Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

It is easy to see why Djilas’s devastating exposé of the Soviet system as a co-optive oligarchy run by a privileged Party nomenklatura should have been seen as so subversive. In 1963 the twenty-year-old Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was sent to psychiatric hospital for possessing a copy of it. Even for KGB officers The New Class was seen as a potentially dangerous text. When General Oleg Kalugin finally read the book in the KGB library in 1981, twenty-four years after its publication in the West, he found himself secretly agreeing with it. 15Why Nietzsche should have been mentioned in the same breath as Djilas is more puzzling. His call for a “revaluation of all values” so that the life force of the strongest should not be hampered by the weak, though bearing some relation to the actual practice of Stalinism, was ideological anathema. But the works of Nietzsche, unlike those of Djilas, were scarcely likely to subvert the youth of the Soviet Bloc. The author of the KGB report probably knew no more about the great German philosopher than that he was a well-known enemy of Marxism.

The first stirrings of reform in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, however, caused relatively little concern in the Centre. The chief target of the reformers, the aging and truculent Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) leader, Antonín Novotný, was increasingly regarded in Moscow as a neo-Stalinist nuisance rather than as a bulwark against revisionism. In December 1967 Brezhnev made an unscheduled one-day visit to Prague at the request of Novotný, who was under pressure to relinquish the post of First Secretary, which he had hitherto combined with that of president. Brezhnev refused to intervene, telling Novotný bluntly to deal with the problem himself. 16Deprived of Soviet support, Novotný gave way to the reformers.

The election of the 46-year-old Alexander Dubček as the new First Secretary on January 5, 1968 initially aroused no disquiet in either the Kremlin or the Centre. Dubček had spent most of his childhood in the Soviet Union, graduating with honors from the Moscow Higher Party School in 1958, and was condescendingly known within the KGB as “Our Sasha.” When the Czechoslovak attempt to create “Socialism with a human face” began, the FCD Eleventh (East European) Department at first concluded that “Our Sasha” was being cleverly manipulated by “bourgeois elements” in the CPCz. Once it became clear that Dubček was himself one of the moving forces behind the reforms, the Centre felt a sense of personal betrayal. 17

Dubček believed, in retrospect, that Moscow took a secret decision to use the Red Army to crush the Prague Spring little more than two months after he succeeded Novotný:

Under Novotný and his predecessors, the Soviets had been permitted to control the Czechoslovak armed forces and secret police in various ways, which included an implicit “right” to approve key appointments. It was apparently not until mid-March that they realized that their proxies might be fired and replaced without their consent and decided to step in. 18

In reality Brezhnev remained unsure about the wisdom of military intervention until almost the eve of the August invasion. The Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, shared some of Brezhnev’s doubts. 19Both, however, gradually gave way to the hardliners in the Politburo.

The case for military intervention was first put at the Politburo meeting on March 21 by the Ukrainian Party secretary, Petr Yefimovich Shelest, who declared that the fate of the whole “socialist camp” was at stake in the Prague Spring. Though it was “essential to seek out the healthy [pro-Soviet] forces in Czechoslovakia more actively,” he argued that “military measures” would also be necessary. Shelest was vigorously supported by the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, who called for “concrete measures” to prepare for armed intervention. 20Though as yet only a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, Andropov became an increasingly influential voice during the Czechoslovak crisis, willing to challenge Kosygin and other more senior figures who appeared reluctant to use force. 21

As Soviet ambassador in Budapest in 1956, Andropov had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution. His insistence that the threat of counter-revolution had reached a critical stage helped to persuade an initially reluctant Khrushchev to agree to military intervention. 22An admiring junior diplomat in the Soviet embassy later recalled how Andropov had been the first to “see through” the reformist prime minister, Imre Nagy, and had seemed completely in control of events even as Soviet tanks entered Budapest: “He was so calm—even when bullets were flying, when everyone else at the embassy felt like we were in a besieged fortress.” 23As well as being an uncompromising advocate of force, Andropov had demonstrated his mastery of deception, successfully persuading Nagy that the Red Army was being withdrawn while simultaneously plotting his overthrow. When the Hungarian commander-in-chief phoned the Prime Minister’s office early on November 4 to report the Soviet attack, Nagy told him, “Ambassador Andropov is with me and assures me there’s been some mistake and the Soviet government did not order an attack on Hungary. The Ambassador and I are trying to call Moscow.” 24

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, as in Hungary in 1956, Andropov’s strategy was based on a mixture of deception and military might. Among the main instruments of deception during the Prague Spring were KGB illegals, all disguised as Westerners. Their deployment in Czechoslovakia in the first of what were henceforth termed PROGRESS operations marked a major innovation in the KGB’s use of illegals. Hitherto illegals had been sent overwhelmingly to the West rather than the East. Most of those deployed within the Soviet Bloc had been sent on missions (codenamed BAYKAL) either to cultivate Western tourists or to monitor contacts between Soviet citizens and Westerners. In 1966 and 1967, for example, a number of illegals were sent to Bulgarian Black Sea resorts to mingle with the growing number of Western holidaymakers and look for possible recruits. 25The illegal Stanislav Federovich Malotenko visited tourist areas of Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia posing as a Western visitor in order to investigate, inter alia, “how willingly women agents agreed to have intimate relations with foreigners without permission” from the KGB. 26

During the Prague Spring illegals, posing as Western tourists, journalists, business people and students, were for the first time used in significant numbers in a country of the Soviet Bloc for both intelligence collection and active measures. Czechoslovak counter-revolutionaries, the Centre believed, would be much franker in revealing their subversive designs to those they believed Western sympathizers than to their neighbors in eastern Europe. Even within the FCD the PROGRESS operation in Czechoslovakia was known only to a small circle of senior officers. Initially the PROGRESS file was kept in the office of the head of Directorate S (Illegals), General Anatoli Ivanovich Lazarev, though, as operations in Czechoslovakia expanded, the group within the directorate who were privy to the secret also widened. 27

Of the first twenty illegals selected by the Centre for PROGRESS operations in Czechoslovakia during 1968, 28at least five (GROMOV, SADKO, SEVIDOV, VLADIMIR and VLAS) 29and probably another two (GURYEV and YEVDOKIMOV) 30posed as West Germans. There were also three bogus Austrians (ARTYOMOVA, DIM and VIKTOR) 31and three bogus Britons (BELYAKOV, USKOV and VALYA), 32two fictitious Swiss (ALLA 33and SEP 34), one Lebanese (YEFRAT 35) and one Mexican (ROY 36). 37Probably in March, Andropov ordered that by May 12 at least fifteen of the illegals should be deployed in Czechoslovakia—more than had ever been despatched to any Western country in so short a period of time. Each was given a monthly allowance of 300 dollars as well as travel expenses and enough money to rent an apartment. 38