Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The trial of Yakir and Krasin opened in Moscow on August 27, 1973. Solzhenitsyn dismissed it in advance as “a dismal repetition of the clumsy Stalin-Vyshinsky farces:”

In the 1930s… these farces, despite the primitive stagecraft, the smeared grease-paint, the loudness of the prompter, were still a great success with “thinking people” among Western intellectuals… But if no [foreign] correspondents are to be admitted to the trial, it means that it has been pitched two grades lower still.

Western correspondents were, however, invited to a KGB press conference at which Yakir and Krasin paraded their guilt and remorse in front of television cameras. 39The transformation of Krasin seemed so remarkable that some dissidents wrongly suspected he had been a KGB agent all along. 40

In the Centre, the show trial was regarded as a triumph. Basking in the approval of their superiors, the case officers of Yakir and Krasin wrote a self-congratulatory article in the classified in-house quarterly, KGB Sbornik, explaining how “the detailed tactics worked out for the interrogation of the accused” and the “deeply thought-out cultivation within the [prison] cell” by well-trained stoolpigeons had combined to “determine the positive results which were obtained at the hearing of the case.” 41

SAKHAROV AND SOLZHENITSYN, however, still remained beyond the punitive arm of the KGB. While the trial of Yakir and Krasin was in progress they raised the stakes in their campaign by publicly criticizing the concessions made by the United States to the Soviet Union in the name of East-West détente. On September 17 Sakharov addressed a public appeal to the US Congress, asking it to support the Jackson-Vanik amendment opposing most-favored nation status for the USSR until it ended restrictions on emigration:

The amendment does not represent interference in the internal affairs of socialist countries, but simply a defense of international law, without which there can be no mutual trust. 42

Sakharov’s letter, printed in capital letters in the Washington Post, was credited with persuading Congress to pass the amendment, despite the opposition of the Nixon administration.

The Politburo reacted with predictable fury. Brezhnev absurdly denounced Sakharov’s letter as “not just an anti-State and anti-Soviet deed, but a Trotskyist deed.” They had, he declared, tolerated the behavior of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov for far too long: “We should have stopped them right away.” Andropov, now a full (voting) member of the Politburo, sought to maintain the collective outrage of his colleagues by a series of slanted intelligence reports. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, he declared, had “stepped up the peddling of their services to reactionary imperialist, and particularly Zionist, circles,” and were being manipulated by, or actually colluding with, Western intelligence agencies. On February 7, 1974 Andropov submitted to the Politburo a further draft decree to deprive Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and expel him from the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, he sent an alarmist personal letter to Brezhnev, implying that there would be serious discontent among senior Party and Military figures unless the decree was approved:

…I think it impossible, despite our desire not to harm international relations, to delay the solution of the Solzhenitsyn problem any longer, because it could have extremely unpleasant consequences for us inside the country.

This time the KGB pressure on Brezhnev and his colleagues was successful. On February 11 the Politburo formally approved “the proposals of Comrade Andropov.” 43Three days later, Solzhenitsyn was forcibly put on board an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt by KGB officers. As the plane took off, he crossed himself and bowed to the homeland he might never see again. 44

From Frankfurt Solzhenitsyn moved on to Zurich, where he rented a house in the city center. Paradoxically it was easier for the KGB to penetrate his entourage in Switzerland than in Russia. Abroad, among strangers, Solzhenitsyn found it far more difficult than at home to distinguish friend from foe. The KGB was quick to take advantage of his sympathy for the survivors of the Prague Spring by using StB agents in the Czech émigré community to win his confidence. The first to do so was the Russian-born StB officer Valentina Holubová. 45Though the files noted by Mitrokhin do not record her first meeting with Solzhenitsyn, she seems to have arrived on his doorstep on his first day in Zurich, claiming to be from Ryazan (where he had been a schoolteacher) and bearing a bouquet of roses and lilac. She gave him a note containing an old Ryazan proverb and said the lilac was to remind him of the lilac that bloomed in Ryazan each spring. 46Within a few weeks, at most, Holubová and her husband, Dr. František Holub (also an StB agent), had succeeded in ensconcing themselves as Solzhenitsyn’s unofficial advisers in Zurich, with Valentina also acting as his part-time secretary and spokeswoman. 47

In March 1974 the Holubs took Solzhenitsyn to see an exhibition of paintings by the artist Lucia Radova at a gallery in the village of Pfúffikon, not far from Zurich, owned by the Czech émigré Oskar Krause. When Krause told him that he too had been a political prisoner, imprisoned in Czech jails, Solzhenitsyn embraced him and burst into tears. The Holubs then introduced him to the young Czech writer Tomáš Řezáč (codenamed REPO), like themselves an StB officer who had penetrated the émigré community posing as a dissident. Solzhenitsyn later agreed that Dr. Holub should edit the work of the seven translators producing a Czech edition of The Gulag Archipelago, while Řezáč would translate the long narrative poem, Prussian Nights, which Solzhenitsyn had written in prison in 1949. 48

Solzhenitsyn thus became the latest in a long line of leading Soviet émigrées, stretching back to the inter-war White Guard and Trotskyist leaders, who unwittingly included Soviet agents among their most trusted advisers. 49The thought of Holub and Řezáč translating the works of the great heretic was bound to give the Centre some pause for thought. But

It was deemed to be operationally justified for REPO to translate all Solzhenitsyn’s materials, without declining to translate various anti-Soviet texts or attempting to tone them down, since he might otherwise lose Solzhenitsyn’s confidence and the texts would in any case be translated by someone else.

Because of the importance of the PAUK (Solzhenitsyn) case, REPO’s instructions were personally drawn up, doubtless in consultation with the KGB, by the head of StB foreign intelligence, Hladik, and his deputy, Dovin. 50

Intelligence from the Holubs and Řezáč allowed the KGB to monitor Solzhenitsyn’s contacts with supporters inside the Soviet Union as well as his activities in the West. Andropov reported to the Politburo on May 2:

[Solzhenitsyn] is hatching plans to conduct subversive activity against the USSR. Residing in Zurich, he has established, in particular, contacts with representatives of the Czechoslovak émigrés in Switzerland, with the assistance of whom he intends to arrange the illegal delivery of his writings and other material of an anti-Soviet nature to the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn stated in a discussion with the Czechoslovak émigrés that his future activities would be subordinate primarily to the interests of the “opposition inside the USSR.”

Following usual practice, Andropov did not identify his sources by name; in particular he did not reveal to the Politburo that the main émigrés with whom Solzhenitsyn had had these conversations were StB agents. On July 24 he reported that Solzhenitsyn had set up a “Russian Social Fund,” using royalties from his books, to “assist the families of political prisoners detained in Soviet camps.” As on other occasions, Andropov also gave a woefully distorted assessment of Solzhenitsyn’s influence in exile. “Available information,” he informed the Politburo, “…indicates that after Solzhenitsyn’s deportation abroad, interest in him in the West is steadily on the decline.” At that very moment, volume I of The Gulag Archipelago was a runaway bestseller, with a print run of 2 million paperbacks in the USA alone. 51KGB assessments on Solzhenitsyn, as on some other subjects, were distorted at two levels. First, residencies in varying degrees told the Centre what it wanted to hear. Secondly, Andropov told the Politburo what he wanted it to hear—which in the summer of 1974 emphasized the correctness of the decision to send Solzhenitsyn into exile but did not include the phenomenal Western sales figures of his books.