Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Research on the Soviet era has already undermined the common assumption of a basic symmetry between the role of intelligence in East and West. The Cheka and its successors were central to the functioning of the Soviet system in ways that intelligence communities never were to the government of Western states. The great nineteenth-century dissident Aleksandr Herzen, perhaps the first real Russian socialist, said that what he feared for the twentieth century was “Genghis Khan with a telegraph”—a traditional despot with at his command all the power of the modern state. With Stalin’s Russia, Herzen’s nightmare became reality. But the power of the Stalinist state was, as George Orwell realized, in large part a secret power. The construction and survival of the world’s first one-party state in Russia and its “near abroad” depended on the creation after the October Revolution of an unprecedented system of surveillance able to monitor and suppress all forms of dissent. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell depicts a state built on almost total surveillance:

There was… no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. 5

Millions in Stalin’s Russia felt almost as closely watched as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Because of the ubiquity of NKVD informers,” writes historian Geoffrey Hosking, “…many people had no one whom they trusted completely.” 6

The foundations of Stalin’s surveillance state were laid by Lenin, the Cheka’s most ardent supporter within the Bolshevik leadership, who dismissed protests at its brutality as wimpish “wailing.” With Lenin’s personal encouragement, the Cheka gradually permeated every aspect of life under the Soviet regime. 7When, for example, Lenin sought to stamp out celebration of the Russian Christmas, it was to the Cheka that he turned. “All Chekists,” he instructed on December 25, 1919, “have to be on the alert to shoot anyone who doesn’t turn up to work because of ‘Nikola’ [St. Nicholas’s Day].” 8Stalin used the Cheka’s successors, the OGPU and the NKVD, to carry through the greatest peacetime persecution in European history, whose victims included a majority of the Party leadership, of the high command and even of the commissars of state security responsible for implementing the Great Terror. Among Western observers of the Terror, unable to comprehend that such persecution was possible in an apparently civilized society, there were some textbook cases of cognitive dissonance. The American ambassador, Joseph Davies, informed Washington that the show trials had provided “proof beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.” The historian Sir Bernard Pares, widely regarded as the leading British expert of his generation on all things Russian, wrote as late as 1962, “Nearly all [those condemned at the trials] admitted having conspired against the life of Stalin and others, and on this point it is not necessary to doubt them.” 9

After the Second World War the NKVD and its successor, the MGB, played a central role in the creation of the new Soviet empire in eastern and central Europe. Their role, according to a sanctimonious Soviet official history, was to “help the people of liberated countries in establishing and strengthening a free domestic form of government” 10—in other words, to construct a series of obedient one-party states along the Soviet Union’s western borders. Throughout the Soviet Bloc, security and intelligence services, newly created in the image of the MGB, played a crucial part in the establishment of Stalinist regimes. Informers in the German Democratic Republic were seven times more numerous even than in Nazi Germany. As in East Germany, many of the leaders of the new one-party states were not merely loyal Stalinists but also former Soviet agents.

Though post-Stalinist enemies of the people were downgraded by the KGB to the category of dissidents and subjected to less homicidal methods of repression, the campaign against them remained uncompromising. In order to understand the workings of the Soviet state, much more detailed research is needed on the KGB’s methods of social control. Mitrokhin’s notes on documents from internal KGB directorates which found their way into FCD files illustrate the enormous wealth of highly classified material on the functioning of the Soviet system which still remains hidden in the archives of today’s Russian security service, the FSB.

Among the KGB’s innovations during the Cold War was the punitive use of psychiatry against ideological subversion. The KGB recruited a series of psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry and other institutes who were instructed to diagnose political dissidents as cases of “paranoiac schizophrenia,” thus condemning them to indefinite incarceration in mental hospitals where they could be drugged and tranquilized. One “plan of agent operational measures” implemented late in 1975 involved the use of four agents (KRAYEVSKY, PETROV, PROFESSOR and VAYKIN) and six co-optees (BEA, LDR, MGV, MZN, NRA and SAB) in the psychiatric profession. 11There were, almost certainly, many more. Remarkably, most incarcerated dissidents retained their sanity, even after treatment by KGB psychiatrists. An examination of twenty-seven of them in 1977-8 by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Voloshanovich, a doctor at the Dolgoprudnaya psychiatric hospital, concluded that none was suffering from any psychological disorder. 12In 1983 Soviet psychiatrists resigned from the World Psychiatric Association, just in time to avoid expulsion for systematic abuse of their patients.

The KGB’s most widely used methods of social control were the simpler, though immensely labor-intensive, techniques of ubiquitous surveillance and intimidation. Andropov’s first-hand experience as ambassador in Budapest in 1956, reinforced by the Czechoslovak crisis during his first year as KGB chairman, convinced him that the KGB could not afford to overlook a single instance of ideological subversion. “Every such act,” he insisted, “represents a danger.” 13None was too trivial to attract the attention of the KGB. The effort and resources employed to track down each and every author of an anonymous letter or seditious graffito criticizing the Soviet system frequently exceeded those devoted in the West to a major murder enquiry.

Among the many successful operations against such authors which were celebrated in the classified in-house journal KGB Sbornik was the hunt for a subversive codenamed KHUDOZHNIK (“Artist”), who in July 1971 began sending anonymous letters attacking Marxism-Leninism and various Party functionaries to CPSU and Komsomol committees. The letters were written in ballpoint pen and signed “Central Committee of the Freedom Party.” Forensic examination revealed barely detectable traces on the back of some of the letters of pencil drawings—hence the codename KHUDOZHNIK and the hypothesis that he had studied at art school. Detailed study of the contents of the letters also revealed that he regularly read Komsomolskaya Pravda and listened to foreign radio stations. The fact that some of the letters were sent to military Komsomols led to an immense trawl through the records of people dismissed from military training establishments and the files of reserve officers. The search for KHUDOZHNIK was concentrated in Moscow, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Gavrilov-Yam, where his letters were posted. In all four places the postal censorship service (Sluzhba PK) searched for many months for handwriting similar to KHUDOZHNIK’s; numerous KGB agents and co-optees were also shown samples of the writing and given KHUDOZHNIK’s supposed psychological profile. An enormous research exercise was undertaken to identify and scrutinize official forms which KHUDOZHNIK might have filled in. Eventually, after a hunt lasting almost three years, his writing was found on an application to the Rostov City Housing Commission. In 1974 KHUDOZHNIK was unmasked as the chairman of a Rostov street committee named Korobov. After a brief period under surveillance, he was arrested, tried and imprisoned. 14As in many similar cases, the triumphalist KGB report on the lengthy operation to track down KHUDOZHNIK showed no sense of the absurdity of devoting such huge resources to the hunt for an author of “libels against Soviet reality” none of which ever became public.