Gulag

Most of those former dissidents who remained in the public eye were no longer solely focused on the fate of the Soviet Union’s remaining concentration camps. Andrei Sakharov, released from internal exile in December 1986, elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, quickly began agitating for the reform of property ownership.²⁵ Two years after his release, the Armenian prisoner Levon Ter-Petrossian was elected president of his country. A host of Ukrainians and Balts moved straight from camps in Perm and Mordovia into their respective countries’ political madhouse, agitating loudly for independence.²⁶

The KGB noticed that its political prisons were closing, of course—yet even they seemed scarcely able to understand the significance. Reading the few available official documents from the second half of the 1980s, it is striking how little the language of the secret police had changed, even relatively late in the game. In February 1986, Viktor Chebrikov, then the head of the KGB, proudly told a Party Congress that the KGB had carried out a major counter-intelligence operation. It had been necessary, he said, because “the West spreads lies about human rights violations to spread anti-Soviet aspirations among such renegades.”²⁷

Later that same year, Chebrikov sent a report to the Central Committee describing his organization’s continued battle against the “activities of the imperialist spy agencies, and the Soviet enemy elements who are linked to them.” He also bragged that the KGB had effectively “paralyzed” the activities of various groups, among them the Helsinki monitoring committees, and had even, in the period from 1982 to 1986, forced “more than 100 people to resign from the conduct of illegal activity, and to return to the path of justice.” Some of them—he named nine—had even “made public declarations on television and in the newspapers, unmasking the Western spies and those who think like them.”

Nevertheless, a few sentences later, Chebrikov acknowledged that things might have changed. One has to read closely to understand how dramatic the change actually was: “The current conditions of the democratization of all aspects of society, and the strengthening of the unity of the Party and of society, make possible a re-examination of the question of amnesty.” ²⁸

What he meant, in fact, was that the dissidents were so weak they could not do much harm anymore—and in any case they would be watched, as he had said at a previous Politburo meeting, “to be certain that they don’t persist in their hostile activity.”²⁹ In a separate statement he added, almost as an afterthought, that by the KGB’s calculation, ninety-six people were being held unnecessarily in special psychiatric hospitals. He suggested that those among them who “do not present a danger to society” should be released as well.³⁰ The Central Committee agreed, and in February 1987 it pardoned 200 prisoners convicted either of Article 70 or of Article 190-1. More were released from camps a few months later to mark the Millennium of Russian Christianity. Over 2,000 (a good deal more than ninety-six) would be released from psychiatric hospitals in the coming two years.³¹

Yet even then—perhaps out of habit, perhaps because it saw its own power waning along with the prison population—the KGB seemed strangely reluctant to let the politicals go. Because they were formally pardoned, not amnestied, the politicals released in 1986 and 1987 were at first asked to sign a piece of paper disassociating themselves from anti-Soviet activity. Most were allowed to invent their own formulas, evading apology: “Thanks to worsening health I won’t engage in further anti-Soviet activity,” or “I was never an anti-Soviet, I was an anti-communist, and there are no laws prohibiting anti-communism.” One dissident, Lev Timofeev, wrote that “I ask to be freed. I do not intend to harm the Soviet state, not that I have ever had such an intention before.” ³²

Others, however, were asked, once again, to renounce their beliefs, or ordered to emigrate.³³ One Ukrainian prisoner was released, but sent directly into exile, where he was held to a curfew and made to report to a militia station once a week.³⁴ One Georgian dissident remained for an extra six months in his labor camp, simply because he refused to put his pen to any formula the KGB could invent.³⁵ Another refused to ask formally for his pardon, “on the grounds that he had committed no crime.”³⁶