At the end of May 1962, reacting to a deteriorating supply situation, the government increased food prices and at the same time ordered factory managers to raise output norms without increasing wages. Given that kolkhoz members had just been prohibited from growing food on their private plots, Khrushchev’s popularity was at its nadir. The KGB recorded signs of growing popular discontent. At Novocherkask, in the Rostov-on-Don region, things took an especially dramatic turn. Between 1 and 3 June 1962, protest exploded in an important factory and spread to the whole city: demonstrations, blockades of trains, attacks on party and KGB offices, beating up of policemen. The local administration, party and military were paralysed: soldiers fraternized with the strikers and their officers did not issue orders to open fire. For them, as for the KGB, the situation was unheard of. But when it threatened to get completely out of control, Moscow dispatched troops and the rioting was suppressed, at the cost of twenty-three dead and numerous wounded. Many arrests and sanctions followed.[4]
Events like this were worrying, because they demonstrated that the system could break down and lose control throughout a city: the soviet officials and party secretaries were arrogant, unpopular bureaucrats who collapsed when it came to the crunch. They often had no local roots and no popular following.
Thereafter, further disorders, varying in kind and importance, required the intervention of troops. Hitherto they had not been taken too seriously, but now they were followed with particular attention and measures were adopted to prevent any recurrence. The protest movement in Novocherkask had caught the KGB unawares and unprepared, and it was reeling from its failure. The Central Committee decided to strengthen the secret police. Perhaps Khrushchev had reason to regret his policy towards the KGB and even, more generally, his anti-Stalinism.
Various documents from the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1963 allow us access to the KGB’s inner sanctum and to hear its chiefs talking, reasoning, organizing and acting. The new KGB head Semichastny reverted to the old-style repressive and aggressive attitude towards enemies. This approach, which his agencies tended to celebrate as authentically ‘chekist’, was in fact rooted in the ideology of the conservatives, shared by Semichastny when a Komsomol functionary. In July 1962 the Central Committee received a memo from a commission of seven senior officials (Shelepin, Semichastny, Ivashutin, Zakharov, Tikunov, Rudenko and Mironov – the last-named a party apparatchik with his eye on the KGB leadership). It offered a series of proposals for stepping up the struggle against anti-Soviet activities and possible mass disorder.[5] It was argued that there was no need for any new decisions; existing directives from the Central Committee and Khrushchev personally were adequate for the task. The commission of seven merely wanted to propose some supplementary measures relating to the activity of certain administrative bodies – measures that featured in draft orders drawn up by the head of the KGB and the Prosecutor General. It added that the MVD of the Russian Federation intended to create reserve units within its existing internal armed forces, to be used, should the need arise, to guard public buildings, communication centres, radio stations, banks and prisons (in case of riots), and which would be equipped with special weapons and communications systems. To this end, the MVD of the Russian Federation had presented a draft to the Central Committee office that handled the affairs of the Russian party.
This text did not wish to be alarmist. The same is not true, however, of one written by Semichastny personally and sent separately, which was much more ‘activist’. His reference to the mass disorders occurring in different parts of the country possibly conveys genuine alarm. But it might also have been intended to present himself and the KGB as more indispensable than ever. In fact the few figures he provided were scarcely alarming – especially in a country as vast as the USSR.
The Presidium of the Central Committee approved the drafts of the decisions that Semichastny and Rudenko (the Prosecutor General) were to implement in their respective domains. The KGB was authorized to recruit a further 400 agents for regional counter-intelligence services. Parts of the text were to be communicated to party secretaries at regional and district level. But only key members of the Politburo and leaders of the MVD and KGB could have sight of the whole text; local officials were to be restricted to paragraphs 1 and 3, meaning that they were not to know that the KGB was recruiting an additional 400 agents (they did not always see eye to eye with the local KGB).
This text is followed by another document, marked ‘top secret’, containing the draft of an order by Semichastny to his agents enjoining them to ‘intensify the KGB’s struggle against demonstrations of hostility by anti-Soviet elements’. It begins with a report on the period between the Twentieth and Twenty-second Congresses (1956–61). According to Semichastny, links between the KGB and the population had been strengthened, allowing for an improvement in intelligence and ‘operational activities’. ‘Prophylactic’ measures (a notion we shall return to) had also paid off However, many KGB agencies had relaxed their guard in uncovering and suppressing anti-Soviet activities. Upright citizens were with the government, on the domestic and international fronts alike, but the fact that society still harboured anti-social elements was something not to be underestimated. Influenced by hostile foreign propaganda, they were spreading malicious slanders against the party and sometimes exploited temporary difficulties to incite Soviet citizens to riot. In recent years, such disorders had included the sacking of administrative buildings, the destruction of public property, attacks on state representatives, and other such excesses. The initiators or perpetrators were mostly criminals and hooligans, but all sorts of people hostile to the regime had also emerged from the shadows – former collaborators with the Germans, for example, or members of churches and sects. Having served their sentences, all these hostile elements were moving to the south, and they might have played a prominent role in the Novocherkask events. Dealing with the situation demanded both an intensification of the struggle against the subversive activities of foreign intelligence agencies and an improvement in KGB operations against the internal enemy. Moreover, in some KGB units, agents in leadership positions, or with responsibilities for operations on the ground, were guilty of a certain complacency and were not taking the requisite measures, which should include repression.
Semichastny mentioned other chinks in the KGB’s armour. Thus, enterprises in the military–industrial complex had intelligence agencies. However, in many important enterprises deemed non-strategic, even though they were formally assigned to KGB officers, no one was actually doing the operative work. They had no secret agents and no reliable informers, with the result that the KGB received no timely information on matters of operational interest. The same was true of many higher education institutions. Furthermore, counter-intelligence units were falling down on what should be a constant preoccupation – i.e. surveillance of suspect individuals after they had served their sentences: foreign agents, members of nationalist and foreign organizations, former Nazis and their collaborators, members of churches and sects. In numerous instances, even the residence of such people was not registered, making surveillance impossible; and many of those on file had been lost sight of.
4
These details come from
5
TsKhSD, f. 89, op. 6, d. 20, LL. 1–11 contains three documents dating from 1962. Two of them belong to the category ‘Special file – Absolutely top secret: to be returned in 24 hours to the 1st sector of the General Department of the Central Committee’. The third pertains to the ‘Special file – Top secret’. Among other things, it contains an extract from minute no. 42 of the 19 July 1962 session of the Central Committee Presidium.