Vladimir Yakunin: The Treacherous Path: An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

A tendency to indulge in wishful thinking is one of the most dangerous qualities a politician can possess. So perhaps it was Russia’s tragedy that both Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were afflicted by it. I suspect Gorbachev was more of an idealist than the man who succeeded him, and I do not doubt that he wanted the best for the USSR. But his ideals were not accompanied by a practical scheme for implementing them. He did not want to break the Soviet Union apart, and yet once the process of disintegration had begun, he did little to stop it. Instead, he affected surprise at the consequences of changes he had himself set in motion, and seemed content to act as a spectator of his country’s demise. Hundreds of thousands have died unnecessarily as a result, while ‘Gorby’ still poses as a great historical figure. (In 2016 he published a memoir, the Russian title of which translates as ‘I remain an optimist’, which reads like black humour to anyone who has spent time in the country his actions brought to its knees.) It might surprise you to read this, for I know he enjoys a hero’s reputation in the West, but I am far from being the only person in Russia who sees the last leader of the Soviet Union in this way.

All this, though, was in the future. As far as the officials checking my documents at the US border were concerned, I had been posted to New York in 1985 to work as a diplomat – one of the Russian representatives on the United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. But I would be combining this with my work for the First Directorate of the Intelligence Division of the KGB, one of the most respected occupations in the Soviet Union. The education it offered you was on a par with anything you could find in Cambridge or Princeton; if you were ambitious, if you wanted to challenge yourself, you joined the KGB’s foreign service, the First Directorate. But in those days, you did not apply for a position in the KGB; no matter how keen you were to join the organisation, you had to wait for them to contact you. It was considered somehow suspect to knock on their door and ask to be let in.

When a KGB officer first contacted me, I was aware of their prestige, but at the same time, there were certain elements of the security service’s history that made me feel uncomfortable. My father-in-law came from what you might call the intelligentsia, and when he learned that I was contemplating signing up he was greatly concerned. We talked and he told me that of course it was for me to decide, but that there was one thing I had to remember. He told me:

Our generation, we are the children of the frightened generation, for whom the night was a nightmare. Every evening, once darkness fell across the city, our parents would all lie gripped by terror, listening out for the growl of a car pulling up outside their apartment, which they knew would be followed by the crunch of boots on the staircase, and, finally, a knock at their door. The situation is different now, but that fear still lives on inside me.

I remember that I was so anxious about the prospect of joining and all that it entailed that for the first time in my life I learned where exactly my heart was located. I had been sitting in a Komsomol [2] All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, a youth organisation dedicated to beginning the process of creating model Soviet citizens. It operated, to employ a sporting analogy, almost like a feeder club for the main CPSU. Membership was considered highly desirable and the sons and daughters of people such as priests were barred from joining. leadership development class, when I felt a searing pain lance through my chest. I was rushed to hospital and after a series of checks I was informed that the pain was a response to the huge anxiety and tension swirling around inside me at the prospect of making such a momentous decision.

Not long afterwards, a family contact who was head of the Leningrad station’s counter-intelligence branch summoned me to his office, where he talked to me for a while. He asked me questions about who I was, where I worked, then he thought for a while before turning to me and saying,

Yakunin, why do you want to join our organisation? You are studying at a top research institute, you’re about to get a PhD, there is a clear path ahead of you; why put all this at risk? Why join an organisation full of tension, danger, hard labour and possibly blood? It is a bloody heavy business, and, personally speaking, I don’t think it is for you. Let somebody else do the dirty work.

What he was saying, in essence, was that I must be prepared to sacrifice everything I loved for the sake of my country, but then this was exactly what I had been brought up to believe. Service to the country and its people were the central elements of the ideological education I had received. I felt that the harder the work promised to be, the greater the contribution I could make to the nation I loved. I knew it would be challenging, and that I would be joining an institution with a complex, charged history, but what might have sounded to others like a warning was to me an incredible and exciting opportunity to help protect the ideals and nation that I cherished so dearly.

At the Dzerzhinsky Higher School and then the Andropov Krasnoznamenny Institute in Moscow, the KGB university for prospective intelligence officers, I learned a lot, perhaps more than I ever thought possible. I learned to speak English so well that I even began to think in the language. I learned about the panoply of techniques I would need to perform my role to the highest standards possible, skills that in the years that followed saved my life more than once. I also learned about the organisation itself. Far from being an omnipotent beast extending its tentacles across the world, the security services were subject to constant surveillance and guidance from the Communist Party. Even during the darkest days of Stalin’s terror, I discovered, the decisions were not being made by the heads of the OGPU or the NKVD, [3] The OGPU and NKVD were two of the forerunners of the KGB. but by the so-called ‘Troikas’, [4] Three-man-strong commissions who in the Soviet Union were employed as instruments of extra-judicial punishment. They were permitted to effectively bypass much of the existing legal apparatus – including the defendant’s right to a full trial, legal aid or the presumption of innocence – in order to secure quick convictions. which were headed by regional party bosses. The Troikas had ceased to operate by the ’50s, but the secret services remained subordinate to the party until the end of the Soviet Union. Decades later when I began my KGB training, almost the first thing we were told was that we were the armed instrument of the party. They gave the orders; our job was to follow them.

Along with the other new recruits, I was also taught about the values at the KGB’s heart. There was much you might expect – about ideology, security and secrecy – but other aspects were more of a surprise. It was made clear to us that the recruits themselves were considered to be the organisation’s most valuable assets. I discovered the truth of this early on in my career when I was struck down by a very severe trauma in my back.

It got so bad that I spent more than four months in hospital. Even after I had been discharged, I could not put on my socks or my underwear without my wife helping. My doctor recommended that in order to overcome the consequences of the injury I should follow a programme of complete rest, followed by a six-month-long course of physiotherapy, water treatment and rehabilitation. It was beginning to look as if my time in the KGB would be over almost before it had begun. It got so bad that I had already started to draft my letter of retirement. As a final resort, I approached the head of my department, a man reputed to be one of the toughest in the entire system – a merciless product of the previous era, so granite-hard that some people said you would struggle to find anything human in him. Almost before I’d finished outlining my problem, he had picked up the telephone, called my immediate superior, and said, ‘Listen, from now until the end of this year, Yakunin is working only on my orders. You won’t bother yourself about his timetable, you won’t take any interest in his results; for one year he is my man.’ He put down the phone and told me I was to carry on my treatment. I will be grateful to him for the rest of my life.