary investigation, and turned over to the courts for a ‘character assessment’.
The authors appended a draft resolution for the Central Committee and a draft decree for the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet – the standard bureaucratic procedure when submitting a proposal – with a request that they be considered. Unlike the 1962–3 KGB texts deploring ‘mass disorder’, there was no suggestion this time that the system was threatened. The stress on ‘preventative medicine’, which sounded too soft to conservative ears, was quite liberal for a country like the USSR. A sense of imminent danger might certainly induce regression to the Semichastny-style line, but there was no question of it in the immediate future. Yet the longer-term prospects for the system’s health were scarcely reassuring, as our later excursion into economic issues will show.
In one respect there was something troubling about this ‘preventative medicine’. What did ‘character assessment’ actually mean? Among other things, it could lead to the person in question being sent, not to prison, but to a psychiatric clinic. This can seem like a fairly lenient gesture by judges anywhere. But abuses are possible and, in the case of the Soviet Union, there were numerous well-documented instances of the use of psychiatric wards to incarcerate perfectly sane people, whose political positions were identified as paranoid delirium or some such, and who were pumped full of harmful drugs. This was testimony to the ugly and reactionary mentality of some Soviet leaders.
There is an abundant literature on this subject in the West, but I have not as yet come across any satisfactory sources in Russia itself. We still do not know how long such practices persisted and how many people they affected. We do know that there were internal debates about the propriety of such methods, which were not unanimously supported within the government. It became public knowledge that figures from the academic community, and certainly legal scholars, had protested to the Central Committee – particularly in the case of the geneticist Zhores Medvedev, who was released. There is no doubt that the issue was debated within the KGB, by Andropov and people around him, and probably reached the Politburo.10
The actual number of people proceeded against (including by way of prophylaxis) does not in itself alter the fact that the Soviet system was politically retrograde, allowing its opponents’ propaganda to score points. The regime possessed repulsive features that cost it dear in the international arena. But the scope of the repression we are dealing with for the post-Stalinist period – an average of 312 cases a year for twenty-six years for the two main political crimes (and in some cases, reduction or quashing of sentences by a higher court) – constitutes not merely a statistic, but an index: this was no longer Stalinism and it does not warrant description of the USSR as the ‘Evil Empire’, which was common in the West. Apocalyptic invective of this sort makes the Soviet Union seem rather innocent by comparison. Leaders should control their rhetoric, lest it rebounds.
Whatever their precise number, dissidents, of whom the most well-known were Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and later Sharansky, were aggressively followed and spied on by Andropov’s agencies. Compromising materials were confiscated and hostile witnesses sought out and induced to testify, and so on. But we will arrive at a better understanding of the specific approach adopted by Andropov, KGB chief since mid-1967, if we compare it with what ‘normal conservatives’ would have liked to see him do in each particular case. It is true that the latter no longer demanded the death penalty. But they still sought criminal prosecution and sentences that would be heavy enough to remove culprits from the scene, by exiling them to a remote region where they could not be seen or heard. In each instance, Andropov pressed for the adoption of a more clement course – in particular, expulsion from the Soviet Union. Sakharov, for example, was exiled to Gorky – a city whose climate and living conditions did not greatly differ from Moscow’s. The way that the West used each case (indeed, the whole dissident movement) for its own purposes, and the way in which different dissidents responded to the West’s appeal, could not escape the KGB chief or be a matter of indifference to him, quite independently of the fact that excessive ‘clemency’ might bring his career to an abrupt end.
There is an enormous literature in the West on the dissidents. We shall restrict ourselves to a few points and, in the first instance, to the case of Solzhenitsyn, who together with Sakharov was the most famous of them (even though one cannot imagine two more different personalities). When discussing Solzhenitsyn, we shall also say something about the remarkable case of an opponent from within the system – namely, the editor of the literary journal Novyi Mir, the poet Alexander Tvardovsky. Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Tvardovsky constitute a ‘typology’ of political opposition and social criticism, even if they do not cover all its varieties and nuances, from open protest to silent ‘internal emigration’ via rejection through indifference and the pursuit of reforms from within the regime.
The Solzhenitsyn phenomenon has various facets. Viewed from afar (i.e. from abroad), he looked like a giant single-handedly taking on a dictatorial machine. The picture has become more complicated over time. Better knowledge of his personality would explain why he did not have only admirers in Russia. He also had many critics among liberal minded oppositionists, probably because they did not regard him as a democrat. As long as he waged his battle from the inside, foreign observers assumed that he was fighting for democratization of the system: the cause he was defending – greater freedom for intellectuals, and especially writers – would help to expand political freedom for all citizens. However, once he was exiled in the West it soon transpired – as in many other cases – that anti-communism was not automatically a vehicle for democracy. Solzhenitsyn’s struggle was in fact inspired by, and served, a profoundly anti-democratic ideology, combining elements of ‘national-statism’ with archaic traits of the Orthodox religion; it was hostile not only to the ills of the West but also to the very concept of democracy. In short, Solzhenitsyn harboured a deep authoritarianism of his own devising which, if not formulated when he first appeared on the public stage, developed in the course of his struggle – especially at the stage of his life when he sensed that higher powers were summoning him to ‘slay the dragon’, and single-handedly at that, by publishing his Gulag Archipelago.
Thrown in the face of the Soviet regime, a book like The Gulag Archipelago may be regarded as an act of literary-political revenge: condemnation of a system that had betrayed its own ideals and those of humanity by creating hell on earth for millions of people, including Solzhenitsyn. Yet he did not offer the slightest hint that by the time of its publication the Gulag as he had known it no longer existed. To have said as much would have been an act of political honesty and would have required of him a deeper critical analysis of the system, with arguments adapted to post-Stalinist Russia. But he did not offer one; and it was of no significance to him. It was much simpler to attack the Soviet Union for its Stalinist history and pretend that it still persisted – something that also fitted his self-image. For Solzhenitsyn considered himself the depository of higher values inherited from Russia’s distant past, and it was with reference to that past that he sought to suggest remedies for twentieth-century Russia.
There were excellent reasons why his celebrated novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in Tvardovsky’s Novyi Mir, should have been unanimously well received in Russia. Resistance to a degrading penal system was identified with indestructible human values, personified by a simple working man, a peasant, who had the inner strength to resist the degradation inflicted on him by his jailers. But there were equally good reasons why The Gulag Archipelago, written and published when the Gulag had essentially been dismantled, was badly received by many internal critics, who regarded it as an apocalyptic exaggeration doubtless very useful to the USSR’s enemies, but damaging for the democratic struggle against a system which, albeit modernized, remained quite primitive in many ways. Many critics of Soviet authoritarianism could not but reject Solzhenitsyn’s alternative, as well as his pretensions to the status of liberator. A fine writer, but politically inept and with a highly inflated sense of his own importance, Solzhenitsyn lacked sufficient grasp of reality to think in political terms. In this respect, the contrast with such figures as Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev or Andrei Sinyavsky could not be more pronounced.
His autobiography The Calf and the Oak supplies us with some of the keys to his personality – notably his sense of having been selected to accomplish a mystical mission, but also some of the other, less attractive characteristics that prompted him to engage in a vicious (and quite unexpected) attack on Tvardovsky and his colleagues at Novyi Mir. These were the people who had fought so hard for Solzhenitsyn and his work in the Soviet Union, and who launched him onto the national – indeed, international – stage. He accused the editorial board of cowardice, self-glorification, ineptitude and duplicity. The response by Tvardovsky’s former deputy, Vladimir Lakshin – an outstanding literary critic and essayist – was powerful, indignant and devastating.11 In his psychological portrait of Solzhenitsyn, Lakshin highlights the characteristics that helped him to survive the camps. In fact, he writes, Solzhenitsyn had assimilated the lessons of the Gulag only too well. He was a product of the camps, who identified with the zek and had always retained the zek mentality.
Highly relevant, this analysis will only briefly detain us here. The crucial question, already alluded to, is what Solzhenitsyn was fighting for. The Novyi Mir milieu was broadly socialist or social-democratic, and the battles they engaged in, however cautiously, were rooted in that ideology. This, more than anything else, was what provoked Solzhenitsyn’s fury. Lakshin was highly dubious about the programme offered by Solzhenitsyn to his fellow citizens: ‘Judging by his idyllic conception of our pre-revolutionary past, he seems to think that Russia’s only future is … her past.’ This boiled down to advising the Soviet leadership to renounce its ideology in favour of nationalism and Orthodoxy: ‘What emerges from the fog of his verbiage is the triad proposed by Count Uvarov [in the nineteenth century]: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nation.’ Lakshin does not deny Solzhenitsyn’s great talent or his role in fighting evil, but he deplores that fact that he seems incapable of deriving anything positive from it:
I cannot detect any sincerity in his faith, just as I find it hard to believe in Solzhenitsyn as a politician and a thinker – even though he has already acquired all the attributes of a familiar type of politician, with his insatiable urge to anathematize, to reject, and to demand of his supporters nothing less than an oath of total loyalty.
Lakshin’s rejection of Solzhenitsyn’s message becomes ever more bitter and adamant:
I don’t want to be in his paradise; I fear I would find myself in an ideally organized prison camp. I don’t believe in his Christianity because no one with his misanthropic bent and such self-worship can possibly be a Christian. And I am fed up with his hatred and rejection of everything in present-day Russia … But had he not exploded the edifice of untruth? Yes he had. But he has become an infernal machine convinced of his divine mission, which has begun to blow up everything around it. I fear he will blow himself up as well. Indeed, he is already in the process of doing so.
The fury, bitterness and complexity of the battles over the Soviet system, and the drama lived by those engaged in them, are conveyed by these few quotations. No one won; everyone was right; everyone lost. Solzhenitsyn returned to his country liberated from communism and found it ‘in a state of collapse’ (such was the title of his book, published in 1998). The amazing journal Novyi Mir was progressively throttled after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It fought on until the Writers’ Union appointed a new editorial board without consulting Tvardovsky, thereby forcing him to resign (February 1970). He died shortly thereafter, a broken, bitter man who bequeathed a legacy of great poetry and personal nobility.
We have briefly dealt with some aspects of opposition and dissidence, after having mapped out the evolution of forms of political repression in the post-Stalin period. The sound and fury over dissidence at home and especially abroad, and the authorities’ treatment of it, should not be allowed to obscure the systemic trends that were at work in the Soviet Union. It is one thing when a worker cannot leave his job or legally protest against injustice in the workplace; it is quite another when he can do so. A system denying all rights was supplanted by a system of laws, rights and guarantees.
Eliminating the notion of ‘counter-revolutionary crime’, and replacing it by that of ‘especially dangerous crime against the state’, might seem merely cosmetic and utterly irrelevant to those persecuted and prosecuted for such crimes. In this context, biography counts for more than historiography. But for historians, changes involve transition to another stage. We have already signalled the fact that the Soviet leadership had a justifiably poor reputation abroad for political repression. And yet, when a penal system amounting to arbitrary punishment and slave labour is transformed into one where slave labour is abolished, where judicial procedures exist, where prisoners possess certain rights and means of challenging the prison administration, where they can maintain access with the outside world, consult a lawyer, protest legally against their treatment, and when the system recognizes that it has an interest in establishing a modicum of legality in the penal domain – when all this obtains, we are dealing with a different kind of regime. To suffer a term of imprisonment for political opinions produces a legitimate sense of injustice, and the biographical experience eclipses the historical dimension: ‘Why should I care if the punishment would have been worse ten years earlier?’ For their part, however, historians cannot discount what would have happened to prisoners – and their families – ten years earlier.
The secret police, which had hitherto operated completely unchecked – running amok, arresting, torturing, imprisoning and shooting almost at will – was now brought under control: the KGB was no longer empowered to convict and sentence; and its investigations were subject to oversight by divisions within the Prosecutor’s Office at all levels created for the purpose. The Prosecutor General now exercised this power at the very heart of a dictatorial system which, in Stalin’s time, had also massacred a good number of unduly ‘nosy’ prosecutors. From March 1953 (and up until 1991), the department of the Prosecutor’s Office responsible for oversight of KGB investigations had to be informed of any case opened by the secret police and would open its own file at the same time. It was also empowered to re-examine cases in the event of appeals by convicted persons or their relatives. They could then refer the case back to the courts (instances of a reduction in sentence were quite frequent), or initiate an appeals process for the rehabilitation of the convicted person or the amendment of the offence (on the basis of a different article in the criminal code from that of the original trial).12
These facts and trends, like many others, can be submitted to two types of comparison, requiring us to subject each phenomenon to two different interpretations. Thus, in the first instance the Soviet Union can be compared with other countries. Here the inability of the regime to accept society’s increasing political differentiation, its fear and denial of independent opinions (a basic right in a modern civilized society), demonstrates the inferiority of the system, which had found ways of tolerating or professing more than one opinion, but generally of a rather conservative complexion. The Soviet Union paid a heavy political price for this in international opinion. And it may come as a revelation to some to learn that Soviet intellectuals were not the only ones concerned about this: such people were also to be found in the KGB’s ranks.
So it is scarcely surprising if the Soviet authorities resorted to an ‘active-reactive’ policy, introducing or reviving a whole range of laws specifically designed to counter critics who explicitly or implicitly sided with the Western bloc. As regards the system’s ‘inferiority’ (its dictatorial character), the laws against ‘anti-state crimes’ that were supposed to defend it from opponents were in themselves evidence of its failure – testimonium paupertatis. When its rulers wanted critics to be silenced, the various legal guarantees would be set aside and judges, secret services and prosecutors would operate hand in glove.
The second relevant historical comparison is with the country’s own past. The anti-state crime laws were now on the statute books for all to see; and to be prosecuted, people actually had to violate them. The intention to commit a criminal act was no longer sufficient to justify such arrests, which were now illegal. The new version of an extensive criminal code and the strengthening of legal institutions afforded a marked contrast with the past, even if the overall framework remained undemocratic. This aspect of political repression was a subject of continual debate among the leadership, jurists, and the KGB; and it explains the protests from different, mainly academic circles when they judged that the regime was not respecting its own legal rules. Such phenomena were part of the political scene and should be perceived as such.
A further consideration comes to mind in the context of a historical reflection. We have stressed that historical changes were in train in all aspects of social existence, including the very character of the regime. Were it not for such phenomena, which attest to the system’s accommodation to new realities, including in its repressive practices, we would be unable to explain how and why the regime disappeared from the historical stage without firing a shot.
A realistic approach, which does not shy away from unpalatable facts, is bound to admit that democracies which achieve the status of great powers do not always respect rights and are not always very democratic. Countries without a democratic system are not necessarily ‘guilty’ because they lack one. Democracy is not a plant that flourishes everywhere. Historical realities do not necessarily correspond to ideals or propaganda claims. The West knows perfectly well whose human rights are to be promoted and whose can be neglected or even curtailed. Ardour for democratic freedoms burns or dims according to global strategic considerations. Cold War pressures, and the whole complex put in place by the West (with the intelligence services playing a leading role) to identify the slightest crack in the other camp, were not invented by Soviet paranoia. And they did nothing to help the small groups or isolated individuals in the USSR who sought to liberalize the regime.