In 1974, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov was at the height of his powers. A tall, reserved man with sparse gray hair combed back off his forehead and thick, square glasses, he had headed the Soviet secret police for seven years. He was only sixty years old, and as a present on his birthday, Brezhnev made him a Hero of Socialist Labor, the highest Soviet award. With his position secure, Andropov felt it was the right moment to update the KGB handbook when it came to dealing with Russians abroad. But first Andropov needed to get rid of a thorn in his side: a Russian writer named Solzhenitsyn.
Monday, January 7, 1974, was frosty in Moscow. The celebrations of the new year, an annual excuse to indulge in vodka and mountains of Salad Olivier—potatoes and pieces of sausage mixed with mayonnaise—were over. The deserted-looking city was slowly coming to its senses.
Perhaps nowhere was emptier than Red Square. Even in better days, it had never been a real town square. Now that the old city had largely been paved over by the modern, Communist one, Red Square was so far from most Muscovites’ daily paths that few ventured there. Usually you would find only tourists stumbling over the cobblestones.
This day was cold even for tourists. The gloomy rectangle of Lenin’s tomb and a bright green dome with a red flag peeping up from behind the high wall of the Kremlin underscored the square’s official function and its emptiness. The dome was part of the ornate, neoclassical Senate building inside the Kremlin—not visible from the square—that housed Leonid Brezhnev’s offices on the third floor. Next to it was the Politburo’s conference hall. Today, as an icy wind swept through the streets of Moscow, fourteen elderly men—members of the Politburo—had gathered there. Brezhnev had summoned them to a closed session on this new year’s day.
The Soviet head of state was angry. He called the meeting to talk about a book: “In France and the United States, our agencies reported, a new book by Solzhenitsyn is coming out soon. It’s called The Gulag Archipelago. No one has read it yet, but the content is already known—and it’s a cruel anti—Soviet libel! We have all the grounds we need to send him to jail.” He turned to his comrades, “So what are we to do about him?”
Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, had an idea ready. He wanted to throw Solzhenitsyn out of the country. Why not send Solzhenitsyn into involuntary exile? “Just like we kicked out Trotsky back then,” he said.
The ghost of Stalin’s archenemy seemed to appear in the hall as Andropov went on: “He [Solzhenitsyn] is trying to build up an organization inside the Soviet Union, hammered together from ex-Gulag prisoners.” Furthermore, Andropov added ominously, “The Gulag Archipelago is not a book; it’s a political document. And it is dangerous.”
Andropov believed that Solzhenitsyn (unlike Trotsky) would pose no serious threat from abroad. For several weeks, as the KGB and the Politburo exchanged notes on Solzhenitsyn, the KGB kept insisting that exile was the best option.
On February I3, it was finally done: Solzhenitsyn was put on a plane bound for West Germany.On February I3, it was finally done: Solzhenitsyn was put on a plane bound for West Germany. From there, he moved to Zurich, where he rented a house. The writer’s expulsion caused a major political scandal, but Andropov remained optimistic. He thought everything was under control. As had been the case with Trotsky forty years earlier, Solzhenitsyn’s inner circle had been penetrated by Soviet spies: in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn was surrounded by no fewer than four Czech intelligence agents who reported the writer’s every move to the KGB.
Solzhenitsyn managed to alienate the Western media almost immediately on his arrival in the West, thanks to his arrogant manner and harsh criticism of the West. Six months after sending Solzhenitsyn into exile, Andropov proudly reported to the Politburo that “all available information indicates that after Solzhenitsyn’s deportation abroad, interest in him in the West is steadily on the decline.”
Andropov was both right and wrong. He was right because Solzhenitsyn, who soon moved from Zurich to the United States (he established himself in remote Vermont), failed to become a mobilizing figure for the Russian émigré community. Neither did he become an adviser to the White House on Kremlin affairs. Much like Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, before him, the writer instead became a recluse on his isolated farm in the American Northeast.
But Andropov was also wrong. The Gulag Archipelago became a phenomenal success. The book—a detailed, compelling, and damning depiction of the huge network of Stalin’s concentration camps, which ranged all over the northern and eastern parts of Russia—reached far beyond the traditional audience for Soviet-themed books. Mainstream Western readers were fascinated. They weren’t the only ones. Copies of the book were also smuggled back into the Soviet Union, as the Soviet intelligentsia was eager to read it. The book was endlessly copied and disseminated through dissident channels.
Andropov was looking only for Solzhenitsyn’s (nonexistent) subversive organization; when he failed to find any traces of it, he thought he had won. But in the West, Solzhenitsyn’s presence was also seen as a huge win. The Gulag Archipelago confirmed Westerners’ very worst suspicions about the behavior of the Soviet government.
In the years to come, the KGB would continue putting dissidents in jail, finding inventive ways to lock them up for years. They also began imprisoning political dissidents in psychiatric clinics. But they didn’t entirely end the practice of throwing troublemakers out of the country. Starting with Solzhenitsyn, Andropov returned with a vengeance to a practice that had been all but abandoned after Trotsky’s exile. From 1974 to 1988, dozens of people from the Soviet intelligentsia—writers, artists, and dissidents—were kicked out of the country and stripped of Soviet citizenship.
From 1974 to 1988, dozens of people from the Soviet intelligentsia—writers, artists, and dissidents—were kicked out of the country and stripped of Soviet citizenship.It was a major shift in the Soviet secret services’ strategy, one that indicated flagging institutional health. “It was a sign of weakness, not strength,” Nikita Petrov, a leading Russian historian on the KGB and Stalin’s secret services, told us. “They simply couldn’t afford any more to do what they had done in the 1930 and 1940s, which was kill people at will.”
With more politically active people out of the country, Andropov needed to expand the KGB surveillance of the exiled. He wanted to keep tabs on political activity beyond Soviet borders. But he had another, very ambitious goal: he hoped to exploit any and all spying potential offered by the Russian emigre community, especially in the United States.
Andropov was briefed on the issue of emigre communities by someone he trusted deeply: his close associate and protege Vladimir Kryuchkov, a small, nondescript man with receding gray hair and distinctly Slavic features. Now deputy head of the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, Kryuchkov had no intelligence background. Just like Andropov, he was a Communist Party man born to a working-class family and had followed Andropov in all his career moves.
The previous autumn, in 1973, Andropov had sent Kryuchkov to America following the FBI’s arrest of a Soviet intelligence officer in Washington, DC. Kryuchkov flew to New York, where he spent almost a month. He also traveled to Washington and San Francisco and made a point of meeting with every KGB officer working in the field. All of this was very unusual for such a high-ranking KGB officer.
Kryuchkov came back to Moscow with an idea, which he presented to Andropov in December 1974. His big idea was to streamline the large, complex, and unwieldy system of KGB departments dealing with emigrants.
In the 1970s Soviet Union, the KGB was truly omnipresent. As in a crazy bureaucrat’s dream, every time a new ideological threat presented itself, the KGB formed a unit to deal with it. Everything from rock-n-roll fans to hippies generated new KGB departments dedicated to keeping these subcultures in check. This policy had been going on for decades. As a result, by the 1970s, the KGB had special units to deal with almost everything, including Jews, unruly youth, athletes, and so on.
The KGB empire also had incredible reach. It spread across every corner of the country, and each region had its own KGB department.
The challenge of Russians abroad was one the Kremlin had been facing from day one. For more than fifty years, the Soviet secret police had being launching departments and units to deal with this threat from every angle imaginable, both inside and outside the country.
By the 1970s, this scheme was complicated, to put it mildly. It looked like this:
The Fifth Directorate of the KGB, which dealt with ideological subversion, spied on dissidents. It collected compromising materials on them to use in case a dissident moved to the West, and it checked the effects of emigre publications in dissident circles. It also had officers assigned to Soviet artists, such as Baryshnikov, traveling abroad.
Within the country, the Soviet Republics departments of the KGB recruited visiting foreigners as spies and reported on the activities of prominent emigres from their respective republics, obtained through their agents in organizations like the Society for the Development of Cultural Ties with Estonians Abroad.
For foreign operations, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB also had several units dealing with emigrants. Service A, in charge of spreading disinformation abroad, made up news about prominent exiles—something they called “active measures.” Department K’s role was to run external counterintelligence, meaning addressing all kinds of threats to Soviet intelligence operations abroad, including preventing defections and unauthorized contacts with Russians abroad (the dancer Semen Kaufman was recruited by this department). The Fourth Section of Department K helped plant fake news in Western emigre magazines and newspapers, since the department ran agents embedded in emigre organizations abroad, including radio stations like Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Free Europe. To help on the spot in foreign countries, the KGB stations in the Soviet embassies—rezidenturas—had several officers whose job was to watch emigrants. They were attached to Line EM—”line” meaning area of operations, and “EM” meaning emigration—whereas gathering political intelligence was Line PR, industrial espionage was Line X, and so on.
In the United States, the picture was a bit different. Emigration was such a top priority that all political intelligence officers working at the Soviet embassy were tasked with spying on emigres.
It worked like this: In 1966, a Soviet sailor jumped off a Soviet reconnaissance warship twelve miles off the coast of California and successfully made his escape to freedom. The US Army’s Russian institute in Garmisch, Germany—always hungry for fresh refugees from the Soviet Union to supply its students (themselves diplomats and spies) with the latest information from behind the Iron Curtain—hired him as an instructor. Radio Liberty, conveniently located in nearby Munich, made him a radio host. By that time, it should be noted, Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and the Russian Service of the BBC had become much more popular in the Soviet Union and were turning into a real threat to the Kremlin’s information monopoly.
But the defector turned out to be a KGB agent run by the Fourth Section of Department K. He gathered intel on the personnel at Radio Liberty and personal details about the US diplomats and spies trained in Garmisch. When the sailor ran away again—this time back to the Soviet Union—he publicly denounced his American hosts in Germany. This part of the operation was supervised by the Fifth Directorate (ideology) and Service A (active measures).
As with every complex bureaucracy, the question was how best to coordinate all these units.
Inside Russia, the KGB had already formed a special unit, the Tenth Section in the Fifth Directorate (ideology), charged with dealing with “the centers of ideological subversion abroad,” to be a contact point between all KGB units in the Soviet Union and all units engaged with émigré groups at the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence).
After his trip to America, Kryuchkov suggested forming a contact unit in the First Chief Directorate to mirror the domestic one. He needed a coordination point for all the anti-émigré activities outside the Soviet Union.
Andropov gave it a green light and made Kryuchkov the head of the entire foreign intelligence branch of the KGB. Kryuchkov promptly set up a unit he called the Nineteenth Section, staffed with more than thirty intelligence officers.
The KGB’s preferred method was brutally simple: exploit paranoia among émigrés.The KGB’s preferred method was brutally simple: exploit paranoia among émigrés. The KGB spread rumors that either the close friends of a prominent emigrant were KGB agents or that the emigrant was a KGB agent recruited years ago back in the Soviet Union. The KGB tried this on Solzhenitsyn, too, planting disinformation that he had been recruited by the KGB in the gulag. Few believed it. Still, these tactics were considered the most effective for creating and maintaining “an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion.”
“There is no other business like it,” said Leonid Nikitenko, a former chief of the KGB’s Nineteenth Section, later the head of Department K, to his counterpart in the CIA many years later. 14 “We are politicians. We are soldiers. And, above all, we are actors on a wonderful stage.”
Following the official “de-Stalinization” of the late I950S, the KGB claimed to have broken completely with Stalin’s secret police tradition of mass repression. Moreover, Lubyanka hastened to claim to be the first victim of Stalin’s purges, citing the high number of its operatives killed and imprisoned in the gulag.
But were the KGB’s methods for dealing with emigres any different from what had been practiced from the 1920s through the1940s? The KGB still employed and was still listening to Stalin’s top spies, people like Vasily Zarubin. Indeed, Zarubin remained a respected authority for the KGB, giving lectures for the new recruits well into his retirement. When he died in 1972, Zarubin was given a state funeral, and memorial services were held inside Lubyanka at the KGB’s Central club. An honor guard was posted near his coffin, and Andropov came to pay his respects. At the funeral, Andropov walked up to Zoya, Zarubin’s daughter, and told her that the country had lost a great intelligence officer.
But what about the brutal methods perfected by Nahum Eitingon in the 1930s and 1940s, namely, assassinations and abductions? Did they fall out of fashion within the KGB? Eitingon himself was alive and well and in 196 ), when he was finally released from jail, landed a job in a publishing house that translated and pub lished foreign books. He got the job thanks to his stepdaughter, Zoya Zarubina (she was always fond of him and even tried to call Eitingon Dad, but he reminded her that she already had a father, Zarubin). But he was legitimately qualified for it; among Eitingon’s many talents was his command of many languages.
When the KGB lured a defected naval officer named Artamonov to Austria in December 1975, he was abducted on a Vienna street by KGB agents, injected with a sedative, and driven to the Austrian-Czech border.15 He died there suddenly. Some said it was a heart attack; some said poison. His fate was strikingly reminiscent of what happened to General Kutepov in 1930.
Three years later, the Bulgarian political émigré Georgi Markov was poisoned on the streets of London after a stranger pricked him with an umbrella. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the KGB provided the poison. Both operations—abducting Artamonov and supplying the Bulgarian secret services with the poison for Markov’s assassination—were arranged by Department K, a part of the vast collection of the KGB units tasked to deal with the Russians abroad.
Eitingon’s old tricks were still reliably effective in the right situation.
Andropov remained convinced that forcing prominent troublemakers out of the country was a good option. In 1976 he agreed to an unusual swap. One of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement, thirty-four-year-old Vladimir Bukovsky, had exposed the KGB’s extensive practice of using psychiatric clinics to imprison critics of the regime. As a result, Bukovsky was put in a prison camp. Now Andropov had him put on a plane to Zurich—in handcuffs all the way. In Zurich, Bukovsky was exchanged for the leader of the Communist Party of Chile. But if the KGB and Andropov believed that Bukovsky would cause them less trouble outside Soviet borders than he had within them, they greatly miscalculated.
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