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

The main beneficiary of the downfall of Semichastny and the sidelining of Shelepin was Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who became chairman of the KGB. Andropov had what some of his staff called a “Hungarian complex.” As Soviet ambassador in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, he had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. When other Communist regimes later seemed at risk—in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981—he was convinced that, as in Budapest in 1956, only armed force could ensure their survival.¹¹ Since leaving Hungary in 1957 Andropov had been head of the Central Committee Department responsible for relations with Communist parties in the Soviet Bloc. His appointment in 1967 as the first senior Party official brought in to head the KGB was intended by Brezhnev to secure political control of the security and intelligence systems. Andropov went on to become the longest-serving and most politically astute of all KGB chiefs, crowning his fifteen years as chairman by succeeding Brezhnev as General Secretary in 1982.

THE FIRST GREAT crisis of Andropov’s years at the KGB was the attempt by the Czechoslovak reformers of the Prague Spring to create what the Kremlin saw as an unacceptably unorthodox “socialism with a human face.” Like Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 was an important staging post in what Mitrokhin calls his “intellectual odyssey.” Stationed in East Germany during the Prague Spring, Mitrokhin was able to listen to reports from Czechoslovakia on the Russian-language services of the BBC World Service, Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle and the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but had no one with whom he felt able to share his sympathy for the Prague reforms. One episode about a month before Soviet tanks entered Prague left a particular impression on him. An FCD Department V (“special tasks”) officer, Colonel Viktor Ryabov, said to Mitrokhin that he was “just off to Sweden for a few days,” but made clear by his expression that Sweden was not his real destination. A few days after Ryabov’s return, he told Mitrokhin there would be an interesting article in the following day’s Pravda, implying that it was connected with his mission. When Mitrokhin read the report the next day that an “imperialist arms dump” had been discovered in Czechoslovakia, he realized at once that it had been planted by Ryabov and other Department V officers to discredit the reformers.

Soon after the crushing of the Prague Spring, Mitrokhin heard a speech given by Andropov in the KGB’s East German headquarters at Karlshorst in the Berlin suburbs. Like Shelepin, Andropov spoke directly to the audience, rather than—like most Soviet officials—sticking to a prepared platitudinous text. With an ascetic appearance, silver hair swept back over a large forehead, steel-rimmed glasses and an intellectual manner, Andropov seemed far removed from Stalinist thugs such as Beria and Serov. His explanation for the invasion of Czechoslovakia was far more sophisticated than that given to the Soviet public. It had, he insisted, been the only way to preserve Soviet security and the new European order which had emerged from the Great Patriotic War. That objective political necessity, Andropov claimed, was accepted even by such unorthodox figures as the great physicist Pyotr Kapitza, who had initially shown some sympathy for the Prague revisionists. Mitrokhin drew quite different conclusions from the Warsaw Pact invasion. The destruction of Czechoslovak “socialism with a human face” proved, he believed, that the Soviet system was unreformable. He still vividly recalls a curiously mythological image, which henceforth he saw increasingly in his mind’s eye, of the Russian people in thrall to “a three-headed hydra”: the Communist Party, the privileged nomenklatura and the KGB.

After his return to Moscow from East Germany, Mitrokhin continued to listen to Western broadcasts, although, because of Soviet jamming, he had frequently to switch wavelengths in order to find an audible station. Often he ended up with only fragments of news stories. Among the news which made the greatest impression on him were items on the Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat journal first produced by Soviet dissidents in 1968 to circulate news on the struggle against abuses of human rights. The Chronicle carried on its masthead the guarantee of freedom of expression in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, daily abused in the Soviet Union.