Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

KGB officers were regularly reminded by articles in KGB Sbornik and other exhortations that even Western popular music was inherently subversive. Provincial KGBs went to enormous pains to discover the extent of local interest in such music, and were usually disturbed by what they discovered. The KGB in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast, where Brezhnev had begun his career as a party apparatchik, calculated after a presumably lengthy examination of young people’s private correspondence in the mid-1970s, that almost 80 percent of the 15-20-year-old age group “systematically listened to broadcasts from Western radio stations,” especially popular music, and showed other unhealthy signs of interest in Western pop stars such as trying to obtain their photographs. The almost surreal nature of the report on musical subversion in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast is a reminder of how the hunt for ideological dissidence frequently destroyed all sense of the absurd among those committed to the holy war against it:

Even listening to musical programs gave young people a distorted idea of Soviet reality, and led to incidents of a treasonable nature. Infatuation with trendy Western popular music, musical groups and performers falling under their influence leads to the possibility of these young people embarking on a hostile path. Such infatuation has a negative influence on the interests of society, inflames vain ambitions and unjustified demands, and can encourage the emergence of informal [not officially approved] groups with a treasonable tendency. 15

Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd, amongst others, were thus identified as potential threats to the Soviet system. The fact that the Communist one-party states felt so threatened by Western pop stars confirmed their status as symbols of youthful rebellion. Even in Albania, after the collapse in 1992 of the last and most isolated Communist regime in Europe (isolated even from Moscow), the elegant tree-lined Bulevard in the center of Tirana was full of young people wearing Michael Jackson (or “Miel Jaksen”) T-shirts. The decapitated statue of Stalin was inscribed, in large red characters, with the words “Pink Floyd.” 16

All points of contact between Soviet citizens and Westerners were regarded by the Centre as potential causes of ideological contagion. Foreign residencies had Line SK officers whose chief duty was to prevent such contamination in the local Soviet colony, which invariably contained large numbers of KGB agents and co-optees. In the mid-1970s 15 percent of Soviet employees in New York were fully recruited agents. 17It has long been known that Soviet groups traveling abroad were always carefully shepherded by KGB officers. What has not usually been appreciated, however, is the large proportion of agents and co-optees in each group (frequently over 15 percent) who monitored the behavior of their fellow travelers. When the Soviet State Academic Symphony Orchestra gave concerts in the FRG, Italy and Austria in October and November 1974, for example, two KGB officers, Pavel Vasilyevich Sobolev and Pyotr Trubagard, posed as members of the orchestra staff. The 122 members of the orchestra also included no less than eight agents and eleven co-optees. In the course of the tour “compromising materials” were obtained on thirtyfive members of the orchestra, including evidence of “alcohol abuse,” “speculation” (probably mostly involving attempts to purchase Western consumer goods), and—in the case of the Jewish musicians—“friendly” correspondence with individuals in Israel. Further “compromising” information was obtained on the musicians’ families, such as the fact that the wife of one of the violinists (identified by name in Mitrokhin’s notes) exchanged birthday greetings with acquaintances in France. 18The Moscow Chamber Orchestra also traveled to the West in October 1974 under the supervision of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sizov of the KGB. Of the thirty members of the orchestra, three were agents and five co-optees. The “compromising information” gathered by the eight informers on the other twenty-two which most concerned the KGB was evidence that some of them corresponded with foreign acquaintances. 19

It was chiefly because of the immense time and effort expended in the war on all fronts against ideological subversion that the KGB was many times larger than any Western intelligence or security service. One example of the overwhelming concentration by provincial KGBs on cases of ideological subversion is provided by the classified report for 1970 by the KGB directorate for Leningrad and Leningrad Oblast. Not a single case had been discovered of either espionage or terrorism. By contrast, 502 people were given “prophylactic briefings” (warnings) over their involvement in “politically harmful incidents”; forty-one were prosecuted for committing or attempting to commit state crimes (most almost certainly involving ideological subversion); thirty-four Soviet citizens were caught trying to cross the frontier. Extensive work was carried out in institutes of higher education “to prevent hostile incidents.” The postal censorship service intercepted about 25,000 documents with “ideologically harmful contents”; a further 19,000 documents were confiscated at the frontier. One hundred and nine individuals (as compared with ninety-nine in 1969) were identified as distributing subversive leaflets and sending anonymous letters; twenty-seven of the culprits were tracked down. The KGB’s huge agent network was reported to have grown by another 17.3 percent over the previous year. On the debit side the KGB surveillance service was reported to have crashed twenty-seven cars in the course of its operations. 20Oleg Kalugin, who became deputy head of the Leningrad KGB in 1980, privately dismissed its work as “an elaborately choreographed farce,” in which it tried desperately to discover enough ideological subversion to justify its existence. 21

As head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, Andropov sought to keep ideological subversion at the forefront of the leadership’s preoccupations. Issues as trivial (by Western standards) as the activities of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the depths of Siberia or the unauthorized publication in Paris of a short story by a Soviet author were liable to reach not merely Andropov’s desk but also, on occasion, the Politburo. Though even the leading dissidents had little resonance with the rest of the Soviet population, at least until the Gorbachev era, they occupied many hours of Politburo discussions. Early in 1977 a total of thirty-two active measures operations against Andrei Sakharov, denounced by Andropov as “Public Enemy Number One,” were either in progress or about to commence both within the Soviet Union and abroad. 22

No group of Soviet dissidents during the Cold War could long avoid being penetrated by one or more of the KGB’s several million agents and co-optees. Their capacity to make a public protest was limited to the ability to circulate secretly samizdat pamphlets or unfurl banners briefly in Red Square before they were torn down by plain clothes KGB men. Until the final years of the Soviet system, the dissidents were a tiny minority within the Soviet population with very little public support or sympathy. Therein lay much of their heroism, as they battled courageously against what must have seemed impossible odds.

The KGB helped to make the notion of serious political change appear an impossible dream. It simply did not occur to the vast majority of the Russian people that there was any alternative to the Soviet system. Despite grumbles about the standard of living, their almost unquestioning acceptance of the status quo had a profound effect on attitudes in the West, and thus on Western foreign policy. During the Cold War, most Western observers reluctantly assumed that the Soviet system would continue indefinitely. Hence the general sense of shock as well as of surprise when the Communist order in eastern Europe crumbled so swiftly in the final months of 1989, followed two years later by the almost equally rapid disintegration of the Soviet one-party state. Henry Kissinger claimed in 1992, “I knew no one… who had predicted the evolution in the Soviet Union.” 23