The Sword and the Shield
Page 55
Though the KGB evidently considered that the prosecution of Dyakonov would be too embarrassing, after a long investigation it put on trial in January 1968 four young dissidents who had compiled the transcript and other documents concerning the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel: Aleksandr Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Alexei Dobrovolsky and Vera Lashkova. Ginzburg and Galanskov had for some years taken leading roles in the production of samizdat journals. Their trial proceeded in much the same manner as that of Sinyavsky and Daniel. The courtroom audience was, once again, picked by the KGB and the defense was prevented from calling most of its witnesses. The two principal defendants, Ginzburg and Galanskov, again refused to contribute to the success of their own show trial and were sentenced to five and seven years in labor camp respectively. Emboldened by the courage of the defendants and the interest of the Western media, Daniel’s wife, Larisa Bogoraz, and a fellow dissident, Pavel Litvinov, issued an impassioned denunciation of the conduct of the trial to foreign correspondents, with a request “that it be published and broadcast by radio as soon as possible.”18 Tonkonog later reported that the small demonstration in Red Square in August 1968 against Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia was also organized by Larisa Bogoraz. On this occasion Litvinov and other dissidents tried to dissuade her, but ten of them joined her when she insisted on going ahead. The KGB inevitably broke up the demonstration and arrested the demonstrators.19
THUS FAR THE writer who most concerned the Soviet authorities, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, codenamed PAUK (“Spider”) by the KGB,20 had escaped arrest. Solzhenitsyn had been saved in part by his celebrity. The labor camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which changed him almost overnight from an obscure provincial teacher of mathematics and physics into a world-renowned author, had been published in 1962 with the personal blessing of Khrushchev. During a sweep of Moscow dissidents shortly after the arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel in September 1965, the KGB had discovered and confiscated manuscripts which Solzhenitsyn had left for safekeeping at the home of a friend. The KGB reported to the Central Committee that the manuscripts provided proof that “Solzhenitsyn indulges in politically damaging statements and disseminates slanderous fabrications.” Both the KGB chairman, Vladimir Semichastny, and the Public Prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, were, however, uncertain how to proceed against such a celebrated writer, and simply referred Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts to the Writers’ Union, which did not supply the denunciation expected of it for another eighteen months. By the time the Central Committee considered the matter in March 1967, Solzhenitsyn had sent his latest novel, Cancer Ward, to the West and had almost finished The Gulag Archipelago, his epic study of the labor camps. Within the Central Committee, the initiative in calling for “decisive measures” to deal with Solzhenitsyn’s “anti-Soviet activities” came from Andropov, who succeeded Semichastny as KGB chairman in the summer of 1967.21
For the remaining seventeen years of his life, Andropov remained the dissidents’ most determined opponent within the Soviet leadership. First-hand involvement in crushing the Hungarian uprising, reinforced by second-hand experience of the Prague Spring during his first year as KGB chairman, convinced him that one of the chief threats to the Soviet Bloc was Western-sponsored ideological subversion:
The enemy gives direct and indirect support to counter-revolutionary elements, engages in ideological sabotage, establishes all sorts of anti-Socialist, anti-Soviet and other hostile organizations and seeks to fan the flames of nationalism. Graphic confirmation of this is provided by the events in Czechoslovakia…22
In the wake of the Prague Spring, Andropov set up a new KGB Fifth Directorate to monitor and crack down on dissent in all its forms. Specialized departments within the directorate were responsible for the surveillance of intellectuals, students, nationalists from ethnic minorities, religious believers and Jews.23
Solzhenitsyn increasingly became one of Andropov’s personal obsessions. The announcement in October 1970 that the great subversive had won the Nobel Prize for Literature prompted the KGB chairman to submit to the Politburo a memorandum, also signed by Rudenko, enclosing a draft decree to deprive Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and expel him from the Soviet Union:
When analyzing the materials on Solzhenitsyn and his works, one cannot fail to arrive at the conclusion that we are dealing with a political opponent of the Soviet state and social system… If Solzhenitsyn continues to reside in the country after receiving the Nobel Prize, it will strengthen his position, and allow him to propagandize his views more actively.24
Andropov, however, did not persuade a majority of the Politburo. Brezhnev showed more sympathy for the contrary views of his crony, Nikolai Shchelokov, the interior minister, who argued in the autumn of 1971 that Solzhenitsyn needed to be won over, not persecuted: “One of the higher-ups needs to sit down and talk with him, to remove the bitter taste that persecution has, no doubt, left in his mouth.” Brezhnev underlined—apparently approvingly—a series of comments in a memorandum by Shchelokov which must have been anathema to Andropov:
In resolving the Solzhenitsyn question we must analyze past mistakes made in dealing with people in the arts… The “Solzhenitsyn Problem” was created by literary administrators who should have known better… In this case what needs to be done is not to execute our enemies publicly but smother them with embraces.25
Henceforth Shchelokov, so far as Andropov was concerned, was a marked man. After Brezhnev’s death he was charged by Andropov with corruption but committed suicide before going on trial.26
In the autumn of 1971, however, Andropov knew better than to attack openly opinions approved by Brezhnev. But he was not prepared to give up. In March 1972 Andropov made a further attempt to persuade the Politburo to expel Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union, providing further “indisputable” evidence that “he was deliberately and irrevocably embarked on the path of struggle with the Soviet government and will wage this struggle regardless of everything.” Though agreeing that Solzhenitsyn was “a true degenerate,” the Politburo—doubtless to Andropov’s extreme displeasure—was still not willing to send him into exile.27
THE OTHER DISSIDENT who most obsessed Andropov from the early 1970s onwards was the nuclear physicist and Academician Andrei Sakharov, codenamed ASKET (“Ascetic”) by the KGB, “father” of the Soviet H-bomb and three times Hero of Socialist Labor. Though out of favor with the scientific establishment, he retained an official dacha in Zhukovka as well as his flat in Moscow. Late in 1970, Sakharov and two fellow physicists, Valeri Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, founded the Committee for Human Rights and persuaded Solzhenitsyn to become a corresponding (though not very active) member.28 Like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov’s international stature made it difficult for the KGB to persecute him as freely as less well-known dissidents. His KGB file makes the absurd claim that Sakharov “used his authority to influence the decisions of the judiciary and create a hullabaloo around the trials of anti-social elements” such as Vladimir Bukovsky, put on trial in January 1972 for compiling evidence about the committal of himself and other dissidents to mental hospitals.29 The real burden of the KGB complaint was that Sakharov and his committee had some modest success in limiting, though not in preventing, the abuse of the legal process.
In October 1972 the 37-year-old illegal Georgi Ivanovich Kotlyar, codenamed BERTRAND, succeeded in winning Sakharov’s confidence and establishing what the Centre considered a “trusted relationship” with him and his wife Elena Bonner. Kotlyar had been born in France and succeeded in passing himself off as one “Alain Boucaut,” a French archaeologist who had been working in Mexico for the past decade. His success in maintaining his cover and providing intelligence on Sakharov and Bonner won him high praise from both Filipp Denisovich Bobkov, head of the Fifth Directorate, and his deputy, Nikashin.30 Attempts were also made to plant agents on Solzhenitsyn, among them the pianist Miroka Kokornaya (transparently codenamed MIROKA), who regularly went on concert tours abroad. A KGB operation in 1973 to persuade
Solzhenitsyn to use MIROKA as a courier to the West failed.31
In the summer of 1973 the KGB at last succeeded in staging what it considered a successful show trial, during which the defendants incriminated themselves in the best Stalinist tradition, and other dissidents were duly demoralized. The victims of this traditional travesty of Soviet justice were Pyotr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, leading members of the group which produced the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events. Yakir was the son of an army commander shot during the Great Terror, and had spent much of his life in prison. At the time of his arrest in June 1972, he was known by other dissidents to be close to breaking point and drinking heavily. After the trial of Bukovsky, the KGB had overheard him saying, “I can’t take it any more. I couldn’t face another sentence myself—I haven’t the strength.” Before his arrest, Yakir circulated a statement saying that any confession extracted from him in jail should be disregarded. 32 Though exhausted by many years of persecution, Yakir somehow found the strength to resist during the early stages of his interrogation before finally breaking under prolonged pressure. In the brutally triumphant words of his chief interrogator, “He began to assess his actions and the contents of the anti-Soviet literature which he had distributed fairly objectively and politically correctly.” Yakir was finally persuaded to put his signature to a formulaic KGB-dictated confession:
In the course of the investigation, I have come to understand that I committed a whole series of criminal acts: I have signed letters with a defamatory content which asserted that in our country people are sentenced for their beliefs; I have given a number of interviews to foreign correspondents which contained slanderous assertions; I kept, duplicated and distributed documents of similar content; and I frequently passed tendentious information to foreign correspondents who used this for propaganda purposes.
Having grasped the seriousness of what I have done, I sincerely repent. Not only will I not do this again in the future, but I shall do my utmost to influence people who are close to me and to demonstrate the error of their positions.33
The breaking of Krasin under interrogation caused much greater surprise in dissident circles than that of Yakir. According to his KGB file, “[Krasin] stood out because of the particularly hostile attitude to the Soviet system which he had adopted in his youth, his stubbornness and consistency in his work, and his readiness to see things through to the end, regardless of the obstacles.” He was co-author of the samizdat Legal Instructions, which advised all those summoned for interrogation by the KGB to refuse to answer questions. On seven occasions between 1968 and 1972 when he himself had been questioned by the KGB, Krasin had faithfully followed his own advice. After prolonged surveillance, however, the Fifth Directorate concluded that a “polite and calm” interrogation with “absolutely no sneering,” combined with a sympathetic stoolpigeon in his cell, would eventually wear down his resistance. Krasin was known to be willing to disagree with other dissidents, and during 1971-2 had become increasingly despondent about their prospects. There were, he said, “few defenders at the final barricades.”34
As expected, Krasin began his lengthy interrogation in defiant mood. When his interrogator, Lieutenant-Colonel Pavel Aleksandrovsky, asked, “Why do you refuse to say what you have been doing if you do not consider it criminal?” Krasin replied, “I do not consider it criminal, but you do. Therefore, if I were to tell you, I would be giving you incriminating material which I do not want to do.” The first breach in Krasin’s defenses was made by the KGB agent in his cell, who pretended that he had been arrested for dealing in foreign currency and appealed for Krasin’s advice on how to face the charges against him. Instead of simply telling him not to answer questions, Krasin showed him how to frame the best defense during his interrogation. Full of praise for Krasin’s knowledge of the criminal code, the stoolpigeon then urged him to follow his own advice and challenge the charges against him:
You are very clever. Fancy knowing the law so well! You can stand up to any interrogator. It would be impossible to trick you or frighten you! If you can prove that what you did was not criminal, then you will be helping your friends who are still free!
Krasin’s KGB cellmate claimed to have been converted from his previous political skepticism to Krasin’s dissident opinions, and gradually persuaded him that by standing up for those views during his interrogation he would be continuing his fight for Russian democracy. According to the absurdly stilted language of the interrogation report, “The agent also introduced the beauty of nature and the significance of art and literature into their conversations. This rekindled Krasin’s love of life and made him forget his bitter disenchantment.” Rumors fed to him that Yakir was now talking to his interrogator seem finally to have persuaded Krasin to take his cellmate’s advice. “The idea that Yakir was giving full, true and detailed evidence,” declared his interrogator Aleksandrovsky dramatically, “hung over him like the sword of Damocles.”35
Krasin’s early replies to Aleksandrovsky’s questions were extremely cautious. Initially he limited himself to refuting alleged evidence that he had attempted to subvert or weaken Soviet power, refusing to answer anything he considered a leading question. He prepared written answers to those questions he accepted, sometimes preparing and correcting several drafts before handing one of them to his interrogator. This laborious procedure continued for two months, during which Krasin provided what the KGB considered “only worthless information.” Like all good interrogators, however, Aleksandrovsky was patient. “The importance of these first interrogations,” he believed, “was that they enabled psychological contact to be established.”
The first sign of a breakthrough came on September 27, 1972. As usual Krasin insisted that, “The accusation against me is monstrous. I cannot do what is against my conscience. I cannot admit that I am guilty of something that I have not done or repent of crimes which have not been committed.” But, for the first time, he seemed to accept that his career as a dissident was at an end. “I will not,” he announced, “carry on with my work.” Krasin added that he did not believe Aleksandrovsky’s main aim was to sentence him to another term in a labor camp. Henceforth the scope of the interrogation was broadened. Each day Aleksandrovsky allowed Krasin to choose the subject for discussion but tried, when the opportunity arose, to develop their conversation in ways which showed the hopelessness of his position and of the dissident cause. While discussing the fight against counter-revolution in the Dzerzhinsky era, Aleksandrovsky mentioned the case of the arch anti-Bolshevik Boris Savinkov, who had been lured back to Russia in August 1924. Krasin’s KGB cellmate was primed to raise the question of how long Savinkov’s interrogation had lasted. The answer, which Krasin doubtless discovered from a book lent him by his interrogator, was that after only nine days Savinkov publicly renounced his “bloody struggle” against the Bolshevik regime and declared that he unconditionally recognized the Soviet state.36 When Krasin asked him why Savinkov had recanted, Aleksandrovsky replied that he had seen the hopelessness of his situation, realized that his struggle against Soviet power was doomed to failure and understood that his actions were against the interests of the Russian people.
Whenever Krasin expressed interest in a subject during interrogation, Aleksandrovsky would try to find him relevant books and articles which would have a “positive influence” on him. He was thought to be particularly impressed by the stirring account by the British journalist Alexander Werth in his book Russia at War of the endurance and triumph of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War. On one occasion Krasin was even given copies of the banned periodical Posev, published by the émigré NTS (social democrat organization), which contained articles by himself and Yakir. Krasin was seen to rub his hands with anticipation as he opened the pages of the periodical. After a time, he put the copies of Posev down in disgust, declaring that it was “White Guard drivel” and that he had never read “anything so primitive and bereft of ideas.” From his reading of the file, Mitrokhin suspected that Krasin had been
given fabricated copies of the periodical specially designed to arouse his indignation.
Krasin’s separation from his wife, Yemelkina, who was banished into internal exile at Yesineysk, was also used to increase the emotional pressure on him. Alexandrovsky noted cynically, “Krasin loved his wife greatly and was ready to do anything for her sake.” On visiting Yemelkina at Yesineysk, he found that she too was desperate to be reunited with her husband. Probably as a condition of being allowed to visit Krasin, Yemelkina agreed to reveal where she had hidden “anti-Soviet literature.” After an emotional reunion with his wife in January 1973, Krasin gave Aleksandrovsky the locations of four hiding places containing sixty allegedly subversive foreign publications and 140 microfilms (totaling 5,000 frames) of other “anti-Soviet texts.”37 Further pressure on Krasin was exerted during visits from his mother and other relatives and friends, all of whom had been expertly intimidated by the KGB.38
Even after Krasin had agreed to plead guilty to the charges against him, however, he refused for almost two months to incriminate his friends. Step by step Aleksandrovsky overcame his resistance. First, Krasin agreed to talk about dissidents who had already confessed, then about foreign correspondents who had left Moscow and Soviet émigrés in the USA and Israel who were, as he put it, “beyond the reach of the KGB.” Next he identified people who, he said, had not committed any criminal offense but had merely read “anti-Soviet literature” and had been present when foreign correspondents were given the Chronicle of Current Events. Then, almost overnight, what remained of Krasin’s resistance to informing on his fellow dissidents collapsed. He spent ten days writing by hand a document of over a hundred pages setting out the evidence against dissidents, identifying sixty of them and giving details of numerous incidents previously unknown to the Fifth Directorate—among them the origins of the Chronicle of Current Events. To a triumphant Aleksandrovsky it seemed as though Krasin was “unburdening himself of a great weight.”