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

The importance attached by the KGB to controlling religious dissent and denying persecuted Soviet Christians support from the West was fully justified by events in Poland, where SB penetration never succeeded in bringing the Catholic Church under political control. By the early 1970s the KGB had already identified Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, as a potentially dangerous opponent, unwilling to compromise on either religious freedom or human rights. Though the SB wanted to arrest him, it dared not risk the outcry which would result in both Poland and the West. Wojtyła’s election as Pope John Paul II in 1978 dealt the Polish Communist regime, and ultimately the cohesion of the Soviet Bloc, a blow from which they never recovered. During his triumphant tour of Poland in 1979, the contrast between the discredited Communist regime and the immense moral authority of the first Polish Pope was plain for all to see.⁶¹

The new freedoms of the Gorbachev era similarly went far to justifying the KGB’s earlier fears of the potential damage to the Soviet regime if political dissidents were allowed to proceed with their “ideological subversion.” In 1989, less than three years after Sakharov was freed from internal exile and allowed to return to Moscow, he established himself, as—in Gorbachev’s words—“unquestionably the outstanding personality” in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Almost all the main dissident demands of the early 1970s were now firmly placed on the political agenda.

Only when the vast apparatus of KGB social control began to be dismantled did the full extent of its importance to the survival of the Soviet Union become clear. The manifesto of the leaders of the August 1991 coup, led by Kryuchkov, which attempted to overthrow Gorbachev, implicitly acknowledged that the relaxation of the KGB campaign against ideological subversion had shaken the foundations of the one-party state:

Authority at all levels has lost the confidence of the population… Malicious mockery of all the institutions of state is being implanted. The country has in effect become ungovernable.⁶²

What the plotters failed to realize was that it was too late to turn back the clock. “If the coup d’état had happened a year and a half or two years earlier,” wrote Gorbachev afterwards, “it might, presumably, have succeeded. But now society was completely changed.”⁶³ Crucial to the change of mood was declining respect for the intimidatory power of the KGB, which had hitherto been able to strangle any Moscow demonstration at birth. Large crowds, which a few years earlier could never have assembled, gathered outside Yeltsin’s headquarters in the Moscow White House to protect it from attack, and later circled the Lubyanka, cheering enthusiastically as the giant statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky was toppled from its plinth.

At the time the speed of the collapse of the Soviet system took almost all observers by surprise. What now seems most remarkable, however, is less the sudden death of the Communist regime at the end of 1991 than its survival for almost seventy-five years. Without the system of surveillance and repression pioneered by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, without the KGB’s immense Cold War campaign against ideological subversion, the Communist era would have been much briefer. The KGB had indeed proved to be “the sword and the shield” of the Soviet system. Its most enduring achievement was to sustain the longest-lasting one-party state of the twentieth century.

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WITH THE DISINTEGRATION of the one-party state went most of the KGB’s vast system of social control. But though the power of the internal KGB directorates (reorganized successively as a security ministry, a counter-intelligence service and a security service) dramatically declined, the influence of the newly independent successor to the FCD, the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, quickly recovered. Indeed, the SVR soon became more publicly assertive than the FCD had ever been. In 1993, its head, Yevgeni Primakov, published a report attacking NATO expansion as a threat to Russian security—and he did so at a time when the Russian foreign ministry was taking a much softer and more conciliatory line. On the eve of President Yeltsin’s visit to Washington in September 1994, Primakov once again upstaged the foreign ministry by publishing a warning to the West not to oppose the economic and political reintegration of Russia with other states which had formerly been part of the Soviet Union. Primakov’s deputy, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, asserted the SVR’s right to a public voice, even if it disagreed with the foreign ministry’s: “…We want to be heard… We express our point of view as we deem necessary.”⁶⁴