In 1960 the infamous ‘political’ Article 58 was abolished, but it did not disappear completely. The new, ‘Khrushchev’ Criminal Code included separate articles on treason, espionage, terrorism, sabotage, and wrecking. But paragraph 58-10 (anti-Soviet propaganda) was transformed into Article 70: ‘Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda being carried out in order to undermine or weaken the Soviet power… and dissemination, production or keeping works of the same content in the written, printed or other form for the same purpose is punished by imprisonment from six months to seven years and an additional exile from one to five years.’ Article 72 stipulated the same punishment for being a member of an anti-Soviet organization. As before, the NKVD/MGB, now the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or State Security Committee; Table 1-1), investigated such crimes.
In 1966, after Leonid Brezhnev (Communist Party leader from 1964–82) replaced Khrushchev, Article 190-1 was additionally introduced in the code. It stated that ‘a systematic dissemination of undoubtedly false fabrications that slander the Soviet power… is punished by imprisonment up to three years’. Since the 1960s, Soviet political dissidents were sentenced mostly under Article 70 or 190-1. However, some writers and poets were tried as ‘social parasites’ (tuneyadtsy).
In 1983–84, during the short tenure of Yurii Andropov, a long-time KGB chairman before he became general (first) Party secretary (Table 1-1), a new paragraph was included in Article 70 that made financial support of political prisoners and their families from abroad a crime, and Paragraph 3 was additionally introduced in Article 188, stating that ‘intentional disobedience’ to the camp’s administration—which could be, for instance, an undone button on the prisoner’s shirt—was punished by up to five years’ imprisonment. Potentially this article meant that a political prisoner would not ever be released.
Of course, the number of prisoners sentenced in the 1960s–80s for committing ‘anti-Soviet crimes’ was small compared with the political convicts of Stalin’s time, but political charges existed until 1989, when Articles 70 and 190-1 were finally abolished. For example, in 1976 there were 851 political prisoners in labor camps and Vladimir Prison, and of those, 261 were sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 70).85 Additionally, the KGB warned up to 36,000 potential perpetrators whom it suspected of anti-Soviet activity.
The rehabilitation process stopped for a few years during Brezhnev’s time, but then it continued. By January 1, 2002, more than 4,000,000 former political prisoners had been rehabilitated. Except for a small group of Nazi collaborators like General Andrei Vlasov and his confidants, some White Russians, leaders of Soviet security services and real Nazis, all Soviet and many foreign prisoners mentioned in this book were rehabilitated. In other words, almost every serviceman, as well as most of the foreigners arrested by Soviet military counterintelligence during World War II and just after it, were innocent.
In the 1990s–2000s, there were even attempts to rehabilitate Beria and Abakumov. In May 2000, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused an application by the members of Beria’s family to overturn the 1953 conviction.86 The court ruled that Beria and his accomplices could not be politically rehabilitated because of their crimes against the Soviet people. But the court found Dekanozov, Meshik, and Vlodzimersky guilty of abuse of authority, rather than of crimes against the state covered by Article 58 of Stalin’s time, and the sentence for them was posthumously changed from death to 25 years’ imprisonment.
A few years later, following the trend of security services-affiliated historians toward glorifying Stalin and his men, a 798-page book entitled Beria: The Best Manager of the 20th Century was published in Russia.87 It not only glorifies Beria, but also tries to persuade the reader that the crimes Beria committed were necessary for the progress of the Soviet economy, winning the war against Hitler, and successfully fighting the Cold War.
During the 1990s, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation twice considered Abakumov and his co-defendants’ political rehabilitation.88 In July 1997, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court found Abakumov, Leonov, Likhachev, Komarov, and Broverman guilty of abuse of authority, but not of political crimes. In December 1997, the Presidium of the Russian Federation Supreme Court posthumously changed the death sentence for these four to 25 years imprisonment in labor camps, and rescinded confiscation of property for all defendants. Chernov was totally rehabilitated in 1992.
The historians and officers of the current FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti or the Federal Security Service) are fond of Viktor Abakumov. One of his biographers, Oleg Smyslov, called him in the press ‘a Knight of State Security’, while the politician and former KGB Major General, Aleksei Kondaurov, maintains that Abakumov was ‘one of the KGB’s most democratic leaders’.89
The legacy of SMERSH continued with the notorious KGB, which was created in 1954. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, military counterintelligence remained within the KGB. Pyotr Ivashutin, former head of one of the SMERSH field directorates, was a KGB deputy chairman between 1954 and 1956, and then, until 1963, its first deputy chairman. Sergei Bannikov, who began his career in the OO of the Baltic Fleet and then served in the SMERSH Directorate of the Navy Commissariat, headed the 2nd KGB Main Directorate (counterintelligence) from 1964 to 1967.90 Grigorii Grigorenko, one of the radio-games organizers in the 3rd SMERSH Department (he participated in 181 games), headed the same 2nd KGB Main Directorate from 1970 to 1978, and then became KGB deputy chairman, from 1978 to 1983. When Grigorenko died in 2007, an obituary in the FSB-connected newspaper Argumenty nedeli (Arguments of the Week) identified fourteen foreign spies discovered and arrested under Grigorenko’s supervision, and called him ‘a genius of Russian counterintelligence’.91
The sinister Filipp Bobkov, head of the notorious 5th KGB Directorate from 1969 to 1984, which was in charge of persecuting political dissidents, graduated from SMERSH’s Leningrad School in 1946.92 Bobkov served as a deputy, then as first deputy KGB chairman, until the end of the KGB in 1991.
During the transition of the Soviet KGB into the Russian Federation Security Ministry, the Federal Security Committee and, finally, the FSB (Table 1-1), military counterintelligence did not change much.93 In 1997, Colonel General Aleksei Molyakov, head of the FSB Military Counterintelligence Department (UVKR), told the press: ‘The situation in the Russian Federation Armed Forces is under our strong control… Military counterintelligence… has clear orders to uncover and prevent extremist and other dangerous tendencies in time… [Its] staff consists of 6,000 officers.’94 After resigning from the service, Molyakov and Lieutenant General Vladimir Petrishchev, who succeeded him as head of the UVKR in 1997 and served until 2002, joined the siloviki (‘men of power’)—a group of former highlevel KGB and military officers who became part of President Vladimir Putin’s ruling elite. Molyakov presided over the National Military Fund, which assists retired KGB/FSB and military officers, and is personally supported by Putin.