So this is what Andropov, shortly after his appointment, wanted the Politburo to hear. A few years later, he would know better. We do not know how long it took Andropov to realize that his first deputy Semen Tsvigun, who was appointed at the same time as him with the rank of general, was in fact a Brezhnev plant, charged with keeping an eye – and reporting – on him (such were the habits of the time); and that he was not the only one.
The second document, eight years later, was produced by the fifth directorate (dealing with ideological subversion), headed by Bobkov. It was signed by the latter and likewise dealt with students’ state of mind. It began by maintaining that Western intelligence and propaganda agencies targeted Soviet youth in particular (which was not wrong), before proceeding to a statistical analysis of ‘events’ of a political nature in the student milieu in recent years: distribution of leaflets, small demonstrations, and so on. According to Bobkov, the most alarming thing was the number of young people sanctioned for heavy drinking and other ‘immoral’ habits. Some KGB observers noted that such behaviour led directly to political opposition. We do not know what Andropov thought of this document or why he had agreed to extend the fifth directorate’s remit well beyond the realm of counter-intelligence. In any event, this move was certainly to the taste of the hard-liners.
The difference in approach between the two texts is striking. Not unlike Semichastny, Bobkov lays the blame on the West and the culprits themselves; he says nothing about the system’s responsibility. Andropov submitted the report without any recommendations, listing the names of its five recipients (first among them Suslov, the ‘grey eminence’ of the Politburo). He simply attached a note indicating that the KGB intended to employ its usual methods (‘prophylaxis’ and arrests in the case of actual clandestine organizations). And the five recipients merely appended a ‘Yes’ to the document, probably indicating nothing more than ‘Yes, I have read it.’
If Andropov forwarded the report without comment, it was because its contents did not meet his wishes. However, in the book he wrote after the fall of the regime, Bobkov maintains that the KGB and the fifth directorate were often opposed to all kinds of ‘persecutions’ attributed to them by ‘uninformed’ critics.[5] They were simply obeying orders from the Politburo or party apparatus. His key argument – often heard from Andropov himself – was that, faced with the West’s intense anti-Soviet propaganda, there was a better way of responding than by simply turning the accusations back against the United States. The battle could have been won by instead recognizing the system’s weaknesses and failures and seeking to correct them. Analysts from the fifth directorate had often argued along these lines, but the leadership had brushed them aside, as if the KGB was sticking its nose in business that was none of its concern. According to Bobkov, Andropov was the only leader who actually undertook to change Soviet domestic policy radically. Fully apprised of the other side’s strategy for undermining the system, he proposed a broad strategy of counter-measures developed by scientific researchers (psychologists, military specialists, economists, philosophers). The plan was radically to alter the character of propaganda, to adopt an entirely different attitude to religion and political heterodoxy, to step up the fight against corruption and nationalist tendencies and, above all, to tackle the most urgent economic problems. The fifth directorate had carefully prepared the arguments deployed in Andropov’s report to the Politburo, ‘which could have led to a democratization of the party and state’.
Andropov presented the report at a Politburo meeting. Brezhnev, Kosygin, Mazurov, Shelepin, Shcherbitsky and even the main ideologue Suslov pronounced themselves in agreement with this dual programme of reform and a propaganda counter-offensive. Bobkov confides that he does not know whether the Politburo was serious about this, but the fact is that nothing actually happened, despite the fact that the text circulated by hand inside the apparatus. Thus it was that the only remaining card was squandered.
It is unclear why Bobkov does not date this meeting. Yet it seems unthinkable that an experienced KGB general would simply have invented such an episode. The report must be sitting in more than one archive. If true, the manoeuvre was an elegant one: table proposals for reform while making them palatable to conservatives by indicating that they also represented powerful propaganda counter-measures, in a phase of the Cold War when the Soviet Union’s position was fragile. Gorbachev’s phenomenal popularity on the world stage at the beginning of the perestroika indicated that a reforming Russia could score a big success with world opinion.
Yet either the idea was too clever given the intellectual level of Politburo members; or they were too shrewd to accept their own suicide. At all events, the KGB’s fine strategists saw their hopes vanish, leaving Bobkov to deplore the fact that those who held the trump card did not know how to play it. This event, which proved to be a non-event, confirms the uniqueness of Andropov’s profile. But it would be more convincing if we could read the famous report for ourselves.
ARRESTS AND DISSIDENTS
We now possess data on the repression of political dissidence for most of the 1960s and ’70s, and we cited some of it in chapter 15. The number of arrests and type of punishments meted out are revealing. Under Andropov, the key method was prevention: he favoured ‘prophylaxis’. This affected many people, but mass arbitrary arrests were a thing of the past. And many Russians confirm that from the 1960s onwards, the fear of the secret police and its arbitrary intrusions, familiar in Stalin’s day, had mostly faded. This in itself made dissidence and other forms of political activity more feasible.
Andropov, who knew some of the dissidents (including Roy Medvedev) personally, studied their characters, read their work, and often appreciated it. As head of political security, however, his agenda ranged far wider. His agencies had to be in a position to provide a precise map of sources of possible trouble. According to his estimates, the number of people with a potential for active opposition was in the region of 8.5 million, many of them ready to spring into action when the circumstances were right. The existence of such a potential offered some leading dissidents the chance to play a catalysing and unifying role. As far as Andropov was concerned, police methods were indispensable in confronting this – all the more so because not a few dissidents openly identified with the ‘other side’. Even so, the performance of the system was the key for him. The discrepancy between its growing needs and its ever scarcer means (not just in material terms, but also in the limited intellectual resources of its leadership) was widening. And this was true not only of the economy, but also of the system’s political foundations.