Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Creative workers produce individualistic works; they are cut off from the positive influence of the collective for forming and training their personality; they develop an egocentric attitude towards reality, one that is based on strictly personal perceptions, personal interest, arrogance, ambition and over-estimation of their importance. 32

Andropov told a Fifth Directorate conference in March 1979 that the KGB could not afford to ignore the activities of a single dissident, however obscure:

Our enemies—and even certain comrades from Communist Parties in Western countries—often bring up this question: “If, as you say, you have constructed a developed socialist society, then do various anti-social phenomena or the negative activities of an insignificant handful of people really represent a threat to it? Are they really capable of shaking the foundations of socialism?”

Of course not, we reply, if one takes each act or politically harmful trick individually. But if one takes them all together, combining their content with their purpose as regards ideological sabotage, then every such act represents a danger. And we cannot ignore it. We simply do not have the right to permit even the smallest miscalculation here, for in the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or indirectly intended to create an opposition which is hostile to our system—to create an underground, to encourage a transition to terrorism and other extreme forms of struggle, and, in the final analysis, to create the conditions for the overthrow of socialism.

The experience of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed that behind the Soviet dissidents were “the main organizers of ideological sabotage—the intelligence services and subversive centers of the imperialist nations. The struggle against them must be decisive, uncompromising, and merciless.” Within the Soviet Union the “twelve-year ideological struggle” of the Fifth Directorate showed that repression worked:

The Check lists have learned to quash undesirable and hostile phenomena in their initial stages. This is confirmed by the facts. Of the 15,580 people who were suppressed last year, only 107 showed themselves to be hostile a second time. 33

In 1980 even Sakharov ceased to be untouchable. While being driven to the Academy of Sciences on January 22 he was arrested, taken to the prosecutor’s office and told that he and his wife were to be exiled to Gorky, a city closed to Westerners: “You are forbidden to go beyond the city limits of Gorky. You’ll be kept under surveillance, and you are forbidden to meet with or contact foreigners or criminal elements [dissidents]. 34The KGB Fifth Directorate organized a series of workplace meetings in Gorky as well as broadcasts on local radio and television in an attempt to ensure that Sakharov and Bonner were reduced to pariah status throughout their exile. To the KGB’s embarrassment, however, Sakharov’s banishment to Gorky was quickly followed by an unconnected period of social unrest which it feared would become known in the West. In May there was a strike at the car factory there. In September and October, after a series of four murders in Gorky, rumors spread rapidly round the city that murders were in fact occurring daily but were being officially concealed. In the ensuing panic schools suspended some of their classes and factories canceled night shifts. There were numerous letters to the authorities pleading for the murderers to be caught. To the Centre’s relief, however, the mayhem in Gorky passed unnoticed in the West. 35

During the early 1980s the dissident movement seemed at its lowest ebb since its emergence in the 1960s. Most leading dissidents were in labor camps or exile. Those who remained at liberty were under constant KGB surveillance. Samizdat literature was reduced to a trickle. During the second half of the 1980s, however, the dissidents found themselves, to their great surprise, rapidly transformed from “anti-social elements” into the prophets of perestroika. The chief agent of this transformation was Mikhail Gorbachev.

“When I became General Secretary,” writes Gorbachev in his Memoirs, “I considered it an important task to rescue Academician Sakharov from exile.” 36The record of his statements in both public and private during his first year as Soviet leader, however, tells a more complicated story. At a Politburo meeting on August 29, 1985, Gorbachev announced that he had received “a letter from a certain Mr. Sakharov, whose name will not be unknown to you. He asks us to allow his wife Bonner to go abroad for medical treatment and visit relatives.” The KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, reported that Sakharov was in poor health: “He has largely lost his position as a political figure and recently we have heard nothing new from him. So perhaps Bonner ought to be allowed abroad for three months.” Chebrikov appeared to believe the propaganda image of Bonner sedulously cultivated by the KGB over the previous decade: “We must not forget that [Sakharov] acts very much under Bonner’s influence… She has one hundred per cent influence over him.” “That’s what Zionism does for you!” joked Gorbachev. Chebrikov added that, with Bonner away, Sakharov might even be willing to reach some sort of accommodation. 37Though he did not tell the Politburo, Chebrikov was doubtless aware from KGB surveillance reports that Sakharov had welcomed Gorbachev’s election as general secretary with the comment: “It looks as if our country’s lucky. We’ve got an intelligent leader!” 38

Aleksandr Yakovlev, the most influential reformer among Gorbachev’s advisers, secretly asked two officials of the Central Committee’s international information department, Andrei Grachev and Nikolai Shishlin, to prepare a case which would persuade the Politburo to end Sakharov’s exile. According to Grachev, both Yakovlev and Gorbachev realized that neither democratic reform nor the normalization of East—West relations could proceed so long as Sakharov’s banishment continued. But “the delicacy of the problem was indicated by Yakovlev’s conspiratorial tone” as he emphasized the need to avoid attracting the attention of the KGB. Grachev and Shishlin had to conduct an elaborate covert operation even to obtain copies of Sakharov’s works without Chebrikov realizing what they were up to. On December 1, 1986 Gorbachev finally considered the time to be ripe to raise the Sakharov question at the Politburo, and gained its approval to end his exile. 39On December 15 two electricians, escorted by a KGB officer, arrived at Sakharov’s Gorky flat and installed a telephone. At 10 a.m. the next day he received a call from Gorbachev. “You [and Bonner] can return to Moscow together,” Gorbachev told him. “You have an apartment there… Go back to your patriotic work!” 40

Though Gorbachev probably had in mind Sakharov’s work at the Academy of Sciences, by far his greatest impact was on the transition to a democratic political system—in changing the Soviet Union from what the Marquis de Custine, a French visitor to Tsarist Russia over a century and a half earlier, had described as a “nation of mutes.” Custine had famously prophesied:

Nations are mute only for a time—sooner or later the day of discussion arises… As soon as speech is restored to this silenced people, one will hear so much dispute that an astonished world will think it has returned to the confusion of Babel. 41

“The day of discussion” arrived in Russia on May 25, 1989, with the opening of the first session of the Congress of People’s Soviets, the product of the first contested elections since 1917. Gorbachev later acknowledged that, of all the deputies elected to the congress, Sakharov was “unquestionably the most outstanding personality.” 42At the time, however, Gorbachev viewed Sakharov with a mixture of irritation and admiration. Sakharov wanted the congress to abolish the one-party state, curb the power of the KGB and establish a directly elected office of president. “If only we had listened more carefully to Andrei Dmitriyevich [Sakharov],” Gorbachev said later, “we might have learned something.” But Gorbachev was not ready to end the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. He could not decide, Sakharov complained, whether he was “the leader of the nomenklatura or the leader of perestroika, ” When the popular weekly Argumenti i Fakti published a poll showing that Sakharov was by far the most popular politician in the country, Gorbachev was so enraged that he threatened to sack the editor. Tension between Sakharov and Gorbachev renewed at the next session of the congress in December 1989. Gorbachev brushed aside an attempt by Sakharov to present him with tens of thousands of telegrams calling for an end to the one-party state. A few days later, Sakharov died suddenly of a heart attack. At his lying in state, Gorbachev and the Politburo stood bare-headed for several minutes in front of the open coffin of the man once described by Andropov as “Public Enemy Number One.” 43