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

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:

In order to take active measures against the dissidents, it is important to know of disagreements among them, differences of views and conflicts within the dissident milieu, reasons why they have arisen, and possible ways of exacerbating them; and particulars discrediting the dissidents personally (alcoholism, immoral behavior, professional decline and so forth, as well as indications of links with the CIA, Western special [intelligence] services and ideological centers).⁵¹

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