Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The illegals sent to Hungary on PROGRESS operations in 1971 posing as Western visitors were sent primarily to investigate the extent of Zionist influence. They were instructed to report on attitudes to Israel and its trade and economic relations with Hungary, “the links of Hungarian organizations and individuals with Zionist circles” and the situation in the Writers’ Union and other “creative unions” (where Jewish influence was also believed to be strong). The illegals were also told to “identify anti-Semitic attitudes,” presumably in the hope that they would discover popular opposition to the number of Hungarian Jews in high places. According to an alarmist Centre assessment, “Pro-Zionist domination was entrenched in Party, state and public organizations.” 71

DURING 1972 PROGRESS operations were extended to areas of nationalist unrest within the Soviet Union. On October 4, 1972 KGB Directive No. 150/3-10807 instructed the FCD Illegals Directorate to investigate the mood of the population and the activities of Western tourists in the Baltic republics. The Centre’s analysis of the reports received from ARTYOM, FYODOROV, SEVIDOV and VLAS was uniformly depressing. Posing as Western visitors, all four illegals noted inefficient administration; an apathetic workforce “just sitting out the appointed [working] hours, with no pride in their profession;” intolerance between ethnic groups; and widespread drunkenness. The population of the Baltic republics were, however, “well informed about events in the West and in the Soviet Union.” Letters were taken to the West by foreign tourists, frequently written by people anxious to enter into marriages of convenience with Westerners to provide pretexts for emigration: “Many people of either sex marry ethnic Jews, although they themselves are not Jews; their only aim is to leave the USSR.” As frequently occurred with analyses of internal dissidence, the main scapegoats were the Jews. Because they were “conscious of the moral support of Israel and the USA and other Western countries,” they were alleged to be even more idle than the rest of the population—admitting to the illegals that “We work just enough to avoid being sacked.” 72

ALL OVER EASTERN Europe the illegals appear to have given franker, and therefore more depressing, assessments of public attitudes than the KGB liaison offices and residencies, who were under pressure to produce flattering accounts of local reaction to dreary set-piece speeches by Soviet leaders. Even in Bulgaria most of the population had lost their traditional sense of Slav kinship with Soviet Russia. According to one report:

Anti-Sovietism flourishes on Bulgarian television. Though not openly expressed… it finds a fertile breeding ground. The so-called “spots,” featuring Soviet films about the Soviet Union and Soviet life, cause the population to switch off their television sets. 73

When the illegal TANOV was sent on a two-month PROGRESS mission to Bulgaria in 1974, posing as a Western journalist preparing travel brochures, he was advised by the Centre to win the confidence of the Bulgarians he talked to by giving them presents. Everywhere he went he found resentment at the low standard of living and the well-founded conviction that Bulgaria was being pressurized by the Soviet Union to squander resources on Cuba and other profligate foreign friends, as well as on a huge police and state security system. From the Centre’s viewpoint, the only silver lining in TANOV’s bleak report was that Bulgarians were too afraid of the DS, their security service, to grumble publicly. 74

PROBABLY THE MOST depressing intelligence on the Soviet Bloc to reach the Centre during the 1970s came from Czechoslovakia. An illegal reported after a PROGRESS mission in 1976:

The population of the country hates the Russians. The Czechs cannot even make an objective judgment of the skills of Soviet artists performing on tour in Czechoslovakia. The following is a typical comment: “It may be that the artists are performing well professionally, but because they are Russians I can’t bear to watch them.” 75

Lines in plays which were capable of being interpreted as “negative allusions” to the Soviet Union, such as “Love for the enemy is not love” in Gorin’s Till Eulenspiegel, were liable to provoke storms of applause from the audience. 76

In view of the popular rejoicings after the Czechoslovak defeat of the Russian team in the 1969 World Ice Hockey Championships in Stockholm, there was considerable anxiety before the 1979 world championships which were held in Prague. A special commission headed by one of the leading internationalists on the CPCz Presidium, Antonín Kapek, tried to ensure good crowd behavior by introducing a variety of security measures, arranging for ticket allocations to Party organizations and conducting what was called “educational work” among both players and spectators. Most of its efforts proved in vain.

Throughout the championships, which opened at the end of April, Brezhnev received regular reports from both the KGB and the Soviet embassy in Prague. They made dismal reading. Irrespective of who the Russian team was playing, the Czechoslovak spectators cheered the other side and shouted anti-Soviet insults. The United States, Canadian and West German teams, by contrast, all received a warm reception. The KGB reported that the Soviet defeat of the Czechoslovak team was “greeted coldly” even by Štrougal and other ministers in the government box. After the match senior CPCz officials avoided members of the Soviet embassy.

The KGB did, however, succeed in preventing one potentially acute embarrassment. After the Soviet match against East Germany, a Russian player who had taken proscribed stimulants was summoned to a drug test. Had he failed the test, as no doubt he would have done, the Soviet victory might have been annulled. The KGB reported proudly to Brezhnev that, “as a result of measures taken by the [Prague] residency,” the player concerned was let off the drug test. 77

KGB reports from Prague complained that, after the Soviet team won the world championship, the medal ceremony was conducted in English and German with no Russian translation. At the gala reception which followed, the Russians were coldshouldered. The Soviet flag was ripped from the team. Even the CPCz newspaper Rudé právo paid more attention to the Canadian, Swedish and Finnish teams than to the Soviet world champions. 78

The KGB was also outraged at the sometimes visible lack of enthusiasm displayed by Czechoslovak representatives at tedious official celebrations in the Soviet Union. The Centre wrote a damning report on the behavior of Miroslav Vasek, head of a delegation from the Czechoslovak ministry of culture at the Ninth Conference of Ministers of Culture of the Socialist Countries, held in Moscow in July 1978. At the end of this doubtless mind-numbing occasion, Vasek had had the impertinence to leave behind in his room at the Hotel Mir both the souvenir conference folder and a series of probably unreadable volumes solemnly presented to him by the Soviet ministry of culture: Lenin: Revolution and Art, Brezhnev: A Brief Biography, Sixty Jubilee Years: Facts and Figures about the Achievements of Culture and Art in the Soviet Union and Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments in the USSR. The KGB report insisted that these valuable items had been deliberately “abandoned, not simply forgotten.” The Centre was not prepared for this outrage to be passed over. A full report on it was sent both to Andropov and to the KGB liaison office in Prague. 79

For all the KGB’s dissatisfaction with the state of Czechoslovak public opinion and the fractious leadership of the CPCz, the Communist one-party state in Czechoslovakia was under no visible threat at the end of the 1970s. At the beginning of 1977 a series of small dissident groups came together in “Charter 77,” which described itself as “a free, informal, open community of people of different convictions, different faiths and different professions, united by the will to strive, individually and collectively, for the respect of civil and human rights.” Within six months, over 750 courageous individuals had signed the Charter. All endured public vilification and persecution, ranging from attacks on the street to prison sentences and incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. One of the founders, the philosopher Jan Patocka, died after a brutal interrogation by the StB. The power of the StB, the sense of powerlessness induced in the mass of the population by the process of “normalization” and the presence of Soviet troops robbed Charter 77 of any chance of recapturing the mass enthusiasm generated by the promise nine years earlier of “socialism with a human face.” 80