The Sword and the Shield

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 European 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”:

Just over a week after he received news of the award, the first of the “Sakharov Hearings,” held in response to an appeal launched by Sakharov and other dissidents a year earlier, opened in Copenhagen to hear evidence of Soviet human rights abuses—almost all of them in breach of the Helsinki Accords.

On November 22 Andropov approved a document entitled “Complex Operational Measures to Expose the Political Background to the Award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Sakharov.” The sheer range and ambitiousness of the active measures proposed indicated Sakharov’s increasing prominence as a KGB target. In collaboration, where necessary, with other KGB directorates, the FCD was instructed:

The main fabrications intended to discredit Sakharov personally—his links with Western intelligence agencies, his support for the Pinochet regime and his plots with the Zionists—were all further developed in active measures over the next few years.⁵ The files examined by Mitrokhin, however, record few immediate successes for the operations approved by Andropov in November 1975. The best the Oslo residency could do to provoke Norwegian opposition to Sakharov’s award was to claim the credit for an article submitted to Dagbladet ridiculing his wife Elena Bonner, who in December 1975 collected the award in place of Sakharov after he was denied an exit visa. The article [which seems not to have been published] claimed that Bonner, a heavy smoker, was constantly providing “free publicity for the tobacco industry” and should have received a cigarette lighter rather than the Nobel Prize.⁶

In Oslo to see Bonner collect the award on behalf of Sakharov was the Soviet émigré Vladimir Maximov, editor-in-chief of the journal Kontinent, which published news of dissidents throughout eastern Europe in Russian, English, French, German and Italian editions. The first issue in September 1974 had opened with a ringing declaration by Solzhenitsyn:

Kontinent rapidly established Maksimov as second only to Solzhenitsyn in the KGB’s list of émigrées enemies. Among the most ingenious of the many active measures used to discredit him in 1976 was one which followed the discovery that a car used by Eduard Mihailovich Serdinov (codenamed TKACHEV), an operations officer in the New York residency, had been bugged by the FBI. It was decided to stage a conversation in the car between Serdinov and a KGB agent from the Soviet community which, it was hoped, would deceive the FBI:

Other active measures were devised to reinforce the impression that Maksimov was a KGB agent.⁸ Whether any of them actually succeeded in deceiving the FBI or any other Western intelligence agency remains in doubt.

Doubtless to the intense irritation of the Centre, Kontinent was able to publicize the formation during 1976 and 1977 of “Helsinki Watch Groups” in Moscow, Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia to monitor Soviet compliance with the terms of the Helsinki Accords.

At a meeting of the KGB Collegium in 1976, Andropov branded Sakharov “Public Enemy Number One,”⁹ a title he retained for the next nine years. The active measures campaign against him continued to expand for several years, with attacks on his wife Elena (codenamed LISA—“Vixen”—by the KGB) forming an increasingly large part of it. A list of current and impending active measures compiled in February 1977 included thirteen “operations to compromise ASKET[Sakharov]”; seven “measures to cut off ASKET and LISA from their close contacts engaged in anti-social activity and to cause dissension in their circle;” eight “measures to hinder the hostile activity of ASKET and LISA;” and four “measures to distract ASKET and LISA from their hostile activity.” Such was the pedantic precision of active measures terminology that “hindrance” operations were carefully distinguished from those whose purpose was merely to “distract.” The main responsibility for directing and coordinating these thirty-two operations fell upon V. N. Shadrin, head of the Ninth Department of the Fifth Directorate.¹⁰ It was a measure of the courage and character of Sakharov and Bonner that their sanity and determination survived the KGB’s best efforts to destroy them.

The thirteen compromise operations were remarkably diverse. As usual, they involved a number of forgeries: among them a bogus State Department evaluation which dismissed Sakharov as a worn-out political dilettante and a fabricated letter from Radio Liberty’s Russian staff denouncing his links with the Zionists. Somewhat more bizarrely, attempts were made to link Sakharov with the gay liberation movement. Letters bearing the forged signatures of Sakharov and a Belorussian “group of homosexuals” were sent to gay rights organizations in Britain and Scandinavia, with the aim of prompting them to send letters in reply.

The Western “bourgeois press” and its Moscow correspondents were fed stories—apparently without much success—claiming that Sakharov’s family suffered from hereditary mental illness, which affected both his children and his brother, and that he himself had degenerated into “a tired, weak-willed man,” “unable to take independent decisions” because of his domineering wife. Instructions were given for suitably gullible foreign correspondents to be invited to meet the Deputy Procurator-General, S. I. Gusev, who would provide “objective information about the nature of the official warning given to ASKET about his provocative actions.”¹¹

The most vicious of the active measures were directed against Elena Bonner both because Sakharov’s worldwide reputation for integrity made him a less vulnerable target than his less well-known wife, and because attacks on Bonner wounded Sakharov more deeply than those on himself. During Sakharov’s fifteen years of persecution, his only resort to physical violence was to slap the face of Nikolai Yakovlev, one of the writers used by the KGB to libel Bonner.¹² The character assassination of Bonner began in earnest with an article entitled “Madame Bonner—Sakharov’s Evil Genius?” planted in the New York Russian-language newspaper Russkiy Golos (Russian Voice) by an agent codenamed YAK, in July 1976.¹³ Simultaneously, Bonner began to receive letters prepared by Service A but purporting to come from one “Semyon Zlotnik,” who claimed to know the secrets of her “dark past” and demanded money with menaces.¹⁴

The “dark past” fabricated by the KGB over the next few years was an explosive mixture of sex and violence. “In her dissolute youth,” it was claimed, “[Bonner] had developed an almost professional knack for seducing and subsequently sponging off older men of considerable stature.” During the war she had allegedly seduced the poet Vsevelod Bagritsky, then hounded his wife to her grave by bombarding her with obscene telephone calls. Her next victim, according to the KGB libel, was a well-known engineer, “Moisei Zlotnik” (“uncle” of the fictitious Semyon Zlotnik), who was jailed for murdering his wife on instructions from Bonner. To escape justice, Bonner was said to have become a nurse on a wartime hospital train—only to be sacked when her seduction of the elderly doctor in charge was discovered by the doctor’s daughter. Among Bonner’s fictitious post-war conquests was her equally elderly, married French uncle, Leon Kleiman; the affair was said to have continued even after she “ensnared” Sakharov.¹⁵ The KGB went to enormous pains to fabricate this account of Bonner’s supposedly homicidal sexual appetites, even sending an illegal to France in 1977 to recover some of the papers of Leon Kleiman (who had died five years earlier) to assist in the production of Service A’s forgeries.¹⁶

Unsurprisingly, the KGB found considerable difficulty for several years in placing this libellous fiction in the Western “bourgeois press.” It eventually appeared as a “world exclusive” in the Sicilian newspaper Sette Giorni, whose staff—according to the Rome residency—included a “confidential contact” codenamed KIRILL. ¹⁷ On April 12, 1980 Sette Giorni printed a sensational story headlined “WHO IS ELENA BONNER? The Wife of Academician Sakharov Perpetrator of Several Murders.” An unnamed member of the editorial staff was reported to have met the elusive “Semyon Zlotnik” while on holiday in Paris, and to have learned the story from him. Sette Giorni cited at some length a series of Service A forgeries, among them a letter from “Moisei Zlotnik” to Bonner reproaching her for persuading him to murder his wife: “You acted precisely, cold-bloodedly and rationally… And your demand ‘to bump her off’ seemed as natural as remembering that I should give you your favorite chocolates on your birthday.” The article also cited an equally fraudulent diary supposedly written by Leon Kleiman describing his seduction by Bonner and denouncing her obsession with “subjugating others” to her will.¹⁸ The Rome residency proudly sent fifty copies of the Sette Giorni article to the Centre, together with subsequent readers’ letters denouncing Bonner, most of which had been written or prompted by the residency itself.¹⁹ When reporting on the operation to the Central Committee, the KGB is unlikely to have mentioned that Sette Giorni was a little-known provincial newspaper with a print run of only 20,000.²⁰

To increase the pressure on Bonner, and through her on Sakharov, attempts were made to deprive her of the support of family and friends. The first of the active measures devised by the KGB early in 1977 “to cut off ASKET and LISA from their close contacts engaged in anti-social activity and to cause dissension in their circle” listed seven different methods of harassing her daughter from her first marriage, Tanya, and son-in-law, Efrem Yankelevich, in order to force them to emigrate. The harassment succeeded. On September 5, 1977 Bonner said goodbye to Tanya and Efrem at Sheremetyevo airport.

The Centre showed equal ingenuity in attempting to alienate the Sakharovs’ friends. Agents in the dissident movement were instructed to “cause dissension between ASKET and LISA on the one hand and their contacts involved in anti-social activity” by circulating disparaging comments about other dissidents supposedly made by Sakharov and Bonner.²¹

The two sets of KGB active measures designed to “hinder the hostile activity of ASKET and LISA” also had the unstated aim of making daily life impossible for both of them. The “hindrance” operations were designed to “create abnormal [living] conditions” in as many ways as possible. Though the KGB did not yet dare to withdraw Sakharov’s driving license, no other member of his or Bonner’s families was allowed to obtain—or retain—a license. An agent codenamed MORVIKOV was instructed to stir up trouble between the couple and Andrei Sakharov’s children. The “distraction” operations included flooding the Sakharovs with bogus requests for help from people who had fallen foul of the Soviet legal system or who simply sought their advice on non-existent problems.²² The cumulative effect of the KGB’s active measures took an inevitable toll—particularly on the health of Bonner, who was suffering from a heart condition. There were times, she wrote later, “when it was difficult for me to walk even a hundred yards, when even sitting at the typewriter made me break out in a cold sweat.” Simply thinking about the allegations about her private life made her feel sick—or even that she was about to have a heart attack.²³

THE EXTENT OF the Sakharovs’ covert persecution was due partly to the fact that the KGB did not yet dare imprison them. The president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences solemnly assured his American opposite number that “not one hair of Dr. Sakharov’s head” would be harmed—though, as Bonner wryly remarked, the promise meant little since Sakharov was almost bald.²⁴ During 1977, however, there was a wave of arrests of other well-known dissidents, among them the two most prominent members of the “Helsinki Watch Groups”: the veteran civil rights campaigner Aleksandr Ginzburg, victim of the botched 1968 show trial, and the physicist Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow group. Andropov’s characteristically slanted intelligence reports to the Politburo sought to implicate both in the ideological subversion campaigns allegedly run by Western intelligence agencies:

Orlov and Ginzburg were arrested in February 1977. A month later it was the turn of the leading Jewish human rights activist and “refusenik” Anatoli Shcharansky. For the next year all three withstood the best efforts of teams of KGB interrogators to cajole and bully them into cooperating in their own show trials. On December 29, 1977 Orlov’s chief investigator, Captain Yakovlev, made what amounted to a formal admission of failure. After Yakovlev showed him the official charge sheet, Orlov took notes of it but “refused to sign it, saying that he wholly rejected the charge.” The record of the interrogation on that day (reproduced as an appendix to this chapter) shows Orlov, ten months after his arrest, obviously getting the better of his interrogator. When asked whether he understood the charge against him, Orlov replied that it was not clear to him, and that he had been shown no “evidence that my actions had the intention of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime.” He put in writing a complaint that “[i]t has never been explained to me precisely and unambiguously what is meant by the words ‘undermining,’ ‘weakening,’ and even ‘Soviet regime.’” Interrogator Yakovlev offered no explanation. Orlov went on to complain against the manner of Yakovlev’s interrogation: “You first make an assertion of your own, and then ask whether this is a fact. This is the typical way of putting a leading question.” Orlov claimed that the documents he had circulated on behalf of the Helsinki Watch Group had had a beneficial effect. They had been studied by “progressive forces in the West,” such as the French and Italian Communist parties, “whose criticism has clearly improved certain aspects of human rights in the USSR.” Fewer people were being sent to prison camps or being mistreated in psychiatric hospitals, and fewer children from unregistered Christian sects were being taken away from their parents. Yakovlev, as usual, had no answer. Orlov made a written protest that his previous request for Yakovlev to be taken off his case had been turned down.²⁶

The most striking feature of Orlov’s trial in May 1978, apart from his own courageous defiance, was the pathetic spectacle of fifteen prosecution witnesses insisting that Soviet citizens enjoyed all the freedoms guaranteed by the Helsinki Accords. For campaigning for those very freedoms, Orlov was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, followed by five in exile.

Ginzburg, who was tried two months later, knew that, as a re-offender, he was liable to a ten-year sentence. But, to his surprise:

Shcharansky’s trial, held at the same time as Ginzburg’s, had moments of farce as well as brutality. At one point a witness named Platonov was asked, “What can you tell us about the case of Shcharansky?” “Nothing,” he replied. “I’m not familiar with the case.” But Ginzburg, he declared, had behaved very badly. It quickly became clear that Platonov had turned up in the wrong court. The trial ended, however, in a great moral victory for Shcharansky. He declared in his closing address:

The KGB’s main fear in the aftermath of the show trials of Orlov, Ginzburg and Shcharansky was that Orlov, like Sakharov three years earlier, would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The KGB residency in Norway was ordered to give the highest priority to an active measures campaign, personally overseen by Andropov himself, designed to discredit Orlov and ensure that his candidacy failed.²⁹ On October 27, 1978 the Oslo resident, Leonid Alekseyevich Makarov (codenamed SEDOV), rang Suslov, the Politburo’s leading ideologist, in the middle of the night to pass on the good news that the prize had gone instead to the Egyptian and Israeli leaders Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Makarov succeeded in claiming more of the credit than he deserved for what was regarded by the KGB as a famous victory. In a notably immodest telegram to the Centre, he reported that the residency had successfully “carried out complex active measures through reliable assets in order to disrupt the anti-Soviet operation” to award the prize to Orlov. It claimed to have brought pressure to bear during conversations with a series of Norwegian political leaders, chief among them Knut Frydenlund, the foreign minister, Reiulf Steen, chairman of the Norwegian Labor Party and of the Parliamentary Foreign Policy Committee, Tor Halvorsen, chairman of the Central Federation of Trade Unions and of the Board of the Norway—USSR Friendship Society, and Trygve Bratteli, a former prime minister and chairman of the Parliamentary Labor Party Group:

The Centre gave Makarov as much credit as he gave himself. Viktor Fedorovich Grushko, head of the FCD Third Department (whose responsibilities included Scandinavia), telegraphed congratulations on “the determination and operational effectiveness which the residency has shown while carrying out this work.”³¹

ANDROPOV REMAINED AS obsessed with ideological subversion during his final years as KGB chairman as he had been at the outset. The war against subversion extended even to abstract painting. A joint report in 1979 by the KGB Moscow Directorate and the Moscow department of the Fifth Directorate proudly reported that, over the past two years, “it proved possible to use agents to prevent seven attempts by avant-garde artists to make provocative arrangements to show their pictures.” Four “leaders of the avant-garde artists” had been recruited as agents. Surveillance of the “creative intelligentsia” was an important part of “the task of the [KGB] agencies to protect the intelligentsia from the influence of bourgeois ideology”:

Andropov told a Fifth Directorate conference in March 1979 that the KGB could not afford to ignore the activities of a single dissident, however obscure:

The experience of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed that behind the Soviet dissidents were “the main organizers of ideological sabotage—the intelligence services and subversive centers of the imperialist nations. The struggle against them must be decisive, uncompromising, and merciless.” Within the Soviet Union the “twelve-year ideological struggle” of the Fifth Directorate showed that repression worked:

In 1980 even Sakharov ceased to be untouchable. While being driven to the Academy of Sciences on January 22 he was arrested, taken to the prosecutor’s office and told that he and his wife were to be exiled to Gorky, a city closed to Westerners: “You are forbidden to go beyond the city limits of Gorky. You’ll be kept under surveillance, and you are forbidden to meet with or contact foreigners or criminal elements [dissidents].³⁴ The KGB Fifth Directorate organized a series of workplace meetings in Gorky as well as broadcasts on local radio and television in an attempt to ensure that Sakharov and Bonner were reduced to pariah status throughout their exile. To the KGB’s embarrassment, however, Sakharov’s banishment to Gorky was quickly followed by an unconnected period of social unrest which it feared would become known in the West. In May there was a strike at the car factory there. In September and October, after a series of four murders in Gorky, rumors spread rapidly round the city that murders were in fact occurring daily but were being officially concealed. In the ensuing panic schools suspended some of their classes and factories canceled night shifts. There were numerous letters to the authorities pleading for the murderers to be caught. To the Centre’s relief, however, the mayhem in Gorky passed unnoticed in the West.³⁵

During the early 1980s the dissident movement seemed at its lowest ebb since its emergence in the 1960s. Most leading dissidents were in labor camps or exile. Those who remained at liberty were under constant KGB surveillance. Samizdat literature was reduced to a trickle. During the second half of the 1980s, however, the dissidents found themselves, to their great surprise, rapidly transformed from “anti-social elements” into the prophets of perestroika. The chief agent of this transformation was Mikhail Gorbachev.

“When I became General Secretary,” writes Gorbachev in his Memoirs, “I considered it an important task to rescue Academician Sakharov from exile.”³⁶ The record of his statements in both public and private during his first year as Soviet leader, however, tells a more complicated story. At a Politburo meeting on August 29, 1985, Gorbachev announced that he had received “a letter from a certain Mr. Sakharov, whose name will not be unknown to you. He asks us to allow his wife Bonner to go abroad for medical treatment and visit relatives.” The KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, reported that Sakharov was in poor health: “He has largely lost his position as a political figure and recently we have heard nothing new from him. So perhaps Bonner ought to be allowed abroad for three months.” Chebrikov appeared to believe the propaganda image of Bonner sedulously cultivated by the KGB over the previous decade: “We must not forget that [Sakharov] acts very much under Bonner’s influence… She has one hundred per cent influence over him.” “That’s what Zionism does for you!” joked Gorbachev. Chebrikov added that, with Bonner away, Sakharov might even be willing to reach some sort of accommodation. ³⁷ Though he did not tell the Politburo, Chebrikov was doubtless aware from KGB surveillance reports that Sakharov had welcomed Gorbachev’s election as general secretary with the comment: “It looks as if our country’s lucky. We’ve got an intelligent leader!”³⁸

Aleksandr Yakovlev, the most influential reformer among Gorbachev’s advisers, secretly asked two officials of the Central Committee’s international information department, Andrei Grachev and Nikolai Shishlin, to prepare a case which would persuade the Politburo to end Sakharov’s exile. According to Grachev, both Yakovlev and Gorbachev realized that neither democratic reform nor the normalization of East—West relations could proceed so long as Sakharov’s banishment continued. But “the delicacy of the problem was indicated by Yakovlev’s conspiratorial tone” as he emphasized the need to avoid attracting the attention of the KGB. Grachev and Shishlin had to conduct an elaborate covert operation even to obtain copies of Sakharov’s works without Chebrikov realizing what they were up to. On December 1, 1986 Gorbachev finally considered the time to be ripe to raise the Sakharov question at the Politburo, and gained its approval to end his exile.³⁹ On December 15 two electricians, escorted by a KGB officer, arrived at Sakharov’s Gorky flat and installed a telephone. At 10 a.m. the next day he received a call from Gorbachev. “You [and Bonner] can return to Moscow together,” Gorbachev told him. “You have an apartment there… Go back to your patriotic work!”⁴⁰

Though Gorbachev probably had in mind Sakharov’s work at the Academy of Sciences, by far his greatest impact was on the transition to a democratic political system—in changing the Soviet Union from what the Marquis de Custine, a French visitor to Tsarist Russia over a century and a half earlier, had described as a “nation of mutes.” Custine had famously prophesied:

“The day of discussion” arrived in Russia on May 25, 1989, with the opening of the first session of the Congress of People’s Soviets, the product of the first contested elections since 1917. Gorbachev later acknowledged that, of all the deputies elected to the congress, Sakharov was “unquestionably the most outstanding personality.”⁴² At the time, however, Gorbachev viewed Sakharov with a mixture of irritation and admiration. Sakharov wanted the congress to abolish the one-party state, curb the power of the KGB and establish a directly elected office of president. “If only we had listened more carefully to Andrei Dmitriyevich [Sakharov],” Gorbachev said later, “we might have learned something.” But Gorbachev was not ready to end the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. He could not decide, Sakharov complained, whether he was “the leader of the nomenklatura or the leader of perestroika,” When the popular weekly Argumenti i Fakti published a poll showing that Sakharov was by far the most popular politician in the country, Gorbachev was so enraged that he threatened to sack the editor. Tension between Sakharov and Gorbachev renewed at the next session of the congress in December 1989. Gorbachev brushed aside an attempt by Sakharov to present him with tens of thousands of telegrams calling for an end to the one-party state. A few days later, Sakharov died suddenly of a heart attack. At his lying in state, Gorbachev and the Politburo stood bare-headed for several minutes in front of the open coffin of the man once described by Andropov as “Public Enemy Number One.”⁴³

Sakharov’s premature death was in all likelihood partly due to the strain of his and Bonner’s earlier persecution, and to the lack of proper medical treatment during their Gorky exile. “The totalitarian system probably killed him,” said the democratic journalist Vitali Korotich. “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow.”⁴⁴ In 1990 the text of a long letter (previously available only in samizdat) calling for democratic political change addressed by Sakharov and two other dissidents to the Soviet leadership twenty years earlier was exhumed from the CPSU archives and published for the first time. Since Gorbachev had become general secretary, almost every issue raised in the “subversive” appeal of 1970 had been placed on the political agenda and acted upon.⁴⁵ Simultaneously, Solzhenitsyn’s works, banned from bookshops and library shelves since 1974, had become bestsellers.

The dissidents were not the main agent for change in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. As at other celebrated turning points in modern Russian history—among them the turn to the West in the early eighteenth century, the end of feudalism in 1861, collectivization and crash industrialization after 1929—change came chiefly from the top. The Soviet system was transformed, and ultimately destroyed, by Gorbachev’s courageous but misguided attempt to reform the unreformable. The dissidents, however, played a major role in changing the political consciousness of the Soviet élite. One KGB report of the mid-1970s quotes Solzhenitsyn as saying that the main task of the dissident movement was “a moral and ideological preparation of the Russian intelligentsia to oppose the Soviet regime.”⁴⁶ Against all the odds, the dissidents largely succeeded in fulfilling that mission. A small and persecuted minority, powerless save for the strength and courage of its convictions, only feebly supported by the West, defeated a determined campaign to silence them by the world’s largest and most powerful security and intelligence service. Nowhere in the world during the final third of the twentieth century did a radical intelligentsia make a greater contribution to the destruction of an anti-democratic political system.

^APPENDIX THE INTERROGATION OF YURI ORLOV ON DECEMBER 29, 1977

The Interrogation of Yuri Orlov on December 29, 1977 According to official announcements in Moscow, Fifth Directorate interrogation records of the interrogation of dissidents have been destroyed. Mitrokhin’s copy may therefore be the only surviving transcript of Orlov’s interrogation. A copy was sent by the Fifth Directorate to the FCD to form part of the dossier being used to prepare active measures to discredit Orlov in the West and prevent him receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Mitrokhin’s growing sympathy for the dissidents is reflected in the fact that he copied the whole of this and some other documents dealing with their persecution, rather than following his usual practice of copying extracts, making notes or writing précis.

The interrogation was conducted by Captain Yakovlev, senior investigator for especially important cases with the investigation department of the KGB Directorate for Moscow and Moscow Oblast under the USSR Council of Ministers, assisted by Assistant Procurator Chistyakov of Moscow City:

[Written comments by Orlov]