Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The enemy’s special services and ideological centers are applying serious efforts to invigorate and extend the hostile activity of anti-Soviet elements on the territory of the Soviet Union. Especially notable is the effort of Western special services to organize an association of persons opposing the existing state and social order in our country… The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov, Ginzburg and others once and for all, on the basis of existing law… 25

Orlov and Ginzburg were arrested in February 1977. A month later it was the turn of the leading Jewish human rights activist and “refusenik” Anatoli Shcharansky. For the next year all three withstood the best efforts of teams of KGB interrogators to cajole and bully them into cooperating in their own show trials. On December 29, 1977 Orlov’s chief investigator, Captain Yakovlev, made what amounted to a formal admission of failure. After Yakovlev showed him the official charge sheet, Orlov took notes of it but “refused to sign it, saying that he wholly rejected the charge.” The record of the interrogation on that day (reproduced as an appendix to this chapter) shows Orlov, ten months after his arrest, obviously getting the better of his interrogator. When asked whether he understood the charge against him, Orlov replied that it was not clear to him, and that he had been shown no “evidence that my actions had the intention of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime.” He put in writing a complaint that “[i]t has never been explained to me precisely and unambiguously what is meant by the words ‘undermining,’ ‘weakening,’ and even ‘Soviet regime.’” Interrogator Yakovlev offered no explanation. Orlov went on to complain against the manner of Yakovlev’s interrogation: “You first make an assertion of your own, and then ask whether this is a fact. This is the typical way of putting a leading question.” Orlov claimed that the documents he had circulated on behalf of the Helsinki Watch Group had had a beneficial effect. They had been studied by “progressive forces in the West,” such as the French and Italian Communist parties, “whose criticism has clearly improved certain aspects of human rights in the USSR.” Fewer people were being sent to prison camps or being mistreated in psychiatric hospitals, and fewer children from unregistered Christian sects were being taken away from their parents. Yakovlev, as usual, had no answer. Orlov made a written protest that his previous request for Yakovlev to be taken off his case had been turned down. 26

The most striking feature of Orlov’s trial in May 1978, apart from his own courageous defiance, was the pathetic spectacle of fifteen prosecution witnesses insisting that Soviet citizens enjoyed all the freedoms guaranteed by the Helsinki Accords. For campaigning for those very freedoms, Orlov was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, followed by five in exile.

Ginzburg, who was tried two months later, knew that, as a re-offender, he was liable to a ten-year sentence. But, to his surprise:

They played a little game with me. The prosecution told the court that he was only asking for eight years, because I had helped the police in the Shcharansky case. It was a lie, but it was a good piece of character assassination for them to use in their propaganda and to make life hard for me in the camps. 27

Shcharansky’s trial, held at the same time as Ginzburg’s, had moments of farce as well as brutality. At one point a witness named Platonov was asked, “What can you tell us about the case of Shcharansky?” “Nothing,” he replied. “I’m not familiar with the case.” But Ginzburg, he declared, had behaved very badly. It quickly became clear that Platonov had turned up in the wrong court. The trial ended, however, in a great moral victory for Shcharansky. He declared in his closing address:

I am proud that I came to know and work with such people as Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and Aleksandr Ginzburg, who are carrying on the best traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. But most of all, I feel part of a marvelous historical process—the process of the national revival of Soviet Jewry and its return to the homeland, to Israel.

For two thousand years the Jewish people, my people, have been dispersed all over the world and seemingly deprived of any hope of returning. But still, each year Jews have stubbornly, and apparently without reason, said to each other, “Next year in Jerusalem!” And today, when I am further than ever from my dream, from my people and from my Avital [Shcharansky’s wife], and when many difficult years of prisons and camps lie ahead of me, I say to my wife and to my people, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

And to the court, which has only to read a sentence that was prepared long ago—to you I have nothing to say. 28

The KGB’s main fear in the aftermath of the show trials of Orlov, Ginzburg and Shcharansky was that Orlov, like Sakharov three years earlier, would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The KGB residency in Norway was ordered to give the highest priority to an active measures campaign, personally overseen by Andropov himself, designed to discredit Orlov and ensure that his candidacy failed. 29On October 27, 1978 the Oslo resident, Leonid Alekseyevich Makarov (codenamed SEDOV), rang Suslov, the Politburo’s leading ideologist, in the middle of the night to pass on the good news that the prize had gone instead to the Egyptian and Israeli leaders Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Makarov succeeded in claiming more of the credit than he deserved for what was regarded by the KGB as a famous victory. In a notably immodest telegram to the Centre, he reported that the residency had successfully “carried out complex active measures through reliable assets in order to disrupt the anti-Soviet operation” to award the prize to Orlov. It claimed to have brought pressure to bear during conversations with a series of Norwegian political leaders, chief among them Knut Frydenlund, the foreign minister, Reiulf Steen, chairman of the Norwegian Labor Party and of the Parliamentary Foreign Policy Committee, Tor Halvorsen, chairman of the Central Federation of Trade Unions and of the Board of the Norway—USSR Friendship Society, and Trygve Bratteli, a former prime minister and chairman of the Parliamentary Labor Party Group:

In the course of these conversations, the provocative nature and anti-Soviet bias of the agitation around Yuri Orlov was emphasized… It was pointed out that the political leadership of Norway needed to show proper responsibility for the state and development of bilateral relations between our countries. The conversations produced the desired response in influential circles of the Norwegian Labor Party. The work that we did exerted useful influence on the foreign policy leadership of Norway and, in our opinion, made it possible for the residency’s task to be carried out—to prevent the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yuri Orlov and his Committee. 30

The Centre gave Makarov as much credit as he gave himself. Viktor Fedorovich Grushko, head of the FCD Third Department (whose responsibilities included Scandinavia), telegraphed congratulations on “the determination and operational effectiveness which the residency has shown while carrying out this work.” 31

ANDROPOV REMAINED AS obsessed with ideological subversion during his final years as KGB chairman as he had been at the outset. The war against subversion extended even to abstract painting. A joint report in 1979 by the KGB Moscow Directorate and the Moscow department of the Fifth Directorate proudly reported that, over the past two years, “it proved possible to use agents to prevent seven attempts by avant-garde artists to make provocative arrangements to show their pictures.” Four “leaders of the avant-garde artists” had been recruited as agents. Surveillance of the “creative intelligentsia” was an important part of “the task of the [KGB] agencies to protect the intelligentsia from the influence of bourgeois ideology”: