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

One of the FCD’s chief priorities until the closing years of the Cold War was to seek to prevent all Soviet dissidents and defectors achieving foreign recognition—even in fields entirely divorced from politics (at least as understood in the West). Enormous time and effort was devoted by the Centre to devising ways to damage the careers of Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and other defectors from Soviet ballet. ⁵⁵ By the time the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (codenamed VOYAZHER, “Traveller”) left for the West in 1974, the KGB had ceased to plan operations to cause physical injury to émigrés in the performing arts, but seems to have redoubled active measure campaigns intended to give them bad reviews in the Western media. In 1976, after Rostropovich and his wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, were deprived of Soviet citizenship, the Centre appealed to all Soviet Bloc intelligence services for help in finding agents to penetrate their entourage. It was outraged by Rostropovich’s appointment in 1977 as director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington—a post he was to retain until his return to Russia seventeen years later—but encouraged by an untypically critical review of his work with the orchestra in the Washington Post in May 1978. The Centre circulated the review to Western residencies as an example of the kind of criticism they were to encourage, and demanded that they inspire articles attacking Rostropovich’s alleged vanity, failure to live up to Western expectations, and—especially ironic in view of KGB active measures against him—his supposed attempts to manipulate the Western media.⁵⁶

Dissident chess players were also the targets of major KGB operations designed to prevent them winning matches against the ideologically orthodox. During the 1978 world chess championship in the Philippines between the Soviet world champion, Anatoli Karpov, and the defector Viktor Korchnoi, the Centre assembled a team of eighteen FCD operations officers to try to ensure Korchnoi’s defeat.⁵⁷ KGB active measures may well have determined the outcome of a close and controversial championship. After draws in the first seven matches, during which Korchnoi had the better of the play, Karpov refused to shake hands with his opponent at the start of the eighth. A furious Korchnoi, who was known to play poorly when angry, lost the game. After twelve games the scores were level, with Korchnoi once again appearing in better form. During the next five games, however, Korchnoi was thrown off his stride by the presence in the front of the audience of a Russian hypnotist, Dr. Vladimir Zukhar, who stared intently at him throughout the play. After seventeen games, Korchnoi was three points down. By the end of the match, he had pulled back two of his defeats but lost the championship by a single point.⁵⁸ A book remains to be written about the KGB’s involvement in Soviet chess.⁵⁹

POTENTIALLY THE MOST troublesome “ideological subversion” with which the KGB had to contend during the Cold War came from organized religion—especially Christianity, which failed to wither away as the Bolsheviks had hoped and expected. Though no other political party was allowed to exist within the Communist one-party state, Soviet rulers felt bound to proclaim a hypocritical respect for freedom of religion. By the end of the Second World War the attempt to eradicate religious practice had given way to subtler forms of persecution designed to ensure its steady decline and to discriminate against the faithful. Within the Russian Orthodox church the KGB was able to rely on an obedient hierarchy permeated by its agents. The Centre’s main problems came from other Christian churches and a courageous minority of Orthodox priests who demanded an end to religious persecution. For freedom of religion to make progress within the Soviet Union, however, persecuted Christians required strong support from the worldwide church—in particular from the World Council of Churches. They did not receive it. KGB agents in the WCC were remarkably successful in persuading it to concentrate on the sins of the imperialist West rather than religious persecution in the Soviet Bloc. In 1975 agent ADAMANT (Metropolitan Nikodim) was elected as one of the WCC’s six presidents.⁶⁰