At Aleksandrovsky’s prompting, Krasin then spent two months composing an appeal to his fellow dissidents which was read aloud at a meeting in Yakir’s flat in April 1973 and, according to a KGB report, “made a strong impact.” “We started by demanding that the laws should be observed,” declared Krasin, “but ended up breaking them. We forgot the basic truth that we are citizens of the USSR and are bound to respect and keep the laws of our state.” Fifty-seven dissidents named by Krasin and Yakir were summoned for interrogation by the Moscow KGB. Some were subjected to emotional confrontations with Krasin and Yakir, who appealed to them to end the dissident campaign. According to KGB records, forty-two capitulated. Another eight “vacillated in evaluating their activities” but “gave assurances that they would not commit any anti-social acts in future.” Only seven remained completely unrepentant; all were given official cautions and put under “operational surveillance.” During 1973 a total of 154 people associated with the dissident movement were cautioned by the Moscow KGB, eighty of them “for possessing, writing and distributing ideologically harmful material and for anti-social and politically harmful conduct.”
The trial of Yakir and Krasin opened in Moscow on August 27, 1973. Solzhenitsyn dismissed it in advance as “a dismal repetition of the clumsy Stalin-Vyshinsky farces:”
In the 1930s… these farces, despite the primitive stagecraft, the smeared grease-paint, the loudness of the prompter, were still a great success with “thinking people” among Western intellectuals… But if no [foreign] correspondents are to be admitted to the trial, it means that it has been pitched two grades lower still.
Western correspondents were, however, invited to a KGB press conference at which Yakir and Krasin paraded their guilt and remorse in front of television cameras.39 The transformation of Krasin seemed so remarkable that some dissidents wrongly suspected he had been a KGB agent all along.40
In the Centre, the show trial was regarded as a triumph. Basking in the approval of their superiors, the case officers of Yakir and Krasin wrote a self-congratulatory article in the classified in-house quarterly, KGB Sbornik, explaining how “the detailed tactics worked out for the interrogation of the accused” and the “deeply thought-out cultivation within the [prison] cell” by well-trained stoolpigeons had combined to “determine the positive results which were obtained at the hearing of the case.”41
SAKHAROV AND SOLZHENITSYN, however, still remained beyond the punitive arm of the KGB. While the trial of Yakir and Krasin was in progress they raised the stakes in their campaign by publicly criticizing the concessions made by the United States to the Soviet Union in the name of East-West détente. On September 17 Sakharov addressed a public appeal to the US Congress, asking it to support the Jackson-Vanik amendment opposing most-favored nation status for the USSR until it ended restrictions on emigration:
The amendment does not represent interference in the internal affairs of socialist countries, but simply a defense of international law, without which there can be no mutual trust.42
Sakharov’s letter, printed in capital letters in the Washington Post, was credited with persuading Congress to pass the amendment, despite the opposition of the Nixon administration.
The Politburo reacted with predictable fury. Brezhnev absurdly denounced Sakharov’s letter as “not just an anti-State and anti-Soviet deed, but a Trotskyist deed.” They had, he declared, tolerated the behavior of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov for far too long: “We should have stopped them right away.” Andropov, now a full (voting) member of the Politburo, sought to maintain the collective outrage of his colleagues by a series of slanted intelligence reports. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, he declared, had “stepped up the peddling of their services to reactionary imperialist, and particularly Zionist, circles,” and were being manipulated by, or actually colluding with, Western intelligence agencies. On February 7, 1974 Andropov submitted to the Politburo a further draft decree to deprive Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and expel him from the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, he sent an alarmist personal letter to Brezhnev, implying that there would be serious discontent among senior Party and Military figures unless the decree was approved:
…I think it impossible, despite our desire not to harm international relations, to delay the solution of the Solzhenitsyn problem any longer, because it could have extremely unpleasant consequences for us inside the country.
This time the KGB pressure on Brezhnev and his colleagues was successful. On February 11 the Politburo formally approved “the proposals of Comrade Andropov.”43 Three days later, Solzhenitsyn was forcibly put on board an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt by KGB officers. As the plane took off, he crossed himself and bowed to the homeland he might never see again.44
From Frankfurt Solzhenitsyn moved on to Zurich, where he rented a house in the city center. Paradoxically it was easier for the KGB to penetrate his entourage in Switzerland than in Russia. Abroad, among strangers, Solzhenitsyn found it far more difficult than at home to distinguish friend from foe. The KGB was quick to take advantage of his sympathy for the survivors of the Prague Spring by using StB agents in the Czech émigré community to win his confidence. The first to do so was the Russian-born StB officer Valentina Holubová.45 Though the files noted by Mitrokhin do not record her first meeting with Solzhenitsyn, she seems to have arrived on his doorstep on his first day in Zurich, claiming to be from Ryazan (where he had been a schoolteacher) and bearing a bouquet of roses and lilac. She gave him a note containing an old Ryazan proverb and said the lilac was to remind him of the lilac that bloomed in Ryazan each spring.46 Within a few weeks, at most, Holubová and her husband, Dr. František Holub (also an StB agent), had succeeded in ensconcing themselves as Solzhenitsyn’s unofficial advisers in Zurich, with Valentina also acting as his part-time secretary and spokeswoman.47
In March 1974 the Holubs took Solzhenitsyn to see an exhibition of paintings by the artist Lucia Radova at a gallery in the village of Pfúffikon, not far from Zurich, owned by the Czech émigré Oskar Krause. When Krause told him that he too had been a political prisoner, imprisoned in Czech jails, Solzhenitsyn embraced him and burst into tears. The Holubs then introduced him to the young Czech writer Tomáš Řezáč (codenamed REPO), like themselves an StB officer who had penetrated the émigré community posing as a dissident. Solzhenitsyn later agreed that Dr. Holub should edit the work of the seven translators producing a Czech edition of The Gulag Archipelago, while Řezáč would translate the long narrative poem, Prussian Nights, which Solzhenitsyn had written in prison in 1949.48
Solzhenitsyn thus became the latest in a long line of leading Soviet émigrées, stretching back to the inter-war White Guard and Trotskyist leaders, who unwittingly included Soviet agents among their most trusted advisers.49 The thought of Holub and Řezáč translating the works of the great heretic was bound to give the Centre some pause for thought. But
It was deemed to be operationally justified for REPO to translate all Solzhenitsyn’s materials, without declining to translate various anti-Soviet texts or attempting to tone them down, since he might otherwise lose Solzhenitsyn’s confidence and the texts would in any case be translated by someone else.
Because of the importance of the PAUK (Solzhenitsyn) case, REPO’s instructions were personally drawn up, doubtless in consultation with the KGB, by the head of StB foreign intelligence, Hladik, and his deputy, Dovin.50
Intelligence from the Holubs and Řezáč allowed the KGB to monitor Solzhenitsyn’s contacts with supporters inside the Soviet Union as well as his activities in the West. Andropov reported to the Politburo on May 2:
[Solzhenitsyn] is hatching plans to conduct subversive activity against the USSR. Residing in Zurich, he has established, in particular, contacts with representatives of the Czechoslovak émigrés in Switzerland, with the assistance of whom he intends to arrange the illegal delivery of his writings and other material of an anti-Soviet nature to the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn stated in a discussion with the Czechoslovak émigrés that h
is future activities would be subordinate primarily to the interests of the “opposition inside the USSR.”
Following usual practice, Andropov did not identify his sources by name; in particular he did not reveal to the Politburo that the main émigrés with whom Solzhenitsyn had had these conversations were StB agents. On July 24 he reported that Solzhenitsyn had set up a “Russian Social Fund,” using royalties from his books, to “assist the families of political prisoners detained in Soviet camps.” As on other occasions, Andropov also gave a woefully distorted assessment of Solzhenitsyn’s influence in exile. “Available information,” he informed the Politburo, “…indicates that after Solzhenitsyn’s deportation abroad, interest in him in the West is steadily on the decline.” At that very moment, volume I of The Gulag Archipelago was a runaway bestseller, with a print run of 2 million paperbacks in the USA alone.51 KGB assessments on Solzhenitsyn, as on some other subjects, were distorted at two levels. First, residencies in varying degrees told the Centre what it wanted to hear. Secondly, Andropov told the Politburo what he wanted it to hear—which in the summer of 1974 emphasized the correctness of the decision to send Solzhenitsyn into exile but did not include the phenomenal Western sales figures of his books.
On September 19, 1974 Andropov approved a large-scale, “multifaceted plan” (no. 5/9-16091) to discredit and destabilize Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his links with dissidents in the Soviet Union. A Fifth Department officer with experience of the PAUK case was sent to Switzerland on long-term assignment to direct a series of operations against Solzhenitsyn.52 The KGB sponsored a series of hostile books and articles, among them a memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mainly composed by Service A. In 1975 Řezáč suddenly disappeared from Zurich, taking the manuscript of Prussian Nights with him, and made his way to Moscow to begin work on a biography intended to destroy Solzhenitsyn’s reputation. Shortly afterwards, Solzhenitsyn realized that he had also been betrayed by the Holubs, on whom he had relied ever since he had arrived in Zurich, and broke all contact with them.53 Andropov gave orders to maintain “an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between PAUK and the people around him” by feeding Solzhenitsyn constant rumors that others in his circle were KGB agents or deceiving him in a variety of ways.
The plan to destabilize Solzhenitsyn also sought “to create a state of nervousness within his family” through a constant stream of threats against his children and the sending of suspicious packages which looked as if they might contain explosives. 54 The Sakharovs were subjected to similar treatment. Shortly before Elena Bonner was due to have eye surgery, they were sent photographs of eyes gouged out of their sockets and other horrifying eye injuries. At Christmas 1974 they received dozens of envelopes containing photographs of car accidents, brain surgery and monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains.55 All such threats, Solzhenitsyn told Time magazine, “come from one and the same organization”—the KGB.56
What is most striking about the KGB’s campaign against Solzhenitsyn during his Swiss exile is the enormous priority and resources devoted to it. The “plan of agent operational measures” to be implemented during 1975 against Solzhenitsyn and the émigrée journal, Kontinent, with which he was associated, was jointly agreed late in the previous year by Kryuchkov, Grigorenko and Bobkov (heads of the First Chief, Second Chief and Fifth Directorates). It had nineteen sections, of which the first three alone provided for twenty different hostile operations. 57 The residencies in Berne, Geneva, Karlshorst, London, Paris, Rome and Stockholm were all involved in implementing the “agent operational measures” and a series of joint operations were planned with other Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies.58 In July 1976 plans for yet more active measures, jointly proposed once again by Kryuchkov, Grigorenko and Bobkov, were approved by Andropov.59
The destabilization campaign had some success. Swiss newspapers reported that Solzhenitsyn asked for, but did not receive, police protection. KGB harassment in Zurich was probably at least partly responsible for his decision to move to the United States in 1976.60 Since his expulsion from Russia two years earlier, Solzhenitsyn had lost some of the immense moral authority he had formerly possessed as a persecuted dissident. Dismayed by what he saw as Western indifference to the Soviet menace, he took to denouncing, sometimes in apocalyptic tones, the moral failings of a West he did not fully understand. After settling in Vermont, he became a virtual recluse on his fifty-acre estate behind an eight-foot-high chainlink fence topped with barbed wire, as he devoted himself to writing a series of historical novels on Russia in the years leading up to the October Revolution.
Solzhenitsyn’s life as a recluse (with occasional excursions to deliver the 1978 Harvard Commencement Address and other solemn pronouncements on East and West) may well have spared him further KGB penetration of his entourage of the kind that had taken place in Zurich. Previously, on August 23, 1975, Andropov had approved a draft directive (no. 150/S-9195), jointly proposed by the heads of the First Chief and Fifth Directorates, Kryuchkov and Bobkov, establishing as the main priority in operations against émigrés the infiltration of at least one illegal into Solzhenitsyn’s inner circle. When Solzhenitsyn moved to the United States, L. G. Bolbotenko, a Line KR officer in the New York residency, was put in charge of operations against him. Though there were numerous active measures designed to discredit Solzhenitsyn and embroil him with other émigrés, there is no evidence that any illegal succeeded in gaining his confidence.61
Despite failing to penetrate Solzhenitsyn’s Vermont fastness, the KGB seems to have been broadly satisfied by the later 1970s that the great writer’s reputation in the West had declined dramatically. In the summer of 1978, the FCD and Fifth Directorate jointly arranged the screening of a video of Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address to a meeting of leading KGB and Party figures. It was an extraordinary moment in Soviet history. Never before, almost certainly, had such an audience gathered together to hear a lecture by a leading opponent of the Soviet system.62 The Moscow notables watched, probably intently, as Solzhenitsyn gave his Commencement audience in Harvard Yard, while drizzle moistened their academic gowns, an uncompromising “measure of bitter truth.” He denounced those in the West whose silence and inertia had made them “accomplices” in the suffering imposed on those who lived under Communist rule. Corrupted by materialism and selfish individualism, the West had become morally impoverished: “Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims…” Though many in Harvard Yard were skeptical, and some were probably seething, they dutifully followed tradition and cheered Solzhenitsyn’s address.63
The KGB screening of the address was followed by commentaries from FCD and Fifth Directorate officers. Though Mitrokhin’s brief notes report only their conclusions, they probably cited the hostile reception accorded to Solzhenitsyn’s “bitter truth” by The New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times leader writer found “Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s world view… far more dangerous than the easy-going spirit which he finds so exasperating,” while the Post denounced his “gross misunderstanding of western society.” The KGB commentators were agreed that Solzhenitsyn had alienated his American listeners by his “reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life—a fact which could not fail to have a negative effect on his authority in the eyes of the West and his continued use in anti-Soviet propaganda.” The meeting of KGB and Party notables agreed that no active measures were required to counter the Harvard Address.64 Solzhenitsyn, they evidently believed, had discredited himself.
TWENTY
IDEOLOGICAL SUBVERSION
Part 2: The Victory of the Dissidents
On August 1, 1975 the Soviet leadership committed what turned out to be a strategic blunder in its war against the dissidents. As part of the Helsinki Accords on Security and Co-operation in Europe, the United States, Canada and all Eur
opean states save Albania and Andorra agreed to protect a series of basic human rights. Though Andropov warned against the consequences, a majority of the Politburo shared Gromyko’s confident view that “We are masters in our house”—that the Soviet Union would be free to interpret the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accord as it saw fit. In fact, as Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted, the accord “put the Soviet Union on the ideological defensive.”1 Henceforth its human rights critics both at home and abroad could justly claim that it was in breach of an international agreement it had freely entered into.
The most influential of those critics was, increasingly, Andrei Sakharov. From the KGB’s viewpoint, both the importance and the difficulty of discrediting Sakharov before world opinion were heightened by his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1975. The Oslo residency had been instructed to do all in its power to prevent the award, but was forced to confess that it was powerless to influence the Nobel Peace Prize committee which, it claimed, was wholly composed of “reactionaries”—chief amongst them its chairwoman, the Labor Party deputy Aase Lionaes.2 Sakharov pronounced the Peace Prize “a great honor not just for me but also for the whole human rights movement”:
I feel I share this honor with our prisoners of conscience—they have sacrificed their most precious possession, their liberty, in defending others by open and non-violent means.3
The Sword and the Shield Page 56
