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

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: