The Sword and the Shield

^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 support 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:

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 in 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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.”

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:”

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:

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:

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

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:

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.