Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Sakharov’s premature death was in all likelihood partly due to the strain of his and Bonner’s earlier persecution, and to the lack of proper medical treatment during their Gorky exile. “The totalitarian system probably killed him,” said the democratic journalist Vitali Korotich. “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow.” 44In 1990 the text of a long letter (previously available only in samizdat) calling for democratic political change addressed by Sakharov and two other dissidents to the Soviet leadership twenty years earlier was exhumed from the CPSU archives and published for the first time. Since Gorbachev had become general secretary, almost every issue raised in the “subversive” appeal of 1970 had been placed on the political agenda and acted upon. 45Simultaneously, Solzhenitsyn’s works, banned from bookshops and library shelves since 1974, had become bestsellers.

The dissidents were not the main agent for change in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. As at other celebrated turning points in modern Russian history—among them the turn to the West in the early eighteenth century, the end of feudalism in 1861, collectivization and crash industrialization after 1929—change came chiefly from the top. The Soviet system was transformed, and ultimately destroyed, by Gorbachev’s courageous but misguided attempt to reform the unreformable. The dissidents, however, played a major role in changing the political consciousness of the Soviet élite. One KGB report of the mid-1970s quotes Solzhenitsyn as saying that the main task of the dissident movement was “a moral and ideological preparation of the Russian intelligentsia to oppose the Soviet regime.” 46Against all the odds, the dissidents largely succeeded in fulfilling that mission. A small and persecuted minority, powerless save for the strength and courage of its convictions, only feebly supported by the West, defeated a determined campaign to silence them by the world’s largest and most powerful security and intelligence service. Nowhere in the world during the final third of the twentieth century did a radical intelligentsia make a greater contribution to the destruction of an anti-democratic political system.

The Interrogation of Yuri Orlov on December 29, 1977 According to official announcements in Moscow, Fifth Directorate interrogation records of the interrogation of dissidents have been destroyed. Mitrokhin’s copy may therefore be the only surviving transcript of Orlov’s interrogation. A copy was sent by the Fifth Directorate to the FCD to form part of the dossier being used to prepare active measures to discredit Orlov in the West and prevent him receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Mitrokhin’s growing sympathy for the dissidents is reflected in the fact that he copied the whole of this and some other documents dealing with their persecution, rather than following his usual practice of copying extracts, making notes or writing précis.

The interrogation was conducted by Captain Yakovlev, senior investigator for especially important cases with the investigation department of the KGB Directorate for Moscow and Moscow Oblast under the USSR Council of Ministers, assisted by Assistant Procurator Chistyakov of Moscow City:

QUESTION: You have been shown the resolution dated December 29, 1977 summoning you as the accused in criminal case No. 474, charged with committing a crime specified in Section 1 of Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code.

Do you understand the nature of the charge?

ORLOV: No, it is not clear to me. I have not been shown evidence that my actions had the intention of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime, or any other evidence; instead of which, as I see it, the charge presented to me contains emotional phrases which obscure the nature of the case.

QUESTION: Do you admit you are guilty of the charge?

ORLOV: No, I do not. I do not see any proof of my guilt; I do not feel guilty, in my own conscience.

QUESTION: Do you admit the facts of preparing, duplicating and disseminating the documents specified in the charge against you?

ORLOV: Since these documents are qualified as deliberately slanderous fabrications, uttered with the intention of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime, I refuse to answer your question.

QUESTION: The investigation has established that you were a direct participant in the preparation, duplication and dissemination of the documents cited in the charge, and in a number of cases you were their author. The contents of these documents, as the materials of the case show, are of a slanderous nature, defaming the Soviet State and social order. What can you say about that?

ORLOV: In answer to that question, I should like to say the same thing as I have said in answer to the previous question, namely that I do not see any evidence, and do not feel guilty in my own conscience.

QUESTION: It has also been established that you acted deliberately to undermine and weaken the Soviet regime. What do you have to say about that?

ORLOV: I do not believe that this has been established. I rely on my own inner conviction, on my experience and on my thoughts.

QUESTION: Do you believe that the imperialist States and their agencies, to which you addressed the majority of the documents which incriminate you, are not interested in weakening and undermining the Soviet regime but in strengthening it? Is that how we must interpret you?

ORLOV: I protest against such a manner of putting questions, when 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. The very problem set out in your positive assertion derives from the interpretation of general aspects of détente, or, on the contrary, of the Cold War, the mutual interest of the peoples in making common progress and, in particular, progress in the field of human rights or, on the other hand, their mutual interest in internal troubles arising because of the lack of such progress. The problem also derives from the interpretation of what international organizations one may turn to, and to which ones one may not (or, perhaps, one must not approach any international organizations?). It derives from the interpretation of whether international obligations on human rights may be verified at an international level; whether they can be criticized by the international public; when such criticism is permissible, and when it becomes interference in internal affairs; does in general criticism of breaches of human rights in a particular society undermine its structure or improve it; which human rights are organically linked with the regime, and which are not; and the same applies to breaches of the rights. Besides, as is well known, my documents have been used in the West by those progressive forces whose criticism has clearly improved certain aspects of human rights in the USSR. I have in mind statements by Communists in France, Italy and probably others, and also criticism from various left-wingers, their meetings and so forth, and also statements by representatives of Workers’ Parties, Socialists and Social Democrats. One must bear in mind that criticism from hostile forces can be useful for the regime; for example, criticism of capitalism by the USSR has undoubtedly strengthened that system and prolonged its existence. However, I did not appeal to hostile forces, but either to the international pubic as a whole, or to left-wingers, including Communists, or to members of governments irrespective of regime, if it was a question of formal international obligations. All criticism, both internal and external, has led to the following shifts in the field of human rights in the USSR: as the result of the 1977 reforms, the number of people imprisoned in the camps is actually falling; a clause has been introduced in the constitution concerning the unacceptability of persecution for criticism, the very persecution which was one of the reasons why Soviet citizens appealed to Western public opinion; the number of psychiatric repressions has been reduced; there has been a clear reduction, and possibly a total stop, to instances of children being virtually taken away from members of certain religious communities following decisions by the judicial authorities, and so forth. For these reasons, I can consider that your question has no direct relevance to the case.