The Sword and the Shield
Page 54
At the beginning of 1976 Marchais privately rebuked the PCF newspaper, L’Humanité, for failing to send a correspondent to meet the exiled Russian dissident, Leonid Plyushch, on his arrival in Paris after being freed from incarceration in a Soviet mental hospital. The Centre interpreted Marchais’s gradual move towards Eurocommunism less in terms of ideological evolution than personal ambition. Even Berlinguer was reported by the KGB as criticizing Marchais for his narrow nationalism and comparing him to the Romanian autocrat Nicola Ceauşescu. The Centre concluded that Marchais would stop at nothing to satisfy his personal vanity.55
The KGB reported to the Central Committee that it was not until the Twentysecond Congress of the PCF in February 1976 that Marchais felt sufficiently confident of support for his increasingly heretical views within the Party hierarchy to dare to express them openly, despite the opposition of Plissonnier.56 The congress adopted an ambitious Eurocommunist agenda. Marchais took the lead in rejecting the traditional aim of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in criticizing the “limitations on democracy” in the Soviet Bloc and in committing the PCF to “a democratic road to socialism” which would “foster the free expression of many trends of thought.” To scandalized Soviet loyalists within the PCF, the new Eurocommunist platform seemed to “legalize counter-revolution.”57 Over the next eighteen months the CPSU Central Committee sent three angry letters to the PCF complaining about its policies. 58 Behind the scenes the KGB accompanied such irate correspondence with active measures. Among them was operation YEVROPA, begun in 1977 and based on forged CIA documents which purported to reveal an American plot to destroy the unity of the PCF. The Centre hoped that YEVROPA would set some of the Central Committee against Marchais, presumably by implying that he was playing into the hands of the CIA.59
The KGB, however, had misjudged the strength of Marchais’s ideological deviations. The PCF’s Eurocommunist flirtation had been part of the price it had paid for the alliance with the socialists. The flirtation ended in the summer of 1977 after it became clear that, instead of confirming the Communists as the largest party on the French left, it had led to them being overtaken by the socialists. In September 1977 the left-wing alliance collapsed amid mutual recriminations. Thereafter Marchais and the PCF Central Committee gradually returned to an increasingly uncritical Soviet loyalism.60 In October 1978 the Centre cancelled an active measure devised by the Paris residency to drive a wedge between the PCF and PCI, probably because it was no longer considered necessary.61
The KGB report on Marchais submitted to the Central Committee in March 1976 reported that he had hanging over him the exposure of his war record.62 Marchais had claimed in 1970 that he had been “requisitioned” in December 1942 to work in a German factory at Lipheim building Messerschmitt fighter aircraft, but had escaped in January 1943 and returned to France.63 The Centre, however, claimed to know “from reliable sources” that the French authorities had documents showing that, far from being forced to work in Germany, he had signed a voluntary contract for a job at Lipheim. The KGB report on Marchais was so hostile that in 1976 it may well have contemplated using his war record to discredit him, just as it hoped to use Berlinguer’s allegedly shady building contracts to destroy his reputation.64 It is unclear, however, whether the KGB did anything to bring to light a document, which was published in 1977 by Auguste Lecoeur, a former member of the PCF Politburo, and the right-wing weekly Minute, showing that Marchais had voluntarily accepted work in the Messerschmitt factory. Marchais claimed that the document was forged and brought a libel suit against both Lecoeur and Minute. At the opening of the trial in September 1977 he burst into tears. He lost both that case and another libel suit in the following year. In March 1980 L’Express published a wartime German document which appeared to show not merely that Marchais had gone voluntarily to work in Germany but that he had stayed there until 1944. On this occasion Marchais did not sue but maintained his innocence, declaring that he was the victim of an improbable plot by his rivals in the 1981 presidential elections: “That is why, at the origin of this calumny, there have been successively discovered close collaborators of Giscard d’Estaing, of Chirac, and of François Mitterrand.”65
The PCF entered the 1980s in a mood of unswerving loyalty to Moscow. No other leader of a major Western Communist Party matched the zeal with which Marchais defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Two years later the PCF sycophantically greeted the outlawing of Solidarity and the declaration of a state of emergency in Poland as a “triumph” for the Polish Communist Party. At the same time, however, the PCF was in steep electoral decline. In the 1981 presidential election Marchais gained only 15 percent of the vote—easily the Party’s worst result since the Second World War. In 1986 the PCF vote fell even more precipitously, to 6.8 percent, in the parliamentary elections.66
THE GORBACHEV ERA brought a sea change in the CPSU’s relations with foreign Communist Parties. The PCF and Moscow’s other most faithful Western followers were increasingly outraged to discover that their loyalism was no longer appreciated. Gorbachev himself appeared far more interested in imaginative heresy than in intellectually sclerotic orthodoxy. Eurocommunism seemed to have conquered the Kremlin. As head of the CPSU delegation to Berlinguer’s funeral in June 1984, Gorbachev was deeply impressed by the spontaneous outpouring of grief by a million and a half mourners crowded into Rome’s Piazza San Giovanni.67 One of the first signs of his “new thinking” when he became CPSU general secretary in March 1985 was the fact that the only European Communist leader included in his meetings with world statesmen after Chernenko’s funeral was Berlinguer’s successor, Alessandro Natta. Ponomarev was visibly shocked. How could it be, he asked his colleagues in the international department, that despite the presence of so many leaders of “good” Communist Parties in Moscow, Gorbachev had bestowed his favor instead on the general secretary of the “bad” PCI?68
Over the next five years Gorbachev repeatedly conferred with PCI leaders, praised their policies and used them as sounding boards for his “new thinking” on social democracy and East-West relations.69 In Spain Gorbachev showed far less interest in the tattered remnants of the PCE70 than in the ruling Socialist Party. Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev, once asked him which foreign politician he felt closest to. Gorbachev’s reply was unhesitating: Felipe González. According to Grachev, Gorbachev “did not just appreciate ‘Felipe,’ he loved him.”71
Dependence on secret Soviet subsidies, however, persuaded some of the affronted hardline foreign Communist leaders to swallow their pride. In June 1987, Marchais sent a groveling message to Gorbachev conveying his “deepest gratitude” for meeting him in May and asking for “emergency financial aid” of 10 million francs (1.65 million dollars) to prepare for the 1988 presidential elections.72 Noting that the PCF had already received 2 million dollars during 1987, the Politburo none the less agreed to supply another million via the KGB.73
For Gus Hall, the hardline leader of the ever-faithful CPUSA, Gorbachev’s “new thinking” proved too much in the end. Goaded for the first time in his career into open disagreement with Moscow, he launched a public attack on Gorbachev’s reforms in 1989, only for his secret Soviet subsidies to be abruptly cut off. The impact on the CPUSA was devastating. Plunged into an immediate financial crisis, it was forced in 1990 first to cut the publication of the Party newspaper, the People’s Daily World, from five to two days a week, then to turn it into a weekly.74 Armando Cossutta spoke for many traditional Moscow loyalists in Western Communist Parties when he declared his disgust after the failure of the August 1991 Moscow coup that “the term ‘Communism’ is now a dirty word even in the land of Lenin.”75
NINETEEN
IDEOLOGICAL SUBVERSION
Part 1: The War Against the Dissidents
Soviet “dissidents” made their first public appearance on Constitution Day (December 5) 1965, when a group of about two hundred organized a demonstration in Pushkin Square, Moscow, in suppo
rt of the authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who were shortly to go on trial accused of attempting to subvert the Soviet system through their writings. Some of the demonstrators briefly succeeded in unfurling banners reading “Respect the Constitution!” and “We Demand an Open Trial for Sinyavsky and Daniel!”, before being frogmarched to the police station by plain clothes members of the KGB. Henceforth the term used to describe democratic and human rights activists in the Soviet Union was the English word “dissidents” rather than its Russian equivalent inakomysliashchii—probably as part of an official attempt to portray such people as stooges of the West rather than as the authentic voice of Russian protest.1
The KGB had been unusually slow to track the two writers down. Sinyavsky, using the pseudonym “Abram Tertz,” had begun publishing his work in the West, initially in Paris, in 1959. His friend Daniel, employing the alias “Nikolai Arzhak,” had followed suit in 1961. After extensive analysis of the publications of “Tertz” and “Arzhak” by Soviet writers and literary critics who were KGB agents and co-optees, opinion in the Centre was divided on their real identity. One school of thought claimed that the intimate knowledge of Moscow life displayed by both authors showed that they were living in the Soviet Union and had smuggled their work abroad for publication. This view was supported by the Paris residency, which forwarded a report that the manuscript for “Tertz’s” book, The Trial Begins (Sud Idyot), had reached France from Moscow. Others within the Centre sided with literary analysts who argued that “inaccuracies” in the authors’ depiction of Moscow life showed that they were living in the West, and cited other (mistaken) KGB reports that both “Tertz” and “Arzhak” were living in western Europe.2 The KGB was further confused by the fact that Sinyavsky used a Jewish pseudonym, thus giving rise to the mistaken belief that he was Jewish himself. The official Soviet press later denounced the choice of pseudonym as “a squalid provocation.” According to a writer in Izvestia:
By publishing anti-Soviet tales under the name of Abram Tertz in foreign publications, Sinyavsky was attempting to create the impression that anti-Semitism exists in our country and that a writer with a name such as Abram Tertz has to seek publishers in the West if he wants to write “frankly” about Soviet life.3
After several years’ fruitless surveillance of the wrong writers, a KGB agent in the Moscow literary world, codenamed YEFIMOV, reported early in 1964 that an author named Yuli Daniel was in possession of “anti-Soviet material.” Simultaneously the KGB in Yalta sent a report from another agent who claimed that Daniel had the manuscript of “a story for which he could be given fifteen years’ imprisonment.” The surveillance of Daniel quickly led the KGB to Sinyavsky. In May 1964 the Centre began operation EPIGONI to obtain proof that Sinyavsky and Daniel were the authors of the “anti-Soviet” volumes published in the West, to discover where they kept their manuscripts and find out how they smuggled them out of the Soviet Union. The KGB arranged for Sinyavsky’s employer, the Gorky Institute of World Literature, to send him on a business trip away from Moscow. During his absence it conducted a detailed search of his flat and installed bugging devices. Searching and bugging Daniel’s apartment proved to be more difficult. His tworoom flat with shared kitchen at 85 Leninsky Prospekt was reported to be “constantly occupied by his family, a friend and a dog.” Eventually, a KGB officer, posing as the relative of a neighbor, succeeded in staying in the flat, taking wax impressions of the keys and creating an opportunity for a detailed search.4
It took over a year for operation EPIGONI to achieve significant results. Though the KGB lacked proof, it correctly concluded that Sinyavsky’s first attempts to smuggle his work to the West had been assisted by Héläne Zamoyska, the daughter of a former French naval attaché, whom he had met while she was studying at Moscow University.5 In the summer of 1965 the KGB intercepted a letter to Sinyavsky, signed “Alfreda” but giving no return address, inviting him to meet her at the Hotel Bucharest in Moscow. Having discovered that “Alfreda” was Alfreda Aucouturier, a friend of Hécläne Zamoyska, the KGB hoped to catch Sinyavsky in the act of handing over a manuscript to her. Sinyavsky and Daniel were both placed under 24-hour surveillance and a “special operational group” was formed to catch Madame Aucouturier redhanded. Despite bugging a visit made by Madame Aucouturier to Sinyavsky’s flat and filming a later meeting between them near the Rechnoy Vokzal metro station, the group failed to detect any manuscript being handed over. It was disappointed again when it searched Madame Aucouturier’s luggage at the Russo-Polish frontier on September 8.6 A long interrogation also failed to produce results. The KGB’s unsuccessful attempts to persuade Aucouturier to admit that “Tertz’s” real name was Sinyavsky merely made her realize how thin their evidence was against him.7
Shortly after Madame Aucouturier was allowed to leave Russia, Sinyavsky and Daniel were arrested and taken to Lefortovo prison in Moscow. Under interrogation both confessed that they had published works under pseudonyms in the West, but denied that they were anti-Soviet. They also refused to admit that Madame Zamoyska had smuggled their manuscripts out of Russia. According to surveillance reports before their arrest, Sinyavsky and Daniel had been suspicious of all new acquaintances, sensibly fearing that they might be KGB agents. In Lefortovo prison, however, Sinyavsky fell for one of the oldest deceptions in the KGB’s repertoire. A stoolpigeon codenamed MIKHAILOV (probably the illegal Geli Fyodorovich Vasilyev) 8 was introduced into his cell and succeeded in gaining his confidence. Before MIKHAILOV’s “release” in November, Sinyavsky asked him to pass on a series of signs and passwords to his wife to enable her to communicate secretly with him during prison visits. MIKHAILOV’s information and surveillance of Sinyavskaya’s meetings with her husband provided what the EPIGONI file describes as “invaluable material relating to Sinyavsky’s contacts.” The most important of these contacts was Andrei Remizov, head librarian at the Moscow Library of Foreign Literature.9
Remizov confessed during interrogation that, under the pseudonym “Ivanov,” he had published in the West the play Is There life on Mars? and the essay “American Pangs of the Russian Conscience,” which had appeared in Encounter magazine in 1964.10 He also admitted that, during a visit to France, he had delivered one of Sinyavsky’s manuscripts to Hélène Zamoyska.11 The KGB seems to have planned originally to put Remizov on trial with Sinyavsky and Daniel. When Remizov became suicidal, however, the plan changed. It was decided instead to use Remizov primarily as a prosecution witness against Sinyavsky and Daniel. His own case was treated separately and he was placed under 24-hour suicide watch. To prevent further contact with the wives of Sinyavsky and Daniel, who were trying to persuade him not to give evidence, Remizov was sent on official business by the Ministry of Culture to Kursk and Tula, where he remained on suicide watch until the trial. Surveillance of Daniel’s wife showed that she was collecting a dossier of material for publication in the West before the trial. The KGB successfully planted on her an illegal posing as a sympathetic Western businessman who delivered the dossier not to the West but to the KGB.12
Though many Soviet writers had been persecuted for unorthodox opinions without due legal process, Sinyavsky and Daniel were the first to be put on trial simply for what they had written. The trial in February 1966 was officially a public one, with both defendants being granted their “full rights.” As the New York Herald Tribune observed, “These rights included the right to be laughed at by a hand-picked audience of 70 persons… [and] the right to have only the prosecution side of the case reported in some detail to those who cannot claim access to the “open” trial because they have no passes.”13 The stage-managed proceedings were, however, spoiled by the failure of the defendants to play the roles allotted to them. Against all the traditions of Soviet show trials, Sinyavsky and Daniel refused either to admit guilt or to show contrition.
Despite the sycophantic audience, the prosecution was visibly disconcerted by the courageous and articulate defendants. Sinyavsky exposed the elementary confusion i
n a prosecution case which identified the opinions of fictional characters with those of their authors. He was also able to refer to the bugging of his flat before he was interrupted in mid-sentence.14 The state prosecutor, undeterred either by his own mental confusion or by his uncertain grasp of the law,15 concluded with an absurdly melodramatic denunciation of the two authors’ work: “They pour mud on whatever is most holy, most pure—love, friendship, motherhood. Their women are either monsters or bitches. Their men are debauched.” But the most serious crime committed by Sinyavsky and Daniel was that of ideological subversion:
The social danger of their work, of what they have done, is particularly acute at this time, when ideological warfare is being stepped up, when the entire propaganda machine of international reaction, connected as it is with the intelligence services, is being brought into play to contaminate our youth with the poison of nihilism, to get its tentacles into our intellectual circles by hook or by crook…16
Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp, Daniel to five.
The promised official transcript of the trial never appeared—a sure sign of the weakness of the prosecution case. An unofficial transcript, however, assembled by supporters of the defendants, was published in the West. To penetrate the dissidents who had come together in support of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the Centre selected two illegals in their late twenties, Anatoli Andreyevich Tonkonog (code-named TANOV) and his wife Yelena Timofeyevna Fyodorova (TANOVA). Tonkonog reported that the sale of the transcripts of the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel in the West had been organized by an entrepreneurial KGB agent, Nikolai Vasilyevich Dyakonov (codenamed GOGOL), who had worked for the Novosti Press Agency in the United States and other Western countries. According to one of Tonkonog’s informants, Dyakonov was “a real wheeler-dealer” who dealt in foreign currency and sold Russian abstract paintings and unpublished literary works to Western buyers.17