The Sword and the Shield

CONCLUSION: FROM THE ONE-PARTY STATE TO THE PUTIN PRESIDENCY The Role of Russian Intelligence

Most academic historians have been slow to recognize the role of intelligence communities in the international relations and political history of the twentieth century. One striking example concerns the history of signals intelligence (SIGINT). From 1945 onwards, almost all histories of the Second World War mentioned the American success in breaking the main Japanese diplomatic cipher over a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. British success in breaking German ciphers during the First World War was also common knowledge; indeed one well-publicized German decrypt produced by British codebreakers—the Zimmermann telegram—had hastened the US declaration of war on Germany in 1917. But, until the revelation of the ULTRA secret in 1973, it occurred to almost no historian (save for former intelligence officers who were forbidden to mention it) that there might have been major SIGINT successes against Germany as well as Japan. Even after the disclosure of ULTRA’s important role in British and American wartime operations in the west, it took another fifteen years before any historian raised the rather obvious question of whether there was a Russian ULTRA on the eastern front.¹

At the end of the twentieth century, many of the historians who now acknowledge the significance of SIGINT in the Second World War still ignore it completely in their studies of the Cold War. This sudden disappearance of SIGINT from the historical landscape immediately after VJ Day has produced a series of eccentric anomalies even in some of the leading studies of policymakers and international relations. Thus, for example, Sir Martin Gilbert’s massive and mostly authoritative multi-volume official biography of Churchill acknowledges his passion for SIGINT as war leader but includes not a single reference to his continuing interest in it as peacetime prime minister from 1951 to 1955.

There is even less about SIGINT in biographies of Stalin. While there are some excellent histories of the Soviet Union, it is difficult to think of any which devotes as much as a sentence to the enormous volume of SIGINT generated by the KGB and GRU. In many studies of Soviet foreign policy, the KGB is barely mentioned. The bibliography of the most recent academic history of Russian foreign relations from 1917 to 1991 (published in 1998), praised by a British authority on the subject as “easily the best general history of Soviet foreign policy,” contains—apart from a biography of Beria—not a single work on Soviet intelligence among more than 120 titles.²

Though such aberrations by leading historians are due partly to the over-classification of intelligence archives (worst in the case of SIGINT), they derive at root from what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”—the difficulty all of us have in grasping new concepts which disturb our existing view of the world.³ For many twentieth-century historians, political scientists and international relations specialists, secret intelligence has been just such a concept. It is, of course, naive to assume, as some “spy writers” have done, that the most secret sources necessarily provide the most important information. But it is also naive to suppose that research on twentieth-century international relations and authoritarian regimes (to take only two examples) can afford to neglect the role of intelligence agencies. As a new century dawns the traditional academic disregard for intelligence is in serious, if not yet terminal, decline. A new generation of scholars has begun to emerge, less disoriented than most of their predecessors by the role of intelligence and its use (or abuse) by policymakers.⁴ A vast research agenda awaits them.

Research on the Soviet era has already undermined the common assumption of a basic symmetry between the role of intelligence in East and West. The Cheka and its successors were central to the functioning of the Soviet system in ways that intelligence communities never were to the government of Western states. The great nineteenth-century dissident Aleksandr Herzen, perhaps the first real Russian socialist, said that what he feared for the twentieth century was “Genghis Khan with a telegraph”—a traditional despot with at his command all the power of the modern state. With Stalin’s Russia, Herzen’s nightmare became reality. But the power of the Stalinist state was, as George Orwell realized, in large part a secret power. The construction and survival of the world’s first one-party state in Russia and its “near abroad” depended on the creation after the October Revolution of an unprecedented system of surveillance able to monitor and suppress all forms of dissent. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell depicts a state built on almost total surveillance:

Millions in Stalin’s Russia felt almost as closely watched as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Because of the ubiquity of NKVD informers,” writes historian Geoffrey Hosking, “…many people had no one whom they trusted completely.”⁶

The foundations of Stalin’s surveillance state were laid by Lenin, the Cheka’s most ardent supporter within the Bolshevik leadership, who dismissed protests at its brutality as wimpish “wailing.” With Lenin’s personal encouragement, the Cheka gradually permeated every aspect of life under the Soviet regime.⁷ When, for example, Lenin sought to stamp out celebration of the Russian Christmas, it was to the Cheka that he turned. “All Chekists,” he instructed on December 25, 1919, “have to be on the alert to shoot anyone who doesn’t turn up to work because of ‘Nikola’ [St. Nicholas’s Day].”⁸ Stalin used the Cheka’s successors, the OGPU and the NKVD, to carry through the greatest peacetime persecution in European history, whose victims included a majority of the Party leadership, of the high command and even of the commissars of state security responsible for implementing the Great Terror. Among Western observers of the Terror, unable to comprehend that such persecution was possible in an apparently civilized society, there were some textbook cases of cognitive dissonance. The American ambassador, Joseph Davies, informed Washington that the show trials had provided “proof beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.” The historian Sir Bernard Pares, widely regarded as the leading British expert of his generation on all things Russian, wrote as late as 1962, “Nearly all [those condemned at the trials] admitted having conspired against the life of Stalin and others, and on this point it is not necessary to doubt them.”⁹

After the Second World War the NKVD and its successor, the MGB, played a central role in the creation of the new Soviet empire in eastern and central Europe. Their role, according to a sanctimonious Soviet official history, was to “help the people of liberated countries in establishing and strengthening a free domestic form of government”¹⁰—in other words, to construct a series of obedient one-party states along the Soviet Union’s western borders. Throughout the Soviet Bloc, security and intelligence services, newly created in the image of the MGB, played a crucial part in the establishment of Stalinist regimes. Informers in the German Democratic Republic were seven times more numerous even than in Nazi Germany. As in East Germany, many of the leaders of the new one-party states were not merely loyal Stalinists but also former Soviet agents.

Though post-Stalinist enemies of the people were downgraded by the KGB to the category of dissidents and subjected to less homicidal methods of repression, the campaign against them remained uncompromising. In order to understand the workings of the Soviet state, much more detailed research is needed on the KGB’s methods of social control. Mitrokhin’s notes on documents from internal KGB directorates which found their way into FCD files illustrate the enormous wealth of highly classified material on the functioning of the Soviet system which still remains hidden in the archives of today’s Russian security service, the FSB.

Among the KGB’s innovations during the Cold War was the punitive use of psychiatry against ideological subversion. The KGB recruited a series of psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry and other institutes who were instructed to diagnose political dissidents as cases of “paranoiac schizophrenia,” thus condemning them to indefinite incarceration in mental hospitals where they could be drugged and tranquilized. One “plan of agent operational measures” implemented late in 1975 involved the use of four agents (KRAYEVSKY, PETROV, PROFESSOR and VAYKIN) and six co-optees (BEA, LDR, MGV, MZN, NRA and SAB) in the psychiatric profession.¹¹ There were, almost certainly, many more. Remarkably, most incarcerated dissidents retained their sanity, even after treatment by KGB psychiatrists. An examination of twenty-seven of them in 1977-8 by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Voloshanovich, a doctor at the Dolgoprudnaya psychiatric hospital, concluded that none was suffering from any psychological disorder.¹² In 1983 Soviet psychiatrists resigned from the World Psychiatric Association, just in time to avoid expulsion for systematic abuse of their patients.

The KGB’s most widely used methods of social control were the simpler, though immensely labor-intensive, techniques of ubiquitous surveillance and intimidation. Andropov’s first-hand experience as ambassador in Budapest in 1956, reinforced by the Czechoslovak crisis during his first year as KGB chairman, convinced him that the KGB could not afford to overlook a single instance of ideological subversion. “Every such act,” he insisted, “represents a danger.”¹³ None was too trivial to attract the attention of the KGB. The effort and resources employed to track down each and every author of an anonymous letter or seditious graffito criticizing the Soviet system frequently exceeded those devoted in the West to a major murder enquiry.

Among the many successful operations against such authors which were celebrated in the classified in-house journal KGB Sbornik was the hunt for a subversive codenamed KHUDOZHNIK (“Artist”), who in July 1971 began sending anonymous letters attacking Marxism-Leninism and various Party functionaries to CPSU and Komsomol committees. The letters were written in ballpoint pen and signed “Central Committee of the Freedom Party.” Forensic examination revealed barely detectable traces on the back of some of the letters of pencil drawings—hence the codename KHUDOZHNIK and the hypothesis that he had studied at art school. Detailed study of the contents of the letters also revealed that he regularly read Komsomolskaya Pravda and listened to foreign radio stations. The fact that some of the letters were sent to military Komsomols led to an immense trawl through the records of people dismissed from military training establishments and the files of reserve officers. The search for KHUDOZHNIK was concentrated in Moscow, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Gavrilov-Yam, where his letters were posted. In all four places the postal censorship service (Sluzhba PK) searched for many months for handwriting similar to KHUDOZHNIK’s; numerous KGB agents and co-optees were also shown samples of the writing and given KHUDOZHNIK’s supposed psychological profile. An enormous research exercise was undertaken to identify and scrutinize official forms which KHUDOZHNIK might have filled in. Eventually, after a hunt lasting almost three years, his writing was found on an application to the Rostov City Housing Commission. In 1974 KHUDOZHNIK was unmasked as the chairman of a Rostov street committee named Korobov. After a brief period under surveillance, he was arrested, tried and imprisoned.¹⁴ As in many similar cases, the triumphalist KGB report on the lengthy operation to track down KHUDOZHNIK showed no sense of the absurdity of devoting such huge resources to the hunt for an author of “libels against Soviet reality” none of which ever became public.

KGB officers were regularly reminded by articles in KGB Sbornik and other exhortations that even Western popular music was inherently subversive. Provincial KGBs went to enormous pains to discover the extent of local interest in such music, and were usually disturbed by what they discovered. The KGB in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast, where Brezhnev had begun his career as a party apparatchik, calculated after a presumably lengthy examination of young people’s private correspondence in the mid-1970s, that almost 80 percent of the 15-20-year-old age group “systematically listened to broadcasts from Western radio stations,” especially popular music, and showed other unhealthy signs of interest in Western pop stars such as trying to obtain their photographs. The almost surreal nature of the report on musical subversion in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast is a reminder of how the hunt for ideological dissidence frequently destroyed all sense of the absurd among those committed to the holy war against it:

Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd, amongst others, were thus identified as potential threats to the Soviet system. The fact that the Communist one-party states felt so threatened by Western pop stars confirmed their status as symbols of youthful rebellion. Even in Albania, after the collapse in 1992 of the last and most isolated Communist regime in Europe (isolated even from Moscow), the elegant tree-lined Bulevard in the center of Tirana was full of young people wearing Michael Jackson (or “Miel Jaksen”) T-shirts. The decapitated statue of Stalin was inscribed, in large red characters, with the words “Pink Floyd.”¹⁶

All points of contact between Soviet citizens and Westerners were regarded by the Centre as potential causes of ideological contagion. Foreign residencies had Line SK officers whose chief duty was to prevent such contamination in the local Soviet colony, which invariably contained large numbers of KGB agents and co-optees. In the mid-1970s 15 percent of Soviet employees in New York were fully recruited agents.¹⁷ It has long been known that Soviet groups traveling abroad were always carefully shepherded by KGB officers. What has not usually been appreciated, however, is the large proportion of agents and co-optees in each group (frequently over 15 percent) who monitored the behavior of their fellow travelers. When the Soviet State Academic Symphony Orchestra gave concerts in the FRG, Italy and Austria in October and November 1974, for example, two KGB officers, Pavel Vasilyevich Sobolev and Pyotr Trubagard, posed as members of the orchestra staff. The 122 members of the orchestra also included no less than eight agents and eleven co-optees. In the course of the tour “compromising materials” were obtained on thirtyfive members of the orchestra, including evidence of “alcohol abuse,” “speculation” (probably mostly involving attempts to purchase Western consumer goods), and—in the case of the Jewish musicians—“friendly” correspondence with individuals in Israel. Further “compromising” information was obtained on the musicians’ families, such as the fact that the wife of one of the violinists (identified by name in Mitrokhin’s notes) exchanged birthday greetings with acquaintances in France.¹⁸ The Moscow Chamber Orchestra also traveled to the West in October 1974 under the supervision of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sizov of the KGB. Of the thirty members of the orchestra, three were agents and five co-optees. The “compromising information” gathered by the eight informers on the other twenty-two which most concerned the KGB was evidence that some of them corresponded with foreign acquaintances.¹⁹

It was chiefly because of the immense time and effort expended in the war on all fronts against ideological subversion that the KGB was many times larger than any Western intelligence or security service. One example of the overwhelming concentration by provincial KGBs on cases of ideological subversion is provided by the classified report for 1970 by the KGB directorate for Leningrad and Leningrad Oblast. Not a single case had been discovered of either espionage or terrorism. By contrast, 502 people were given “prophylactic briefings” (warnings) over their involvement in “politically harmful incidents”; forty-one were prosecuted for committing or attempting to commit state crimes (most almost certainly involving ideological subversion); thirty-four Soviet citizens were caught trying to cross the frontier. Extensive work was carried out in institutes of higher education “to prevent hostile incidents.” The postal censorship service intercepted about 25,000 documents with “ideologically harmful contents”; a further 19,000 documents were confiscated at the frontier. One hundred and nine individuals (as compared with ninety-nine in 1969) were identified as distributing subversive leaflets and sending anonymous letters; twenty-seven of the culprits were tracked down. The KGB’s huge agent network was reported to have grown by another 17.3 percent over the previous year. On the debit side the KGB surveillance service was reported to have crashed twenty-seven cars in the course of its operations.²⁰ Oleg Kalugin, who became deputy head of the Leningrad KGB in 1980, privately dismissed its work as “an elaborately choreographed farce,” in which it tried desperately to discover enough ideological subversion to justify its existence.²¹

As head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, Andropov sought to keep ideological subversion at the forefront of the leadership’s preoccupations. Issues as trivial (by Western standards) as the activities of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the depths of Siberia or the unauthorized publication in Paris of a short story by a Soviet author were liable to reach not merely Andropov’s desk but also, on occasion, the Politburo. Though even the leading dissidents had little resonance with the rest of the Soviet population, at least until the Gorbachev era, they occupied many hours of Politburo discussions. Early in 1977 a total of thirty-two active measures operations against Andrei Sakharov, denounced by Andropov as “Public Enemy Number One,” were either in progress or about to commence both within the Soviet Union and abroad.²²

No group of Soviet dissidents during the Cold War could long avoid being penetrated by one or more of the KGB’s several million agents and co-optees. Their capacity to make a public protest was limited to the ability to circulate secretly samizdat pamphlets or unfurl banners briefly in Red Square before they were torn down by plain clothes KGB men. Until the final years of the Soviet system, the dissidents were a tiny minority within the Soviet population with very little public support or sympathy. Therein lay much of their heroism, as they battled courageously against what must have seemed impossible odds.

The KGB helped to make the notion of serious political change appear an impossible dream. It simply did not occur to the vast majority of the Russian people that there was any alternative to the Soviet system. Despite grumbles about the standard of living, their almost unquestioning acceptance of the status quo had a profound effect on attitudes in the West, and thus on Western foreign policy. During the Cold War, most Western observers reluctantly assumed that the Soviet system would continue indefinitely. Hence the general sense of shock as well as of surprise when the Communist order in eastern Europe crumbled so swiftly in the final months of 1989, followed two years later by the almost equally rapid disintegration of the Soviet one-party state. Henry Kissinger claimed in 1992, “I knew no one… who had predicted the evolution in the Soviet Union.”²³

AS WELL AS underestimating the centrality of the KGB’s system of social control to the functioning of the Soviet system, Western observers have often underestimated the power and influence of its security and intelligence chiefs.²⁴ Beria, who became head of the NKVD at the end of the Terror, emerged as the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union—“my Himmler,” as Stalin once described him. In 1945 he was put in charge of the construction of the first Soviet atomic bomb. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Beria became the first Soviet security chief to make a bid for supreme power. Fear of his ambitions, however, united the rest of the Soviet leadership against him and led to his execution at the end of the year.

It was frequently assumed thereafter that no KGB chief would ever again be given the opportunity by the rest of the Soviet leadership to make a successful bid for power. That assumption proved correct in the case of Aleksandr Shelepin, the dynamic and relatively youthful chairman of the KGB from 1958 to 1961, who made little secret of his desire to become general secretary, but was effectively sidelined after Khrushchev’s overthrow by Brezhnev and the other leading plotters.

Yuri Andropov played a much subtler game than Beria or Shelepin in planning his own rise to power during the 1970s. As Brezhnev became progressively feebler, Andropov gradually established himself as heir apparent, succeeding him as general secretary in 1982. There is, however, not a single reference to Andropov either in the 2,000 pages of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs of the period 1969-77, or in Cyrus Vance’s memoirs on his term as secretary of state, in succession to Kissinger, from 1977 to 1980.²⁵ Vladimir Kryuchkov was similarly underrated as KGB chairman a decade later. Most Western observers were taken by surprise when he emerged as the ringleader of the abortive coup of August 1991 which sought to topple Gorbachev and install a hardline regime. Like Beria, however, Kryuchkov overreached himself. Though the KGB had hitherto been an indispensable bulwark of the Communist one-party state, Kryuchkov’s mistimed attempt to shore it up merely hastened its collapse.²⁶

Yevgeni Primakov, first head of the FCD’s successor, the SVR, also attracted surprisingly little attention from most Western commentators. A much-praised American study of Yeltsin’s Russia, published on the eve of Primakov’s appointment as prime minister in September 1998, contained not a single reference to him.²⁷ By the spring of 1999, though disclaiming any ambition to succeed Yeltsin, Primakov topped opinion polls of potential candidates in the following year’s presidential elections. Having apparently concluded that Primakov had become too powerful, Yeltsin sacked him in May 1999.

THE CHEKA AND its successors were central to the conduct of Soviet foreign policy as well as to the running of the one-party state. Kim Philby proudly told a KGB lecture audience in 1980, “Our service operating abroad is the Soviet Union’s first line of defense.”²⁸ The failure by many Western historians to identify the KGB as a major arm of Soviet foreign policy is due partly to the fact that many Soviet policy aims did not fit Western concepts of international relations. Surveys of Stalin’s foreign policy invariably mention the negotiations on collective security against Nazi Germany, which were conducted by Litvinov and Soviet diplomats, but usually ignore entirely the less conventional operations against the White Guards in Paris, the plan to assassinate General Franco early in the Spanish Civil War, the liquidation of the leading Trotskyists in western Europe in the late 1930s and the plot to kill Tito in 1953—all of which were entrusted to the foreign intelligence service.²⁹ Even after Stalin’s death, much of Soviet foreign policy was not cast in a Western mold.

INO, the interwar foreign intelligence agency, made its initial reputation by defeating a series of counter-revolutionary conspiracies involving anti-Bolshevik émigrés and imperialist intelligence agencies. Though the evidence now available indicates that none of these (in reality, rather trivial) conspiracies had the slightest prospect of success, they bulked large in the imagination of the Soviet leadership. Similarly, INO’s liquidation of leading White Guards and Trotskyists outside the Soviet Union was, from Stalin’s perspective, a major victory. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Stalin was more concerned by Trotsky than by Hitler.

During the 1930s Soviet foreign intelligence collection, thanks chiefly to the Great Illegals, led the world. The recruitment of the Magnificent Five and other high-flying ideological agents opened up the prospect of penetrating the very heard of imperialist power in Western capitals. The large number of British and other diplomatic documents obtained by INO had an important—though still little researched—influence on the making of Soviet foreign policy. Throughout the Stalin era, the Soviet intelligence contest with both Britain, the chief pre-war target, and the United States, the Main Adversary of the Cold War, was remarkably one-sided. SIS had no Moscow station between the wars; the United States possessed no espionage agency at all until 1941. INO’s main pre-war defeats were selfinflicted: chief among them the massacre of many of its best officers who fell victim to the paranoia of the Great Terror.

Soviet intelligence penetration of the West reached its apogee during the Second World War. Never before had any state learned so many of its allies’ secrets. At Tehran and Yalta Stalin was probably better informed on the cards in the hands of the other negotiators than any statesman at any previous conference. Stalin knew the contents of many highly classified British and American documents which Churchill and Roosevelt kept even from most of their cabinets. ULTRA, though revealed to only six British ministers, was known to Stalin. So was the MANHATTAN project, which was carefully concealed from Vice-President Harry Truman until he succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945. (Truman was then also informed of ULTRA for the first time.)³⁰ There is a peculiar irony about Truman’s decision at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 to reveal to Stalin that “we had a new weapon of unusual destructive power.”³¹ Stalin seemed unimpressed by the news—as well he might, since he had known about plans to build the American atomic bomb for fifteen times as long as Truman.

Stalin was also much better informed than most American and British policymakers about the first major American-British intelligence success against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the VENONA decrypts, which revealed the codenames and clues to the identities of several hundred Soviet agents. Remarkably, Truman seems never to have been informed of VENONA at all. Nor, almost certainly, were more than a small minority of the Attlee cabinet in Britain. Because of internal rivalries within the US intelligence community, even the CIA was not told until late in 1952. The Centre, however, had learned of VENONA by early in 1947 from William Weisband, an agent in the US SIGINT agency, ASA. Thus, amazingly, Stalin discovered the greatest American intelligence secret of the early Cold War over five years before either the president or the CIA.³²

The Centre’s extraordinary successes in penetrating its allies during the Second World War, and the fact that some of its agents remained in place after victory, raised exaggerated expectations of what Soviet intelligence could achieve during the Cold War against the Main Adversary and its NATO allies. KGB post-war strategy was based on an attempt to recreate the pre-war era of Great Illegals, establish a large network of illegal residencies and recruit a new generation of high-flying ideological agents. Alongside the legal residencies in Washington, New York and San Francisco, the Centre planned as late as the early 1980s to set up six illegal residencies, each running agents at the heart of the Reagan administration. Its plans proved hopelessly optimistic.³³

Despite some striking tactical successes, the KGB’s post-war grand strategy for penetrating the corridors of power in its Main Adversary failed. At least until the early 1960s, its chief source of intelligence on American foreign policy was probably the penetration of the US embassy in Moscow. By the beginning of the Cold War the previously seductive myth-image of Stalin’s Russia as the world’s first truly socialist worker-peasant state, which had inspired the Magnificent Five and their American counterparts, was fading fast. Most of the idealistic student revolutionaries of the late 1960s, unlike their pre-war predecessors, turned for inspiration not to the old Communist parties but to a new left which seemed deeply suspect to the increasingly geriatric leadership of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.

The marginalization of the post-war Communist Parties in the United States and Great Britain deprived Soviet intelligence of what had previously been a major source of recruits and talent-spotters. Its most fertile Western recruiting grounds in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War were France and Italy, the two west European countries with the most powerful Communist Parties, both of which took part in post-war coalition governments. The longest-serving and probably most productive French and Italian agents identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin, JOUR and DARIO, both entered their respective foreign ministries during these years.³⁴

By the 1950s the KGB was probably obtaining more high-grade diplomatic and political intelligence from the main NATO members in continental Europe than from the United States and Britain. As well as generating large numbers of diplomatic documents, the penetration of the French, Italian and other Western foreign ministries and Moscow embassies provided crucial assistance to KGB codebreakers. For most, if not all, of the Cold War the total number of diplomatic decrypts which the Centre considered sufficiently significant to forward to the Central Committee probably never dropped below 100,000 a year.³⁵ During the Cold War as a whole, as a result of the partition of Germany and the flow of refugees from East to West, the FRG was the major NATO member most vulnerable to agent penetration—though the KGB’s successes were exceeded by those of its East German ally. The success of the HVA agent, Gånter Guillaume, in becoming aide to the Chancellor of West Germany at a crucial moment in East-West relations, just as Willy Brandt was beginning his Ostpolitik, was one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.

Though the Centre acquired a considerable volume of high-grade intelligence from NATO countries, it was never satisfied by what it achieved. In Europe, as in north America, it refused to abandon its early Cold War ambition to create a new generation of Great Illegals. During the 1970s it sought and obtained promises of assistance from Communist leaders around the world in finding further Richard Sorges. The files seen by Mitrokhin suggest, however, that few, if any Sorges were discovered. By the mid-1970s the brightest of the young Party members in the few west European countries where Communism remained a powerful force tended to be Eurocommunist heretics rather than blindly obedient pro-Soviet loyalists ready to sacrifice their lives in the service of the Fatherland of the Toilers. Even some Soviet illegals had difficulty in preserving their ideological commitment when confronted with the reality of life in the West. As the Cold War progressed, the KGB’s best agents increasingly became mercenary (like Aldrich Ames) rather than ideological (like Kim Philby).

Residencies, however, remained under pressure from the Centre leadership, which had almost no first-hand experience of life in the West, to cultivate major political figures. Hence the hopelessly unrealistic KGB schemes, all doubtless approved by the political leadership, to recruit Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt, Oskar Lafontaine, Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski and other senior Western statesmen. Kryuchkov responded to these and other failures not with a more realistic recruitment policy but with greater bureaucracy, demanding ever longer reports and more form-filling. Residents must have groaned inwardly in April 1985 when they received from the Centre a newly devised questionnaire which Kryuchkov instructed them to use as the basis for reports on politicians and other “prominent figures in the West” being considered as possible “targets for cultivation.” It contained fifty-six questions, many of them highly complex and minutely detailed. Question 14 in section 4 of the questionnaire, for example, demanded information on:

The fifty-five other questions contained similarly detailed demands for reports on topics as diverse as “compromising information on subject” and “subject’s attitude towards American foreign policy.”³⁶ A full answer to the questionnaire on any “prominent figure in the West” would have required months of investigations by residency operations officers.

THE CENTRE’S MAIN weakness in the field of political intelligence was not, as it supposed, in intelligence collection but rather in its ability to interpret what it collected. Under both Stalin and Khrushchev, the Centre forwarded each day to the Kremlin a selection of foreign intelligence reports received from residencies and other sources, but usually shrank from offering more than perfunctory interpretation of the reports for fear of contradicting the views of the political leadership.³⁷ Both Stalin and Khrushchev acted as their own, ill-qualified chief intelligence analysts. Brezhnev, by contrast, spent little time interpreting intelligence or any other information, thus giving Andropov greater scope than any of his predecessors to submit intelligence assessments.

Intelligence assessment was worst in the Stalin era. Stalin himself bears a large measure of personal responsibility for the failure to heed repeated intelligence warnings of the 1941 German invasion. The institutionalized paranoia of the Stalinist system led to a series of other failures of assessment—among them the deluded belief in the middle of the war that the Magnificent Five, some of the Centre’s most gifted and productive agents, were part of an elaborate British deception. Though intelligence analysis after Stalin’s death never again descended to quite such paranoid depths, at moments of crisis in the Cold War the KGB tended to substitute conspiracy theory for balanced assessment. Within a year of becoming KGB chairman, Andropov was submitting distorted intelligence assessments to the Politburo designed to strengthen its resolve to crush the Prague Spring by armed force. His obsession with Western attempts to promote ideological sabotage in the Soviet Bloc made him unwilling to consider any evidence which suggested otherwise. In 1968 the Centre destroyed classified US documents obtained by the Washington residency which showed that neither the CIA nor any other American agency was manipulating the reformers of the Prague Spring.³⁸

In both the early 1960s and the early 1980s the Centre believed that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Though some FCD officers in Western residencies, far better acquainted with the West than Soviet leaders and KGB chairmen, privately dismissed such fears as absurd alarmism, they did not dare dispute the Centre’s judgment openly. The East German foreign intelligence chief, Markus Wolf, who resented the waste of time caused by KGB demands for HVA assistance in discovering non-existent plans for an American first strike, also knew better than to complain to Moscow. “These orders,” he claims, “were no more open to discussion than other orders from above.”³⁹

The distortion of Soviet intelligence analysis derived, at root, from the nature of the one-party state and its inherent distrust of all opposing views. The Soviet Union thus found it more difficult than its Western rivals to understand, and therefore to use, the political intelligence it collected. Though the Soviet leadership never really understood the West until the closing years of the Cold War, it would have been outraged to have its misunderstandings challenged by intelligence reports. Heterodox opinions within the Soviet system always ran the risk of being condemned as subversive. Those intelligence officers who dared to express them openly during the late 1930s were likely to have their life expectancy dramatically reduced. Even during the post-Stalin era, when their survival was no longer threatened, their careers, like that of Mitrokhin, were almost certain to suffer. Closed or semi-closed societies have an inbuilt advantage over open societies in intelligence collection from human sources, because Western capitals invariably have much lower levels of security and surveillance than their counterparts in Communist and other authoritarian regimes. Equally, however, one-party states have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to intelligence analysis, since analysts usually fear to tell the Party hierarch what it does not want to hear.

Though careful to avoid offending the sensibilities of the political leadership, INO report-writers during the 1930s knew that they were on safe ground if they produced evidence of British anti-Soviet conspiracies. During the Cold War, their FCD successors similarly knew that they were taking no risks if they used the United States as a scapegoat. One Line PR officer, interviewed a few weeks after the abortive 1991 coup, told Izvestia that he and his colleagues had spent much of their careers acting on the principle “Blame everything on the Americans, and everything will be OK.”⁴⁰ The intelligence reports received by the Soviet leadership thus tended to reinforce, rather than to correct, their misconceptions of the outside world.

There is no more convincing evidence of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” towards the West during his first year as general secretary than his denunciation of the traditional bias of the FCD’s political reporting. The fact that the Centre had to issue stern instructions at the end of 1985 “on the impermissibility of distortions of the factual state of affairs in messages and informational reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other ruling bodies” is a damning indictment of the KGB’s subservience to the standards of political correctness expected by previous Soviet leaders.

For all their distortions, however, intelligence reports are sometimes crucial to an understanding of Soviet foreign policy. Khrushchev’s policy towards the United States, in particular the horrendously dangerous gamble of the Cuban missile bases, was heavily influenced by erroneous reports of American preparations for a nuclear first strike. The growing authority of Andropov in the 1970s and his policymaking troika with Gromyko and Ustinov is evidence of the influence of the Centre’s intelligence assessments during the Brezhnev era. The increasingly apocalyptic language used by Andropov as Brezhnev’s successor, culminating in denunciations of the “outrageous militarist psychosis” allegedly imposed on the American people by the Reagan administration, reflected, as in the early 1960s, alarmist Centre assessments of the (non-existent) threat of an American first strike.

Despite Gorbachev’s early denunciation of KGB assessments, he came to rely on foreign intelligence in reorienting Soviet foreign policy to the United States. Hence his unprecedented decision to take the head of the FCD with him on his first visit to Washington in 1987 and his disastrous subsequent appointment of Kryuchkov as chairman of the KGB. Kryuchkov’s successor as head of the FCD, Shebarshin, insists that foreign intelligence reports were by now free from past, politically correct distortions. As the Soviet system began to crumble in 1990-91, however, some of the old, anti-American conspiracy theories began to resurface. The United States and its allies were variously accused by Kryuchkov and other senior KGB officers of infecting Soviet grain imports, seeking to undermine the rouble, plotting the disintegration of the Soviet Union and training agents to sabotage the economy, administration and scientific research.⁴¹

THE SOVIET SYSTEM found it far easier to digest scientific and technological than political intelligence. While Western politics were inherently subversive of the one-party state, most Western science was not. “The achievements of foreign technology” had first been identified as a Soviet intelligence target by Dzerzhinsky in 1925.⁴² By the Second World War ST, particularly in the military sphere, was seen as crucially important. Nothing did more than intelligence on BritishAmerican plans to build the first atomic bomb to bring home to Stalin and the Centre the necessity of ST in ensuring that Soviet military technology did not fall behind the West. As in the case of nuclear weapons, the early development of Soviet radar, rocketry and jet propulsion was heavily dependent on the imitation of Western technology. Stalin, indeed, had greater confidence in Western scientists than in his own. He did not trust Soviet technological innovation unless and until it was confirmed by Western experience.⁴³

The enormous flow of Western (especially American) ST throughout the Cold War helps to explain one of the central paradoxes of a Soviet state which was famously described as “Upper Volta with missiles”: its ability to remain a military superpower while its infant mortality and other indices of social deprivation were at Third World levels. The fact that the gap between Soviet weapons systems and those of the West was far smaller than in any other area of economic production was due not merely to their enormous priority within the Soviet system but also to the remarkable success of ST collection in the West. For most of the Cold War, American business proved much easier to penetrate than the federal government. Long before the KGB finally acquired a major spy in the CIA with the walk in of Aldrich Ames in 1985, it was running a series of other mercenary agents in American defense contractors. Soviet agent penetration was accompanied by interception of the fax communications of some of the United States’ largest companies.⁴⁴ During the early 1980s probably 70 percent of all current Warsaw Pact weapons systems were based on Western technology.⁴⁵ To an astonishing degree, both sides in the Cold War depended on American know-how.

Andropov and, at least initially, Gorbachev, saw greater use of ST in nonmilitary spheres as one of the keys to the rejuvenation of the Soviet economy as a whole. The real economic benefit of Western scientific and technological secrets, though put by Directorate T at billions of dollars, was, however, severely limited by the structural failings of the command economy. The ideological blinkers of the Soviet system were matched by its economic rigidity and resistance to innovation by comparison with the market economies of the West. Hence the great economic paradox of the 1980s: that despite possessing large numbers of well-qualified scientists and engineers and a huge volume of ST, Soviet technology fell steadily further behind its Western rivals. Before Gorbachev’s rise to power, the extent of that decline was concealed from the Soviet leadership. Politically correct FCD reports dwelt overwhelmingly on the economic problems of the capitalist West rather than on those of the “Socialist” East. In a biennial report on foreign intelligence operations completed in February 1984, Kryuchkov emphasized “the deepening economic and social crisis in the capitalist world,” but made no mention of the far more serious crisis in the Soviet Bloc.⁴⁶ Even Gorbachev, in his speech to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986 calling for “new thinking” in Soviet foreign policy, claimed that the crisis of capitalism was continuing to worsen.⁴⁷

Until the closing years of the Cold War, there was an extraordinary contrast between the Kremlin’s privileged access to the secrets of state-of-the-art Western technology and its failure to grasp the nature and extent of its own economic mismanagement. Gorbachev was the first post-war Soviet leader who gained access to moderately accurate statistics on the performance of the Soviet economy. Abel Aganbegyan, his most influential economic adviser in the early years of perestroika, calculated that between 1981 and 1985 there had been “a zero growth rate.” The revelation of the extent of Soviet economic stagnation and long-term decline relative to the West had a much more profound effect on Gorbachev’s policy than the successes of ST collection against Western targets which had previously so impressed him. By the end of the decade, he had moved from trying to rejuvenate the command economy to accepting the market as the main economic regulator.⁴⁸

The conclusion of the Cold War, so far from ending Russian ST operations in the West, created new Line X opportunities through the expansion of East-West scientific exchanges and business joint ventures, which the SVR was eager to exploit. The reactivation in the early 1990s of the leading British Line X agent Michael Smith was one sign among many of the continued priority given to ST collection in the Yeltsin era.⁴⁹ For the SVR, as for the FCD, the main Line X target remained the United States. The relaxation of US security checks, in an attempt to build bridges to Moscow and Beijing, led in 1994 to a dramatic increase in the number of Russian and Chinese scientists allowed to visit the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear laboratories, as well as other institutes conducting classified research. Line X, however, has found less enthusiasm for its product than during the Cold War. The collapse of the Russian command economy left the military-industrial complex—previously the chief customer for S—in disarray. During (and perhaps even before) the Yeltsin presidency, Russian S operations seem to have been upstaged by those of the Chinese. A congressional enquiry concluded in 1999 that, over the two previous decades, China had obtained detailed intelligence on every warhead in the US nuclear arsenal.⁵⁰ There is little doubt that the phenomenal achievements of Chinese ST collection were inspired, at least in part, by the Soviet Union’s earlier success in copying the first American atomic bomb and in basing the majority of its Cold War weapons systems on Western technology.

IT IS IMPORTANT not to judge the success of KGB foreign operations by purely Western standards. The Centre had, ultimately, an even higher priority than intelligence collection in the West. The Cheka had been founded six weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power “for a revolutionary settlement of accounts with counter-revolutionaries.” In that primary role—to defend the Bolshevik one-party state against dissent in all its forms—the Cheka and its successors were strikingly successful.

From the 1920s onwards the war against “counter-revolution” was waged abroad as well as at home. The FCD’s role in combating ideological subversion has given rise, in Yeltsin’s Russia, to a curious official amnesia. Like Kryuchkov and some other former senior FCD officers, the SVR maintains that the FCD was not involved in the persecution of dissidents and the abuse of human rights. In reality, it was centrally involved. Within the Soviet Bloc the war against ideological subversion was increasingly coordinated between the internal KGB and its foreign intelligence arm.

In the immediate aftermath of the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956, and again after the destruction of the Prague Spring in 1968, many Western observers doubted whether the genie of freedom could be quickly returned to its bottle. In fact, thanks largely to the KGB and its Hungarian and Czechoslovak allies, one-party states were restored in both Budapest and Prague with remarkable speed and success. From 1968 onwards the state of public opinion in the Soviet Bloc was carefully monitored by experienced illegals posing as Western tourists and business people, who sought out, and pretended to sympathize with, critics of the Communist regimes. In reporting on the results of these “PROGRESS operations,” the FCD was franker than it would have dared to be in analyzing, for example, satirical comments by Soviet citizens on Brezhnev’s increasing physical decrepitude.

Throughout the Cold War the KGB’s war against ideological subversion was energetically waged in foreign capitals as well as on Soviet soil. Residencies in the West had standing instructions to collect as much material as possible to assist the persecution of dissidents, both at home and abroad:

Residencies were also required to target many of the dissidents’ main supporters in the West. Among the KGB’s targets in Britain was the London neurologist Harold Merskey, who had campaigned on behalf of the victims of Soviet psychiatric abuse. On September 20, 1976 the London residency posted a letter to Merskey, purporting to come from an anonymous wellwisher, warning him of an imminent attempt by unidentified assailants to cause him grievous bodily harm. Merskey, it was hoped, would become preoccupied with his own personal safety and spend less time supporting the incarcerated dissidents.⁵²

So, far from being a mere adjunct to more conventional foreign intelligence operations, the FCD’s war against the dissidents was one of its chief priorities. Among its most important operations in 1978, for example, was the attempt to ensure that the dissident Yuri Orlov did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize—as Sakharov had done three years earlier. The fact that the prize went instead to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin was claimed by the Centre as a major triumph—though, in reality, it probably owed little to KGB active measures. Suslov, the Politburo’s leading guardian of ideological orthodoxy, was woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from the Oslo resident to be told the good news.⁵³ There are few better indications of the importance attached to a piece of information in any political system than the decision to wake a minister.

Residencies also followed with anxious attention the emergence in some leading Western Communist parties of the Eurocommunist heresy which challenged the traditional infallibility of the Moscow line, and thus qualified as a novel form of ideological subversion. Among the more unusual active measures devised in the later 1970s were those designed to discredit Eurocommunist party leaders.⁵⁴

One of the FCD’s chief priorities until the closing years of the Cold War was to seek to prevent all Soviet dissidents and defectors achieving foreign recognition—even in fields entirely divorced from politics (at least as understood in the West). Enormous time and effort was devoted by the Centre to devising ways to damage the careers of Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and other defectors from Soviet ballet. ⁵⁵ By the time the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (codenamed VOYAZHER, “Traveller”) left for the West in 1974, the KGB had ceased to plan operations to cause physical injury to émigrés in the performing arts, but seems to have redoubled active measure campaigns intended to give them bad reviews in the Western media. In 1976, after Rostropovich and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, were deprived of Soviet citizenship, the Centre appealed to all Soviet Bloc intelligence services for help in finding agents to penetrate their entourage. It was outraged by Rostropovich’s appointment in 1977 as director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington—a post he was to retain until his return to Russia seventeen years later—but encouraged by an untypically critical review of his work with the orchestra in the Washington Post in May 1978. The Centre circulated the review to Western residencies as an example of the kind of criticism they were to encourage, and demanded that they inspire articles attacking Rostropovich’s alleged vanity, failure to live up to Western expectations, and—especially ironic in view of KGB active measures against him—his supposed attempts to manipulate the Western media.⁵⁶

Dissident chess players were also the targets of major KGB operations designed to prevent them winning matches against the ideologically orthodox. During the 1978 world chess championship in the Philippines between the Soviet world champion, Anatoli Karpov, and the defector Viktor Korchnoi, the Centre assembled a team of eighteen FCD operations officers to try to ensure Korchnoi’s defeat.⁵⁷ KGB active measures may well have determined the outcome of a close and controversial championship. After draws in the first seven matches, during which Korchnoi had the better of the play, Karpov refused to shake hands with his opponent at the start of the eighth. A furious Korchnoi, who was known to play poorly when angry, lost the game. After twelve games the scores were level, with Korchnoi once again appearing in better form. During the next five games, however, Korchnoi was thrown off his stride by the presence in the front of the audience of a Russian hypnotist, Dr. Vladimir Zukhar, who stared intently at him throughout the play. After seventeen games, Korchnoi was three points down. By the end of the match, he had pulled back two of his defeats but lost the championship by a single point.⁵⁸ A book remains to be written about the KGB’s involvement in Soviet chess.⁵⁹

POTENTIALLY THE MOST troublesome “ideological subversion” with which the KGB had to contend during the Cold War came from organized religion—especially Christianity, which failed to wither away as the Bolsheviks had hoped and expected. Though no other political party was allowed to exist within the Communist one-party state, Soviet rulers felt bound to proclaim a hypocritical respect for freedom of religion. By the end of the Second World War the attempt to eradicate religious practice had given way to subtler forms of persecution designed to ensure its steady decline and to discriminate against the faithful. Within the Russian Orthodox church the KGB was able to rely on an obedient hierarchy permeated by its agents. The Centre’s main problems came from other Christian churches and a courageous minority of Orthodox priests who demanded an end to religious persecution. For freedom of religion to make progress within the Soviet Union, however, persecuted Christians required strong support from the worldwide church—in particular from the World Council of Churches. They did not receive it. KGB agents in the WCC were remarkably successful in persuading it to concentrate on the sins of the imperialist West rather than religious persecution in the Soviet Bloc. In 1975 agent ADAMANT (Metropolitan Nikodim) was elected as one of the WCC’s six presidents.⁶⁰

The importance attached by the KGB to controlling religious dissent and denying persecuted Soviet Christians support from the West was fully justified by events in Poland, where SB penetration never succeeded in bringing the Catholic Church under political control. By the early 1970s the KGB had already identified Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, as a potentially dangerous opponent, unwilling to compromise on either religious freedom or human rights. Though the SB wanted to arrest him, it dared not risk the outcry which would result in both Poland and the West. Wojtyła’s election as Pope John Paul II in 1978 dealt the Polish Communist regime, and ultimately the cohesion of the Soviet Bloc, a blow from which they never recovered. During his triumphant tour of Poland in 1979, the contrast between the discredited Communist regime and the immense moral authority of the first Polish Pope was plain for all to see.⁶¹

The new freedoms of the Gorbachev era similarly went far to justifying the KGB’s earlier fears of the potential damage to the Soviet regime if political dissidents were allowed to proceed with their “ideological subversion.” In 1989, less than three years after Sakharov was freed from internal exile and allowed to return to Moscow, he established himself, as—in Gorbachev’s words—“unquestionably the outstanding personality” in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Almost all the main dissident demands of the early 1970s were now firmly placed on the political agenda.

Only when the vast apparatus of KGB social control began to be dismantled did the full extent of its importance to the survival of the Soviet Union become clear. The manifesto of the leaders of the August 1991 coup, led by Kryuchkov, which attempted to overthrow Gorbachev, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the KGB campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state:

What the plotters failed to realize was that it was too late to turn back the clock. “If the coup d’état had happened a year and a half or two years earlier,” wrote Gorbachev afterwards, “it might, presumably, have succeeded. But now society was completely changed.”⁶³ Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power of the KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. Large crowds, which a few years earlier could never have assembled, gathered outside Yeltsin’s headquarters in the Moscow White House to protect it from attack, and later circled the Lubyanka, cheering enthusiastically as the giant statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky was toppled from its plinth.

At the time the speed of the collapse of the Soviet system took almost all observers by surprise. What now seems most remarkable, however, is less the sudden death of the Communist regime at the end of 1991 than its survival for almost seventy-five years. Without the system of surveillance and repression pioneered by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, without the KGB’s immense Cold War campaign against ideological subversion, the Communist era would have been much briefer. The KGB had indeed proved to be “the sword and the shield” of the Soviet system. Its most enduring achievement was to sustain the longest-lasting one-party state of the twentieth century.

WITH THE DISINTEGRATION of the one-party state went most of the KGB’s vast system of social control. But though the power of the internal KGB directorates (reorganized successively as a security ministry, a counter-intelligence service and a security service) dramatically declined, the influence of the newly independent successor to the FCD, the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, quickly recovered. Indeed, the SVR soon became more publicly assertive than the FCD had ever been. In 1993, its head, Yevgeni Primakov, published a report attacking NATO expansion as a threat to Russian security—and he did so at a time when the Russian foreign ministry was taking a much softer and more conciliatory line. On the eve of President Yeltsin’s visit to Washington in September 1994, Primakov once again upstaged the foreign ministry by publishing a warning to the West not to oppose the economic and political reintegration of Russia with other states which had formerly been part of the Soviet Union. Primakov’s deputy, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, asserted the SVR’s right to a public voice, even if it disagreed with the foreign ministry’s: “…We want to be heard… We express our point of view as we deem necessary.”⁶⁴

The rivalry between SVR and foreign ministry during Yeltsin’s first five years as president ended in decisive victory for the SVR with Primakov’s appointment as foreign minister to replace the pro-Western Andrei Kozyrev in December 1996. Probably to the dismay of many Russian diplomats, Primakov took with him to the foreign ministry a number of SVR officers. Both as foreign minister and later as prime minister, Primakov remained in close touch with his former deputy, Trubnikov, who succeeded him as head of the SVR.⁶⁵

The SVR is also more assertive behind the scenes than the FCD dared to be. The FCD regularly swore slavish obedience to the Party leadership—as, for example, in the typically ponderous preamble to its “work plan” for 1984:

Today’s SVR has abandoned such bureaucratic sycophancy. It reports direct to the president and sends him daily digests of foreign intelligence somewhat akin to the President’s Daily Brief produced by the CIA in the United States. Unlike the CIA, however, the SVR lists policy options and does not hesitate to recommend those which it prefers.⁶⁷

How many SVR reports the ailing Yeltsin bothered to read during the final years of his presidency is uncertain. By the mid-1990s, when presented with his paperwork, he was already said to be frequently telling his long-suffering chief of staff, Viktor Ilyushin, not to bother him with “all that shit.”⁶⁸ Like Primakov before him, however, Trubnikov had direct personal access to Yeltsin. In 1998 he helped to shape Russian policy during the dispute over UN weapons inspection in Iraq. Soon afterwards he was present at the Moscow talks on Kosovo between Yeltsin and Slobodan Milošević.⁶⁹ Unnoticed by the media, Trubnikov also accompanied Primakov on a visit to Belgrade in March 1999 for further discussions with Milošević. Trough the SVR is not a supporter of Saddam Hussein or Milošević, it does not wish either to be defeated by the West.

By the mid-1990s, the internal security service (then the FSK, now the FSB) had recovered some of its former influence, though only a fraction of its previous authority. Sergei Stepashin, who became its chief in 1994, was one of Yeltsin’s closest advisers. A centrist politician with reformist credentials, he had declared in 1991, “The KGB must be liquidated.” Once head of the FSK, however, he complained that his service had been “castrated” and was demanding greater powers. His influence was clearly evident in the crisis over Chechnya. In the late summer of 1994 Stepashin persuaded Yeltsin that an attack on Grozny, the Chechen capital, would overthrow its rebellious president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, almost overnight and bring Chechnya back under direct control from Moscow. The attack was to be mounted by Dudayev’s Chechen opponents, armed and financed by the FSK. When most of the Chechen opposition pulled out of the operation at the last moment in November, however, the FSK went ahead using Russian troops instead—with (as Stepashin later acknowledged) disastrous consequences. Dudayev repulsed the initial attack and paraded captured Russian soldiers before the world’s television cameras. Though Grozny later fell to Russian forces, the Chechens mounted a determined resistance from the countryside in a brutal war which, over the next two years, cost 25,000 lives. Yeltsin’s reputation never recovered. Stepashin was sacked in June 1995 in an attempt to appease critics of the war in the Duma, but remained close to Yeltsin and was brought back into the government two years later, first as minister of justice, then in March 1998 as minister of the interior. In May 1999 Yeltsin chose him to succeed Primakov as prime minister.⁷⁰

Yeltsin caused further incredulity by declaring that Putin would be the next President. The incredulity swiftly disappeared, however, when Putin launched a brutal, full-scale attack on the breakaway republic of Chechnya which achieved far greater short-term success than Yeltsin’s offensive five years earlier. Putin’s popularity in the opinion polls soared in only three months from 2 to 70 percent. On New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin sprang his final surprise on Kremlin-watchers by stepping down from the presidency before the end of his term and announcing that Putin was succeeding him as acting president. The striking contrast between the infirm and alcoholic leadership of Yeltsin’s final years in office and the tough no-nonsense leadership style successfully cultivated by Putin during his first months in the Kremlin won him victory at the presidential elections in March 2000.

THE SVR AND FSB ARE GUARANTEED powerful roles under the Putin presidency. Neither foresees a return to the Cold War. Both, indeed, now have well-established, though little-advertised, liaison arrangements with the main Western intelligence agencies. The SVR and FSB none the less expect a continuing conflict of interest with the West.

They have good reason to do so. The collapse of the Soviet system has revealed a much older East-West faultline which has more to do with events in the fourth century AD than in the twentieth century. It follows the line not of the Cold War Iron Curtain but of the division between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity which began with the establishment of Constantinople as the New Rome in 330 and was made permanent by the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches in 1054. Though the Orthodox East was invaded by Islam and the unity of the Catholic West fractured by the Protestant Reformation, the cultural divide between East and West persisted. “From the time of the Crusades,” writes the historian Norman Davies, “the Orthodox looked on the West as a source of subjugation worse than the infidel.”⁷¹ It is precisely because the faultline is so deeply entrenched that it is so difficult to overcome.⁷² Those east European states joining NATO at the end of the twentieth century, those likely to do so early in the twenty-first and the most probable future entrants into the European Union are all on the western side of the divide.⁷³ There is still no very promising candidate in Orthodox Europe.

To most Russians, the welcome given by Western statesmen in the late 1980s to Gorbachev’s ambition of establishing Russia’s place in the “common European home” now seems hollow, if not hypocritical. “A Russia shut out and disconnected,” argued historian Jonathan Haslam, “will inevitably be troublesome.”⁷⁴ Despite Russian membership of the Council of Europe, the Russia-NATO Joint Council and other Western attempts to bridge the East-West divide, the enlargement of NATO and the planned expansion of the European Union confirm Russia’s relegation to the margins of Europe. The SVR, unsurprisingly, is resolutely opposed to both. Its opposition is strengthened by resentment at Russia’s national decline. In the space of a few months in 1989 the revolutions in eastern Europe destroyed the Soviet Bloc. Two years later Russia lost, even more suddenly, almost half the territory previously ruled from Moscow and found itself smaller than in the reign of Catherine the Great. The signs are that some—perhaps many—SVR officers share the belief of the current leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, in a long-term Western plan first to destroy the Soviet state and then to prevent a revival of Russian power. Russia’s historic mission, they believe, is to bar the way to American global hegemony and the triumph of Western values.⁷⁵

The Yeltsin presidency was far too short a period for Russia to adjust to the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Like post-war Britain, post-Communist Russia has, in Dean Acheson’s famous phrase, “lost an empire and not yet found a role.” But, whereas for Britain the loss of empire came at a time of political stability and economic recovery, in Russia it has been accompanied by economic collapse and political disintegration. Russia is in the unusual position at present of having a national anthem but little prospect of agreeing on words to go with it—one sign among many of its current crisis of national identity.⁷⁶

In the search for its own identity at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the SVR looks back to a heroic, reinvented version of its Soviet past. On December 20, 1995 it celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka’s foreign department as its own seventy-fifth birthday, and marked the occasion by publishing an uncritical eulogy of the “large number of glorious deeds” performed by Soviet foreign intelligence officers “who have made an outstanding contribution to guaranteeing the security of our Homeland.” The SVR copes with the unfortunate fact that some of its past heroes perpetrated or collaborated in the atrocities of the Great Terror by denying, absurdly, that they played any part in them. In the SVR version of the Terror, the sole involvement of foreign intelligence was to produce martyrs who “perished in the torture chambers of Yezhov and Beria.”⁷⁷ As head of the SVR, Primakov became “editor-in-chief” of a multi-volume history of Soviet foreign intelligence designed to demonstrate that Soviet foreign intelligence “honorably and unselfishly did its patriotic duty to Motherland and people.”⁷⁸ Though Primakov’s history has yet to reach the Cold War era, it is already clear that there will be no place in it for any account of FCD involvement in the persecution of dissidents and the abuse of human rights.

In 1996 the SVR issued a CD-ROM in both Russian and English, with the title Russian Foreign Intelligence: VChK [Cheka ]-KGB-SVR, which claims to give “for the first time… a professional view on the history and development of one of the most powerful secret services in the world.” The aim throughout its multimedia celebration of past successes, such as the recruitment of the Magnificent Five and atomic espionage, is to emphasize the direct links between Soviet foreign intelligence and today’s SVR. The cover of the CD-ROM depicts the statue of Dzerzhinsky which the SVR and FSB now hope to see re-erected on its former pedestal outside the Lubyanka. Nothing better illustrates the continuity between the Soviet and Russian foreign intelligence services than the attempt by the SVR to reclaim its KGB past.