Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Dissident chess players were also the targets of major KGB operations designed to prevent them winning matches against the ideologically orthodox. During the 1978 world chess championship in the Philippines between the Soviet world champion, Anatoli Karpov, and the defector Viktor Korchnoi, the Centre assembled a team of eighteen FCD operations officers to try to ensure Korchnoi’s defeat. 57KGB active measures may well have determined the outcome of a close and controversial championship. After draws in the first seven matches, during which Korchnoi had the better of the play, Karpov refused to shake hands with his opponent at the start of the eighth. A furious Korchnoi, who was known to play poorly when angry, lost the game. After twelve games the scores were level, with Korchnoi once again appearing in better form. During the next five games, however, Korchnoi was thrown off his stride by the presence in the front of the audience of a Russian hypnotist, Dr. Vladimir Zukhar, who stared intently at him throughout the play. After seventeen games, Korchnoi was three points down. By the end of the match, he had pulled back two of his defeats but lost the championship by a single point. 58A book remains to be written about the KGB’s involvement in Soviet chess. 59

POTENTIALLY THE MOST troublesome “ideological subversion” with which the KGB had to contend during the Cold War came from organized religion—especially Christianity, which failed to wither away as the Bolsheviks had hoped and expected. Though no other political party was allowed to exist within the Communist one-party state, Soviet rulers felt bound to proclaim a hypocritical respect for freedom of religion. By the end of the Second World War the attempt to eradicate religious practice had given way to subtler forms of persecution designed to ensure its steady decline and to discriminate against the faithful. Within the Russian Orthodox church the KGB was able to rely on an obedient hierarchy permeated by its agents. The Centre’s main problems came from other Christian churches and a courageous minority of Orthodox priests who demanded an end to religious persecution. For freedom of religion to make progress within the Soviet Union, however, persecuted Christians required strong support from the worldwide church—in particular from the World Council of Churches. They did not receive it. KGB agents in the WCC were remarkably successful in persuading it to concentrate on the sins of the imperialist West rather than religious persecution in the Soviet Bloc. In 1975 agent ADAMANT (Metropolitan Nikodim) was elected as one of the WCC’s six presidents. 60

The importance attached by the KGB to controlling religious dissent and denying persecuted Soviet Christians support from the West was fully justified by events in Poland, where SB penetration never succeeded in bringing the Catholic Church under political control. By the early 1970s the KGB had already identified Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, as a potentially dangerous opponent, unwilling to compromise on either religious freedom or human rights. Though the SB wanted to arrest him, it dared not risk the outcry which would result in both Poland and the West. Wojtyła’s election as Pope John Paul II in 1978 dealt the Polish Communist regime, and ultimately the cohesion of the Soviet Bloc, a blow from which they never recovered. During his triumphant tour of Poland in 1979, the contrast between the discredited Communist regime and the immense moral authority of the first Polish Pope was plain for all to see. 61

The new freedoms of the Gorbachev era similarly went far to justifying the KGB’s earlier fears of the potential damage to the Soviet regime if political dissidents were allowed to proceed with their “ideological subversion.” In 1989, less than three years after Sakharov was freed from internal exile and allowed to return to Moscow, he established himself, as—in Gorbachev’s words—“unquestionably the outstanding personality” in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Almost all the main dissident demands of the early 1970s were now firmly placed on the political agenda.

Only when the vast apparatus of KGB social control began to be dismantled did the full extent of its importance to the survival of the Soviet Union become clear. The manifesto of the leaders of the August 1991 coup, led by Kryuchkov, which attempted to overthrow Gorbachev, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the KGB campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state:

Authority at all levels has lost the confidence of the population… Malicious mockery of all the institutions of state is being implanted. The country has in effect become ungovernable. 62

What the plotters failed to realize was that it was too late to turn back the clock. “If the coup d’état had happened a year and a half or two years earlier,” wrote Gorbachev afterwards, “it might, presumably, have succeeded. But now society was completely changed.” 63Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power of the KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. Large crowds, which a few years earlier could never have assembled, gathered outside Yeltsin’s headquarters in the Moscow White House to protect it from attack, and later circled the Lubyanka, cheering enthusiastically as the giant statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky was toppled from its plinth.

At the time the speed of the collapse of the Soviet system took almost all observers by surprise. What now seems most remarkable, however, is less the sudden death of the Communist regime at the end of 1991 than its survival for almost seventy-five years. Without the system of surveillance and repression pioneered by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, without the KGB’s immense Cold War campaign against ideological subversion, the Communist era would have been much briefer. The KGB had indeed proved to be “the sword and the shield” of the Soviet system. Its most enduring achievement was to sustain the longest-lasting one-party state of the twentieth century.

WITH THE DISINTEGRATION of the one-party state went most of the KGB’s vast system of social control. But though the power of the internal KGB directorates (reorganized successively as a security ministry, a counter-intelligence service and a security service) dramatically declined, the influence of the newly independent successor to the FCD, the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, quickly recovered. Indeed, the SVR soon became more publicly assertive than the FCD had ever been. In 1993, its head, Yevgeni Primakov, published a report attacking NATO expansion as a threat to Russian security—and he did so at a time when the Russian foreign ministry was taking a much softer and more conciliatory line. On the eve of President Yeltsin’s visit to Washington in September 1994, Primakov once again upstaged the foreign ministry by publishing a warning to the West not to oppose the economic and political reintegration of Russia with other states which had formerly been part of the Soviet Union. Primakov’s deputy, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, asserted the SVR’s right to a public voice, even if it disagreed with the foreign ministry’s: “…We want to be heard… We express our point of view as we deem necessary.” 64

The rivalry between SVR and foreign ministry during Yeltsin’s first five years as president ended in decisive victory for the SVR with Primakov’s appointment as foreign minister to replace the pro-Western Andrei Kozyrev in December 1996. Probably to the dismay of many Russian diplomats, Primakov took with him to the foreign ministry a number of SVR officers. Both as foreign minister and later as prime minister, Primakov remained in close touch with his former deputy, Trubnikov, who succeeded him as head of the SVR. 65