Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Andropov, however, did not persuade a majority of the Politburo. Brezhnev showed more sympathy for the contrary views of his crony, Nikolai Shchelokov, the interior minister, who argued in the autumn of 1971 that Solzhenitsyn needed to be won over, not persecuted: “One of the higher-ups needs to sit down and talk with him, to remove the bitter taste that persecution has, no doubt, left in his mouth.” Brezhnev underlined—apparently approvingly—a series of comments in a memorandum by Shchelokov which must have been anathema to Andropov:

In resolving the Solzhenitsyn question we must analyze past mistakes made in dealing with people in the arts… The “Solzhenitsyn Problem” was created by literary administrators who should have known better… In this case what needs to be done is not to execute our enemies publicly but smother them with embraces. 25

Henceforth Shchelokov, so far as Andropov was concerned, was a marked man. After Brezhnev’s death he was charged by Andropov with corruption but committed suicide before going on trial. 26

In the autumn of 1971, however, Andropov knew better than to attack openly opinions approved by Brezhnev. But he was not prepared to give up. In March 1972 Andropov made a further attempt to persuade the Politburo to expel Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union, providing further “indisputable” evidence that “he was deliberately and irrevocably embarked on the path of struggle with the Soviet government and will wage this struggle regardless of everything.” Though agreeing that Solzhenitsyn was “a true degenerate,” the Politburo—doubtless to Andropov’s extreme displeasure—was still not willing to send him into exile. 27

THE OTHER DISSIDENT who most obsessed Andropov from the early 1970s onwards was the nuclear physicist and Academician Andrei Sakharov, codenamed ASKET (“Ascetic”) by the KGB, “father” of the Soviet H-bomb and three times Hero of Socialist Labor. Though out of favor with the scientific establishment, he retained an official dacha in Zhukovka as well as his flat in Moscow. Late in 1970, Sakharov and two fellow physicists, Valeri Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, founded the Committee for Human Rights and persuaded Solzhenitsyn to become a corresponding (though not very active) member. 28Like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov’s international stature made it difficult for the KGB to persecute him as freely as less well-known dissidents. His KGB file makes the absurd claim that Sakharov “used his authority to influence the decisions of the judiciary and create a hullabaloo around the trials of anti-social elements” such as Vladimir Bukovsky, put on trial in January 1972 for compiling evidence about the committal of himself and other dissidents to mental hospitals. 29The real burden of the KGB complaint was that Sakharov and his committee had some modest success in limiting, though not in preventing, the abuse of the legal process.

In October 1972 the 37-year-old illegal Georgi Ivanovich Kotlyar, codenamed BERTRAND, succeeded in winning Sakharov’s confidence and establishing what the Centre considered a “trusted relationship” with him and his wife Elena Bonner. Kotlyar had been born in France and succeeded in passing himself off as one “Alain Boucaut,” a French archaeologist who had been working in Mexico for the past decade. His success in maintaining his cover and providing intelligence on Sakharov and Bonner won him high praise from both Filipp Denisovich Bobkov, head of the Fifth Directorate, and his deputy, Nikashin. 30Attempts were also made to plant agents on Solzhenitsyn, among them the pianist Miroka Kokornaya (transparently codenamed MIROKA), who regularly went on concert tours abroad. A KGB operation in 1973 to persuade Solzhenitsyn to use MIROKA as a courier to the West failed. 31

In the summer of 1973 the KGB at last succeeded in staging what it considered a successful show trial, during which the defendants incriminated themselves in the best Stalinist tradition, and other dissidents were duly demoralized. The victims of this traditional travesty of Soviet justice were Pyotr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, leading members of the group which produced the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events. Yakir was the son of an army commander shot during the Great Terror, and had spent much of his life in prison. At the time of his arrest in June 1972, he was known by other dissidents to be close to breaking point and drinking heavily. After the trial of Bukovsky, the KGB had overheard him saying, “I can’t take it any more. I couldn’t face another sentence myself—I haven’t the strength.” Before his arrest, Yakir circulated a statement saying that any confession extracted from him in jail should be disregarded. 32Though exhausted by many years of persecution, Yakir somehow found the strength to resist during the early stages of his interrogation before finally breaking under prolonged pressure. In the brutally triumphant words of his chief interrogator, “He began to assess his actions and the contents of the anti-Soviet literature which he had distributed fairly objectively and politically correctly.” Yakir was finally persuaded to put his signature to a formulaic KGB-dictated confession:

In the course of the investigation, I have come to understand that I committed a whole series of criminal acts: I have signed letters with a defamatory content which asserted that in our country people are sentenced for their beliefs; I have given a number of interviews to foreign correspondents which contained slanderous assertions; I kept, duplicated and distributed documents of similar content; and I frequently passed tendentious information to foreign correspondents who used this for propaganda purposes.

Having grasped the seriousness of what I have done, I sincerely repent. Not only will I not do this again in the future, but I shall do my utmost to influence people who are close to me and to demonstrate the error of their positions. 33

The breaking of Krasin under interrogation caused much greater surprise in dissident circles than that of Yakir. According to his KGB file, “[Krasin] stood out because of the particularly hostile attitude to the Soviet system which he had adopted in his youth, his stubbornness and consistency in his work, and his readiness to see things through to the end, regardless of the obstacles.” He was co-author of the samizdat Legal Instructions, which advised all those summoned for interrogation by the KGB to refuse to answer questions. On seven occasions between 1968 and 1972 when he himself had been questioned by the KGB, Krasin had faithfully followed his own advice. After prolonged surveillance, however, the Fifth Directorate concluded that a “polite and calm” interrogation with “absolutely no sneering,” combined with a sympathetic stoolpigeon in his cell, would eventually wear down his resistance. Krasin was known to be willing to disagree with other dissidents, and during 1971-2 had become increasingly despondent about their prospects. There were, he said, “few defenders at the final barricades.” 34

As expected, Krasin began his lengthy interrogation in defiant mood. When his interrogator, Lieutenant-Colonel Pavel Aleksandrovsky, asked, “Why do you refuse to say what you have been doing if you do not consider it criminal?” Krasin replied, “I do not consider it criminal, but you do. Therefore, if I were to tell you, I would be giving you incriminating material which I do not want to do.” The first breach in Krasin’s defenses was made by the KGB agent in his cell, who pretended that he had been arrested for dealing in foreign currency and appealed for Krasin’s advice on how to face the charges against him. Instead of simply telling him not to answer questions, Krasin showed him how to frame the best defense during his interrogation. Full of praise for Krasin’s knowledge of the criminal code, the stoolpigeon then urged him to follow his own advice and challenge the charges against him: