The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

As yet, however, Mitrokhin pinned his faith not on the overthrow of the Soviet regime but on the emergence of a new leader less tainted than Khrushchev by his Stalinist past. When, late in 1958, Serov was replaced as KGB chairman by one of his leading critics, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, Mitrokhin believed that the new leader had emerged. Aged only forty, Shelepin had made his reputation as a guerrilla commander during the Second World War. As head of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) from 1952 to 1958, he had mobilized thousands of young people from Khrushchev’s “Virgin Lands” campaign to turn vast areas of steppe into arable farmland. Though many of the new collective farms were later ruined by soil erosion, in the short term the campaign seemed a spectacular success. Soviet newsreels showed endless lines of combine-harvesters as they advanced through prairies rippling with grain and stretching as far as the eye could see.

As Mitrokhin had hoped, Shelepin rapidly established himself as a new broom within the KGB, replacing many veteran Stalinists with bright young graduates from Komsomol. Mitrokhin was impressed by the way that when Shelepin gave televised speeches, he looked briefly at his notes, then spoke directly to the viewer—instead of woodenly reading from a prepared text like most Soviet leaders. Shelepin sought to give the KGB a new public image. “Violations of socialist legality,” he claimed in 1961, “have been completely eliminated… The Chekists [KGB officers] can look the Party and the Soviet people in the eye with a clear conscience.” Mitrokhin also remembers Shelepin for an act of personal kindness to a close relative.

Like Beria before him and Andropov after him, Shelepin’s ambitions stretched far beyond the chairmanship of the KGB. As a twenty-year-old university student, he was once asked what he wanted to become. According to the Russian historian Roy Medvedev, he instantly replied, “A chief!”⁸ Shelepin saw the KGB as a stepping stone in a career which he intended to take him to the post of First Secretary of the CPSU. In December 1961 he left the KGB but continued to oversee its work as chairman of the powerful new Committee of Party and State Control. The new KGB chairman was Shelepin’s youthful but less dynamic protégé, thirty-seven-year-old Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny. On Khrushchev’s instructions, Semichastny resumed the work of pruning the archives of material which too vividly recalled the Presidium’s Stalinist past, ordering the destruction of nine volumes of files on the liquidation of Central Committee members, senior intelligence officers and foreign Communists living in Moscow during the Stalin era.⁹

Mitrokhin continued to see Shelepin as a future First Secretary, and was not surprised when he became one of the leaders of the coup which toppled Khrushchev in 1964. Memories of Beria, however, were still too fresh in the minds of most of the Presidium for them to be prepared to accept a security chief as Party leader. For most of his colleagues, Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, who had succeeded Khrushchev as First (later General) Secretary, was a far more reassuring figure—affable, lightweight and patient in reconciling opposing factions, though skillful in outmaneuvering his political rivals. By 1967 Brezhnev felt strong enough to sack the unpopular Semichastny and sideline the still-ambitious Shelepin, who was demoted from heading the Committee of Party and State Control to become chairman of the comparatively uninfluential Trade Union Council. On arriving in his spacious new office, Shelepin found that his predecessor, Viktor Grishin, had what Medvedev later euphemistically described as “a specially equipped massage parlor” in an adjoining room. Shelepin took revenge for his demotion by circulating stories about Grishin’s sexual exploits around Moscow.¹⁰