NEW LIES FOR OLD
The Communist Strategy of
Deception and Disinformation
PART TWO
The Disinformation Program
and
Its Impact on the West
13
The First Disinformation Operation:
The
Soviet-Yugoslav "Dispute" of
☭1958-60 ☭
THE YEARS 1958 TO 1960 were marked by spectacular polemics
between the Soviet and Yugoslav leaders and their party presses,
with interjections from the Albanians and Chinese. Khrushchev
himself participated with vigor. In his speech to the Seventh Congress
of the Bulgarian Communist Party held in Sofia on June 3, 1958, he
called Yugoslav revisionism a class enemy in the pay of the
imperialists and a Trojan horse in the communist movement. "Some
theoreticians," he said, "exist only because of the alms they receive
from imperialist countries in the form of leftover goods. . . . The
revisionists are trying to bore at the revolutionary parties from within,
to undermine their unity and introduce disorder and confusion in
Marxist-Leninist ideology [shouts of They won't succeed']."1
The existence of a Soviet-Yugoslav dispute was, to all appearances,
confirmed by the boycott of the Seventh Congress of the Yugoslav
party by the communist parties of the bloc, by further Soviet criticism
of the Yugoslav party's program and foreign policy, and by the
exclusion of Yugoslavia from the Eighty-one-Party Congress in
November 1960, which condemned revisionism. However, the true
picture of Soviet-Yugoslav relations, revealed by inside information
supported by much open evidence, is very different.
Yugoslavia's Final
Reconciliation with the Bloc
After Stalin's death the Soviet leaders made a major effort to
achieve a reconciliation with the Yugoslav leaders in order to win Yugoslavia back from the West and return her to the communist
camp. Official secret negotiations between Tito and Khrushchev in
1955 and 1956 led to a full reconciliation in state relations and a
partial reconciliation in party relations, but the process of
reconciliation was interrupted by the Polish and Hungarian uprisings
of 1956. The initial and generally sympathetic attitude of the Yugoslav
leaders toward the Poles and Hungarians during these uprisings,
and Tito's attacks on such Stalinist leaders in Eastern Europe as
Hoxha, contributed to the surge of nationalism and revisionism in the
bloc and to Hungary's short-lived break with the Soviets. The Soviets
recognized the dangers of Yugoslav revisionist influence in Eastern
Europe, and therefore resumed their general criticism of Yugoslavia
while continuing their efforts to split her away from the West.
Although the exchanges of criticism between the Soviets and
Yugoslavs intensified immediately after the Hungarian uprising, the
leaders on both sides were always careful to leave the door open for
subsequent meetings and discussions. After Khrushchev had defeated
the anti-party group at home in June 1957, he renewed his efforts to
return Yugoslavia to the bloc. This time he was successful. A complete
reconciliation between the Yugoslav leaders and the Soviet and other
bloc leaders was achieved. According to TASS, Kardelj and
Rankovic, while on holiday in the Crimea, visited Moscow for
"comradely" meetings with Khrushchev; the Albanian leader, Hoxha;
and the Bulgarian leader, Zhivkov, in July.
On August 1-2, 1957, Tito, Kardelj, and Rankovic met Khrushchev
and Mikoyan in Bucharest for a confidential conference on "socialist
solidarity." A statement issued after the conference affirmed their joint
determination to improve relations and cooperation on a basis of
equality. Moscow radio reported that agreement on "concrete forms of
cooperation" had been reached. The major implication of the Soviet-Yugoslavian
reconciliation was that the grounds for the continuation
of their old feud vanished.
It is clear from Yugoslavia's actions in the following months that
she had in fact realigned herself with the communist bloc, including
China. In September 1957 there were four strong indications of this: a
Yugoslav delegation led by Vukmanovic-Tempo was welcomed in
Peking; Yugoslavia blocked a United Nations resolution condemning
Soviet intervention in Hungary; Yugoslav representatives attended a session of Comecon; and Tito, together with
Gomulka, publicly repudiated "national communism." Said Tito, "We
think it wrong to isolate ourselves from the great possibilities of
strengthening socialist forces throughout the world." In October the
Yugoslavs honored the commitment they had made to the Soviets in
1955-56 to recognize East Germany. In June 1958 Tito tacitly
assented to the execution of the former Hungarian premier, Imre
Nagy, whom the Yugoslavs had earlier betrayed to the Soviets.
The Yugoslavs secretly attended the first post-Stalin conference of
bloc communist parties in November 1957 and openly attended the
congress of sixty-four communist parties that followed it. Significantly
the Yugoslav delegation to both conferences included Kardelj, who
had been a Yugoslav representative to the Cominform; Ranko-vic,
who was responsible for the Yugoslav security service; and Vla-hovic,
who was responsible for relations with communist and socialist
parties. At the bloc conference Stalin's mistrust of other parties and his
interference in their affairs were condemned. New relations between
the leaders and parties of the bloc were established, based on Leninist
principles of equality and cooperation. Yugoslavia signed the Peace
Manifesto of the sixty-four communist parties, but not the declaration
of the bloc communist parties. The absence of Yugoslavia's signature
from the bloc declaration contributed to Western acceptance of the
subsequent Soviet-Yugoslav dispute as genuine. However, in his
lecture at the KGB Institute in December 1957, General Kurenkov
made it clear that the Yugoslavs fully agreed with the declaration but
had abstained from signing it because they had reached a secret
understanding with the Soviets that it would be tactically
advantageous for them not to sign.
Among the decisions of the conference to which the Yugoslavs
secretly gave their support was the decision to formulate a long-range
policy for the bloc. The agreement that the Yugoslavs should not sign
the declaration established the pattern of secrecy and deception
subsequently used to conceal Yugoslav collaboration in the
formulation and adoption of the long-range policy and paved the way
for Yugoslav participation in a joint disinformation effort in support
of that policy.
From conversations in 1959 with Colonel Grigorenko,2
the deputy
head of the KGB's disinformation department, the author learned that there were consultations and agreements between the
Soviets and Yugoslavs in late 1957 and early 1958 on political
cooperation between them within the framework of the long-range
policy. The agreements covered cooperation in three fields: in diplomacy,
particularly with regard to Egypt and India, and Arab and Asian
countries generally; in dealings with Western socialists and trade
unionists; and in the field of disinformation.
According to Grigorenko, early in 1958 the Presidium of the
CPSU's Central Committee had given instructions to Pushkin, the
head of the party's newly created Department of Active Operations, to
prepare disinformation operations on Soviet-Yugoslav relations in
accordance with the requirements of bloc policy.3 This instruction
preceded the outbreak of the dispute in April 1958.
The dispute manifested itself mainly in the Soviet and Yugoslav
party presses. Since in both cases the party press was under the full
control of the party apparatus, such a dispute was easy to manufacture
and easy to control. Nevertheless, it was clear at an early stage that, in
order to capitalize on the operation and build for the future, new
assets, channels, and forms of action would have to be developed in
coordination with the KGB. This explains why, according to
Grigorenko, the Central Committee decided to use, from the end of
1959 onward, both the Department of Active Operations and the
KGB's disinformation department to widen the scope of this particular
operation. As a consequence of this decision, Shelepin issued
instructions that a special group should be formed in the KGB's
disinformation department under Grigorenko to work in cooperation
with the Department of Active Operations on the one hand and with
the Yugoslav and Albanian security services on the other.
Open Evidence of
Yugoslav Participation in
the
Formulation of the Policy
Evidence that Yugoslavia accepted the application of Lenin's
concepts and the lessons of the NEP period as the basis for the new
bloc policy is to be found in the speeches and writings of Tito and
Kardelj during the period of the formulation of the policy (from 1958
to 1960).
So much Western attention was focused on the polemics between
Tito and Khrushchev in mid-1958 that the crucial statements in Tito's
speeches, which are fundamental to an understanding of the actual
state of Soviet-Yugoslav relations, were overlooked. Tito frequently
referred to the relevance of the NEP. For example, in his speech at
Labin, Yugoslavia, on June 15, 1958, in reply to Khrushchev's
criticisms of Yugoslavia for accepting American aid, Tito said: "The
Americans began to furnish aid to us after 1949, (as they did to the
Soviet Union in 1921 and 1922) not that socialism might win in our
country . . . but because on the one hand, we were threatened with
famine and, on the other hand, Yugoslavia could thus more easily
fight off Stalin's pressures and preserve her independence. And if
perhaps some American circles cherished other hopes, this was not
our concern."4
Tito committed himself to a new and broader concept of socialist
internationalism that served to protect and support not just the Soviet
Union as in the past, but all the communist countries and parties and
socialist and other progressive movements.
On relations between the socialist countries, Tito said that there
was a "new confidence and sincere exchange of opinions and experiences
on the basis of which broad cooperation is developing." Yugoslavia
could play a more useful role outside the bloc than in it. As Tito
put it in his Labin speech: "Refusal to sign the Moscow Declaration
and to join the socialist camp does not mean that we are not for the
greatest co-operation with all socialist countries. It means, on the
contrary, that we are for such co-operation in all fields but that in the
present tense international situation we believe it is more useful to
follow a constructive peace policy, together with other peace-loving
countries which also do not belong to either bloc, than to join the bloc
and thus still more aggravate a world situation which is tense enough."
In other words, by remaining formally outside the bloc, Yugoslavia
could contribute more effectively to the furtherance of the objectives
of the common long-range Leninist policy.
Equally illuminating on the true nature of Yugoslavia's relationship
with the bloc policy is Edvard Kardelj's book Socialism and War,
published in Belgrade in 1960 shortly before the Eighty-one-Party
Congress. The book attracted the attention of Western analysts at the
time because of its polemics against China. In it Kardelj gives an able
exposition of the policy of "active coexistence,"a concept very close to Khrushchev's "peaceful coexistence,"
and takes the Chinese to task for their negative attitude toward this
concept and their opposition to the thesis (again propounded by
Khrushchev) that war is not inevitable despite the continuing existence
of imperialism. The West focused on this aspect of Kardelj's
book and failed to understand the significance of his recommendation
that differences between communists should be analyzed in terms of
their substance, not in terms of the verbal polemics between them.
The West also failed to appreciate Kardelj's numerous references to
Lenin's doctrines, including clear, if not explicit, references to Left Wing
Communism, An Infantile Disorder, and to the experience
gained during Lenin's NEP in the use of concessions, diplomatic
agreements with adversaries, and various other tactics; in other words,
to the same historical sources that were used during 1958-60 in the
formulation of the new bloc policy and international communist
strategies.
The implications of the references to Lenin by the Yugoslav leaders
in defining their position cannot be ignored. They clearly establish
that Tito and Kardelj regarded a return to Leninism and the use of
activist diplomacy and tactics in conditions of "peaceful coexistence"
as the most effective way of undermining the nations of the West and
changing the world balance of power in favor of the communist
countries. Their statements are not only compatible with the long range
policy; they are a clear expression of many of the most
important elements in it. They are important evidence that Yugoslav
policy and bloc policy as they developed between 1958 and 1960 were
identical and had a common source of inspiration in the historical
experience of Lenin and his NEP. They also suggest that the Yugoslav
leaders made significant contributions to the long-range policy and
communist strategy. The possibility should not be excluded that
communist strategists from other bloc countries contributed to
Kardelj's book. His and Tito's ideas were solidly based on Leninist
ideological doctrine, not on the form of revisionism the Yugoslavs had
practiced during the Tito-Stalin split. Their concept of active
coexistence was but one of the variety of tactics, including
Khrushchev's variant of "peaceful coexistence" and Mao's tactic of
protracted revolutionary war, approved by the Eighty-one-Party
Congress of November 1960. The fact that Tito and Kardelj were
developing these ideas during 1958-60 in itself exposes the unreality of their alleged dispute with the Soviets during
that same period; it confirms the validity of the inside information on
secret Soviet-Yugoslav cooperation.
The tactic of publishing Kardelj's book on the eve of the Eighty one-Party
Congress, which approved the long-range bloc policy and
strategy for the communist movement, recalled Lenin's tactic of
publishing Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder on the eve
of the Soviet adoption of the NEP and just prior to the adoption of
new tactics by the Second Congress of the Comintern.
A vague admission of the Soviet-Yugoslav cooperation against
imperialism over questions on which their positions coincided was
made by Khrushchev in his report to the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress
in January 1959.5
Although the official History of the C.P.S.U,
published in Russian in 1959, criticized the Yugoslav leaders for their
refusal to attend the bloc conference in November 1957 and castigated
the Yugoslav party program of 1958 as revisionist,6
it also said that
normal relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia had been restored
on the C.P.S.U's initiative and that the C.P.S.U's policy of friendship and
mutual assistance had triumphed.7
The reconciliation with Yugoslavia in 1957-58 went far beyond the
bounds envisaged by the Soviets in 1955-56. It covered the Yugoslav
leaders' relations not only with their Soviet opposite numbers, but also
with the Albanians, Bulgarians, Chinese, and all the other bloc
leaders. The Yugoslav leaders, in fact, voluntarily surrendered their
ideological and political independence to the bloc at the conference of
bloc parties in November 1957. This became possible for them
because the conference adopted a resolution, which Kardelj and
Rankovic no doubt helped to draft, permitting the bloc parties to
pursue their own national roads to socialism, provided that they
followed the basic principles of Marxist revolution and construction
of socialism.
Confirmation that all the bloc parties agreed that, for tactical
reasons, Yugoslavia should not sign the main declaration of the
conference is provided by the fact that, after the conference was over,
there was no condemnation of Yugoslavia's refusal to sign by the bloc
parties either individually or collectively. Indeed, since November
1957 the real state of relations among all the leaders of the bloc has
been excellent and there has been no basis for any serious disputes
between them.
The true relationship between Yugoslavia and the rest of the bloc
during the period 1958-60 was revealed in November 1960 when the
Eighty-one-Party Congress (which continued to recognize Yugoslavia
as a socialist country) publicly approved, as its most fundamental and
crucial decision, a policy Manifesto that not only incorporated Tito's
concept of broad international solidarity, so heavily criticized by the
Soviets in 1958, but also Kardelj's recommendations on the revival of
Lenin's activist policies and tactics during a period of "peaceful
coexistence" and the use of the historical experience of the NEP to
facilitate the construction of socialism.
There was, of course, no public recognition of the Yugoslav contribution
and the authors of the Manifesto were not named. In fact the
congress officially announced that the Yugoslavs did not participate in
the proceedings. "Yugoslav revisionism" was condemned in general
terms in the Manifesto. Nevertheless, the evidence of secret
agreements entered into between Yugoslavia and the rest of the bloc
in November 1957, coupled with the arguments above, points to the
conclusion that Yugoslavia's apparent non-participation in the congress
in November 1960 was again no more than a tactical maneuver. The
likelihood is that Yugoslavia agreed secretly in advance to the draft
resolutions of the November 1960 congress and that the bloc as a
whole agreed that its interests would best be served by Yugoslavia
continuing to appear to be an independent, nonbloc country.
Further Anomalies in the "Dispute"
Detailed examination of the Soviet criticisms of Yugoslavia and the
course of the 1958-60 dispute against the background of the genuine
Tito-Stalin split throws up a number of further points that either cast
additional doubt on the authenticity of the later dispute and confirm
that it was a disinformation operation or help to illustrate the
disinformation technique used in it and the purposes the operation was
intended to serve.
The dispute opened in the spring of 1958 with criticisms in the
Soviet press of the draft of the new Yugoslav party program, which
included a statement about Yugoslavia's road to socialism. In fact the
statement was fully in accord with the resolutions of the November 1957 conference of bloc communist parties. Consequently,
Soviet criticism of it was not only strange, inconsistent, and
unjustified, but contrary to the endorsement specifically given by the
bloc parties of different national roads to socialism, provided that
certain basic principles, such as the leading role of the communist
party, were upheld. Later on, Khrushchev and Tito directly and
indirectly admitted that Soviet criticism of the Yugoslav program was
unfounded. In his report to the Twenty-first CPSU Congress in
January 1959, Khrushchev said: "Questions of the methods and
practice of socialist construction are the domestic affair of each
individual country. We have no controversy with the Yugoslav leaders
on the establishing of workers' councils or other matters of their
domestic affairs. When the Declaration of the Conference of the
representatives of the Communist and Workers' Parties of the Socialist
Countries was being signed there were no arguments and no
controversies on such matters."8
Thus Khrushchev repudiated the
earlier Soviet criticisms of Yugoslavia's "road to socialism," but not
before the attention of Western analysts had been successfully
diverted by the polemics from what was really going on inside the
bloc at that time.
Soviet criticism of Yugoslavia for failing to support socialist solidarity
was equally unfounded. Yugoslavia's recognition of East Germany
and expressions of solidarity with the East German Communist
party and its leader, Ulbricht, demonstrated that Yugoslavia honored
the promises of support that had been secretly given to the Soviets. It
is noteworthy that neither the Soviets nor the Yugoslavs revealed
during the 1958 polemics that they had reached this secret
understanding.
Officially, the Yugoslav party congress in April 1958 was boycotted
by the rest of the bloc. But the boycott was strangely incomplete
because, although official party delegations from the bloc did
not attend, ambassadors from the bloc countries were present as
observers.
There is room for considerable doubt about the reality of the
economic pressure allegedly applied by the Soviets to the Yugoslavs
following the 1958 dispute. The Soviets did not cancel agreements or
sever economic relations, as they did when Stalin split with Tito.
Trade, technical cooperation, and cultural exchanges continued. The
Soviets did not cancel their 1956 credit commitments, deny them in principle, or arbitrarily delay the fulfillment dates.
Rather, they suggested that there should be discussions about delaying
the fulfillment dates from 1957-64 to 1962-69 and 1963-69. In
December 1958 negotiations on Soviet-Yugoslav trade began in
Moscow, and in April 1959 a cultural cooperation program was
signed in Belgrade. In January 1960 the Yugoslav leader Vukmanovic-Tempo
met Khrushchev in Moscow. At the same time the Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia signed a scientific cooperation protocol.
Criticism of Yugoslavia for lack of revolutionary ardor helped to
distract attention from the active support later given by Yugoslavia to
liberation movements, especially in Africa.
Criticism of Tito for accepting American aid preceded by only a
matter of months Soviet attempts to obtain for themselves a two billion-dollar
credit from the United States for industrial modernization.
Tito pointed out the inconsistency himself in April 1959,
referring to Mikoyan's visit to the United States in the previous
January.
Although Yugoslavia's position in the United Nations appeared to
vacillate between support for the United States and support for the
Soviet Union, on vital issues such as the German treaty (in February
1959), colonialism, disarmament, reorganization of the structure of
the UN, and the seating of communist China, Yugoslavia consistently
supported the Soviet position. There were therefore sound reasons for
Gromyko to say that the Soviets' relations with the Yugoslavs were
"good" and that, on major issues, their positions coincided.9
Comparison of the dispute of 1958 with the split of 1948 shows
how superficial the later differences were. The 1958 dispute failed to
gather momentum. There were no clear breaches in political,
economic, or cultural relations. Yugoslavia was not isolated politically
by the bloc. Military action was not threatened against her nor
was an economic boycott imposed. There were no major changes in
diplomatic representation between Yugoslavia and the rest of the
bloc. Exchanges of delegations between them continued. Yugoslavia
asked to be admitted to the Comecon meeting in April 1959, but was
allegedly refused an invitation. Nevertheless, in the same month a
program of cultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia was signed in Belgrade.
Since details of protocol have often been cited by Western analysts
in support of the existence of splits in the communist world, it is
worth mentioning that, despite the existence of an alleged dispute,
Khrushchev, while on his way to Albania, sent a greetings telegram to
Tito on May 26, 1959, which Tito acknowledged on the following
day.
The final inconsistency in the dispute was the manner of its ending.
For no apparent reason there was a sudden improvement in Soviet-Yugoslav
relations in 1960, accompanied by closer diplomatic
cooperation. An open reconciliation followed in 1961. The
controversial Yugoslav party program, which Khrushchev and the
Soviet press had criticized so vigorously in 1958 and 1959 and which
the Yugoslavs had so obstinately refused to modify, ceased to be an
obstacle to good relations in 1960 and 1961.
To sum up, open, official information from communist sources
confirms the validity of the inside information on secret Soviet-Yugoslav
agreements and leads to the conclusion that the Soviet-Yugoslav
dispute of 1958—60 was not a repetition of the genuine Tito-Stalin
split, but the calculated product of a joint Soviet-Yugoslav
disinformation operation in support of the long-range bloc policy to
the formulation of which both sides to the dispute had made their
contribution.
Once the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute of 1958-60 is seen to have been
artificial and once the polemics between the leaders are recognized as
having been no more than shadowboxing conducted by agreement
between them for the benefit of external observers, the explanation of
other aspects of the controversy becomes clear. For example, in
response to Chinese attacks on Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav press
criticized the Chinese communes; then, in December 1958,
Khrushchev revealed to the late Senator Hubert Humphrey that there
were differences between the Soviets and Chinese on the subject of
the communes. The following month, in addressing the Twenty-first
C.P.S.U Congress, Khrushchev repudiated his own remarks and accused
the "Yugoslav revisionists" of disseminating all sorts of inventions
about differences between the C.P.S.U and the C.P.C. As he put it: "And
now the Yugoslav revisionists have taken this fabricator [Humphrey]
unto themselves as a witness." Anticipating to some extent the
argument of later chapters, this incident can be seen as a good
example of disinformation technique.
First, Western interest was aroused in nonexistent Sino-Soviet differences
by a statement at the highest level. Then, Khrushchev's
repudiation of his own statements drew further attention to them and
suggested that they must indeed have represented a serious
indiscretion on his part, which he was at pains to cover up. Apart from
its significance in the Sino-Soviet context, the incident provided a
further artificial issue with which to fuel an agreed-upon, controlled
dispute between the Soviets and Yugoslavs; it was an instance not of
antagonism between them, but of cooperation in fulfillment of their
secret agreement to collaborate in the disinformation field.
Objectives of the Soviet-
☭Yugoslav Dispute of 1958-60☭
The first objective of staging the dispute of 1958-60 was to conceal
the true degree of reconciliation between the leaders of Yugoslavia
and the other bloc countries. The reasons for concealment were
twofold; bearing in mind the anti-Soviet stance taken up by
Yugoslavia in the last five years of Stalin's life and Yugoslav sympathy
with the Polish and Hungarian rebels in 1956, a sudden, open
reconciliation with Yugoslavia in 1958 could have had adverse
consequences elsewhere in the bloc, which it was particularly important
to avoid during the formulation of a new long-range policy.
Bearing in mind also the strength of nationalist feeling in the Yugoslav
population and in the Yugoslav party itself, an open surrender by
the Yugoslav leaders to the bloc and to the requirements of its long range
policy could have caused them severe problems with both their
followers and their opponents inside Yugoslavia.
The second major objective was to prepare the Yugoslav leaders for
a special strategic role by building up their image as independents. In
the advanced countries this was calculated to help the leaders to use
their relations with European socialist and trade union leaders to
promote the formation of united fronts between socialist and
communist parties and, in the longer term, to contribute toward the
dissolution of military pacts with the United States and toward the
neutralization of Western Europe and Japan. In the developing
countries it was calculated to gain acceptance for the Yugoslavs as
genuine neutralist leaders of the nonaligned movement, which in the long run they would be able to influence and turn against
the West. Subsidiary objectives were:
• To pin the revisionist label firmly on the Yugoslav party and to identify its policies and doctrines as one extreme of a variety of different brands of communism.
• At a later stage, to project Khrushchev and the Soviet leaders as veering toward Yugoslav revisionism and thereby to assist Soviet activist, detente diplomacy in its dealings with the advanced countries.
• To gain experience, to provide support, and to create a favorable atmosphere for the development of other disinformation operations, along similar lines, on Soviet-Albanian and Sino-Soviet splits and, at a later stage, on Romanian independence.
It is true that there is and, on a varying scale, always has been a private market in the Soviet Union in which collectivized peasants and some private individuals have sold the agricultural produce grown on their lots. In the N.E.P period, when private ownership and private enterprise were permitted, this private market reached its post revolutionary zenith. With the ending of the N.E.P and the collectivization of agriculture, it shrank to insignificant proportions. During and after the Second World War, it revived again for a short period, only to be drastically curtailed in the last years of Stalin's rule. Since his death, with the new emphasis on incentives and the abolition of deliveries of goods to the State by farmers from their private lots, the private market has once more grown in scale. It now exists in two principal forms: the main market, in the cities where collective farmers and some private individuals sell their agricultural produce; and a small black market, especially in Moscow and Leningrad, in which illegal transactions in currency and goods take place between Soviet speculators and foreign diplomats and visitors.
The growth of the main market has been strictly limited because the introduction of greater incentives for farmers and other workers was not accompanied by the legalization of private enterprises; the emphasis throughout has been on increasing production and efficiency not in private enterprises, but in collective farms and state-owned industries and trading enterprises. There can be no significant widening of the private market in healthy competition with the state sector unless private ownership and enterprise are reintroduced. The Soviet government shows no sign of doing this; on the contrary, the regime maintains its hostile attitude to private ownership and the ultimate objective of party policy is still the total extinction of the private sector.
As for the black market, it is, as foreign diplomats know, extremely limited and illegal. What is less widely known is that it is secretly controlled and actively exploited by the Anti-contraband Department of the KGB. Significantly this department was created in 1959 on the lines of a similar department set up in the GPU during the N.E.P period. Its function is to control the activities of domestic speculators and foreign businessmen and to blackmail and recruit as agents members of the diplomatic colony and other foreign visitors who engage in illicit transactions. The head of this new department, Sergey Mikhaylovich Fedoseyev, was so successful in recruiting foreigners, including Americans, that in 1961 he was promoted to be Chief of the American Department, responsible for the recruitment of officials of the US Embassy in Moscow.
Tendencies toward private enterprise have existed in the Soviet Union since the revolution. Arrests of embezzlers and speculators who have enriched themselves at state expense have not always been reported. If in the period 1959-62 such arrests were given wide publicity, this did not indicate, as some Western observers believed and as the Soviet regime wished them to believe, that capitalism in the Soviet Union was reviving; on the contrary, it indicated that the regime was stepping up its traditional ideological policy of eliminating the "remnants of capitalism" while at the same time promoting the myth that capitalism was being restored.
Since the end of the 1950's a measure of industrial reorganization has been in progress. Greater powers of initiative have been given to local economic management without weakening central control. Local councils of people's economy have been created. The authority of economic officials has been enhanced.
In Western terminology, these officials are described as "technocrats," who are said to be increasingly taking over control. But what Western observers largely ignore is that these so-called technocrats are in reality party members who, having received industrial or other specialized training, are applying the party line in their place of work. Through them the party exercises a more efficient control over Soviet industry, which, despite the appearance of recent changes, is now more comprehensively planned and more effectively coordinated than before.
From 1962 onward there was a protracted debate in the official Soviet press on the introduction of the profit motive, on the concept of a market-regulated economy, and on the creation of a trust system in industry. The Soviet economist Professor Liberman played a prominent role in the debate.1 According to Liberman, factories should be given no more than basic production plans, which should be based mainly on commercial orders. Within the framework of the basic plan, factories should be free to determine their own wages, costs, and profits. A proportion of the profits should be paid into an incentive fund, which would pay bonuses to managers and workers. The introduction of state trusts that would function on a profit basis was encouraged by the government. In fact some trusts of this kind were created from 1962 onward; for example, small shoe factories were combined experimentally into one complex in the firm Progress in Lvov, and other trusts were set up in Gorky and elsewhere.
The resemblance of these reforms to capitalism is only superficial. Their effect has been to strengthen, not to weaken, party control over industry. The fundamental differences between the Soviet and capitalist systems in their basic objectives, their principles of ownership and management, and the distribution of national income and political power remain. The emphasis in the Soviet capital investment program is still on heavy industry and especially on armaments, including military satellites and nuclear missiles.
It should be noted that the economic reforms reflected to some extent the experience of the N.E.P. Some of Liberman's ideas, as well as the creation of trusts in industry, were directly modeled on the N.E.P pattern, but in fact the changes of the 1960's were less far-reaching than those of the 1920's. Private ownership of enterprises was not reintroduced after 1960; agriculture remained collectivized. Such reforms as were carried out in the 1960's and 1970's did not signal a fundamental change in the regime; they were carefully calculated steps taken by the regime within the framework of its long-range policy. Their object was not to change the nature of the system, but to stabilize it by making the economy more efficient and party control more effective.
There are, in short, fewer objective grounds for concluding now that the economic nature of the regime has been evolving since 1960 in the direction of capitalism than there were in the N.E.P period. In the 1960's and 1970's, however, the same technique has been used as in the 1920's to exaggerate and misrepresent the nature of such changes as have occurred to suggest a weakening of ideological influence and a tendency toward the restoration of capitalism.
The KGB has played an active part in this misrepresentation. For example, the confessions of an underground millionaire were supplied to Izvestiya by the KGB at the personal instigation of Shelepin. A more widespread KGB technique has been used to influence directly the opinions of visiting Western tourists, businessmen, scholars, and correspondents. For instance, Western economists who visit the Soviet Union naturally wish to meet their Soviet colleagues. It is normal practice for the latter to clear such meetings in advance with the party and the KGB. They are then briefed on the line to be taken in "frank" discussions with their Western colleagues on the faults in the Soviet system and the direction in which it is evolving.
Given that there has been no restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, Chinese and Albanian charges to this effect in their polemics with the Soviet leaders in the 1960's were unfounded and can therefore be seen as part and parcel of an agreed bloc disinformation effort carried out in accordance with the long-range policy decisions reached, with Chinese and Albanian participation, in the period 1958- 60.
A more tolerant attitude was ostensibly adopted toward religion. The Chairman of the Directorate for Affairs of the Orthodox Church, a KGB official named G. Karpov, was replaced by Kuroyedov, a former secretary of a party provincial committee. More religious leaders were allowed to travel abroad.
A more liberal attitude was adopted toward writers, scientists, and other creative workers. There were occasional, apparently independent and spontaneous, expressions of public opinion. Unofficial critical comments about the regime were sometimes published. While traditional socialist realism in art continued to receive official encouragement, well-publicized exhibitions of abstract painters were held in Moscow. They were roundly criticized by Khrushchev. As in painting, so in literature; alongside traditional hard-line writing, certain well-known Soviet poets and authors published controversial material in the Soviet and foreign press. Some were harassed and punished in consequence. A Yevtushenko poem including criticism of Stalin was published in the Soviet Union. So was Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a description of life in a Soviet prison by an author who had himself been a prisoner under Stalin. Works by other former prisoners, such as Dyakov and Georgiy Shelest, appeared in the early 1960's. More Soviet tourists traveled abroad, including writers who made critical and controversial comments about the regime. Some were allowed to leave the Soviet Union permanently. Within the Soviet Union the well-known writer Kochetov emerged as the leader of the "conservative" wing of the writers' union, while the late poet Tvardovskiy, who sponsored Solzhenitsyn's writings, led the "liberals." The liberals were joined by the poets Yevtushenko and Voznesenskiy, also by prominent scientists and other dissidents.
With the help of these apparently more liberal official attitudes, the image of the Soviet Union presented to the outside world was changed; the political fundamentals of the regime were not. The "state of the whole people" was still a dictatorship ruled exclusively, and now more effectively, by the communist party through the party apparatus and other organs, including the KGB. The KGB was still one of the pillars of the strength and stability of the regime. True anticommunist political opposition was suppressed as before, but on a selective basis. The real nature of the Soviet regime and the KGB and their intolerance of ideological opposition were demonstrated in October 1959 by the assassination in West Germany by the KGB of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. The regime was no less ruthless inside the Soviet Union when dealing with nationalist or other opposition movements. Despite Khrushchev's disclaimers, political prisoners still existed, though their numbers were reduced. Political trials were normally still held in secret.
The scale of repression cannot be judged by the show trials, which were sometimes publicized, or by information that, following the example of the 1920's, was sometimes leaked for political or tactical considerations through samizdat and other sources. According to Mironov, its former chairman, the KGB branch in Leningrad in 1958- 59 was still arresting 35 percent of the anti-Soviet elements it detected; the other 65 percent were let off with prophylactic warnings.
Soviet intellectuals were still controlled officially through party organizations in the various institutes, academies, and writers' and other unions. Unofficially they were still controlled by the security services through secret agents. There was no free, independent, spontaneous expression of political views in the Soviet Union. Although the use of terror was diminished in comparison with Stalin's time, true reform went no further than in the thaw between 1953 and 1956.
The so-called political evolution of the regime can be understood in the light of Shelepin's secret report as the implementation of the long range policy of stabilizing and strengthening the regime by adopting the methods used with success in the 1920's. The policy entailed not diminishing the power of the KGB, but giving it a wider, more active, sophisticated, and influential political role in shaping and conditioning the life of society. The statements by Khrushchev and others quoted above on the reduction in the KGB's importance were untrue and are in themselves evidence of the deliberate creation of a false image of Soviet society. The KGB itself participated with the party and the Soviet leadership in the creation of this false image. Prominent Soviet legal experts, including several from the KGB Institute like Professor of Law Viktor Chikvadze, helped the Soviet leaders to formulate the new concept of the "state of the whole people." They also helped to prepare the false statements quoted above on the restricted role of the KGB and the nonexistence of political prisoners. When the puzzled staff and students at the KGB Institute (including the author) pointed out the inaccuracy of Khrushchev's remarks and asked for an explanation, they were told that such statements were required for political and tactical considerations. In fact, the statements were made in order to mask the KGB's new role.
Further evidence of the role of the KGB in shaping the new, false image of the regime, evidence that illustrates the linkage in technique between the N.E.P period and the 1960's, can be found in the case of Shul'gin.
Shul'gin was a former monarchist emigre leader who became a victim of the O.G.P.U's Trust and unwittingly was used by the O.G.P.U to influence Western views on Soviet evolution. In September 1925 he was lured by the Trust into the Soviet Union, and under Trust auspices visited Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad, meeting the defense, foreign affairs, and finance "ministers" of the Trust's "underground organization." In 1927 he wrote a book about his visit to the Soviet Union entitled Three Cities. After clearance with the Trust (in effect, with the O.G.P.U), the book was published outside the Soviet Union. One of its main themes was that foreign intervention in Soviet affairs was superfluous, since communism was a declining force.
After the Second World War Soviet security agents arrested Shul'gin in Belgrade. He was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for his involvement with the Trust in the 1920's. In 1960 he was released from prison and was used by the KGB, this time wittingly, to publish a brochure in which he stated some of the reasons for suggesting that the Soviet regime was evolving toward a more tolerant and democratic system.6
These initiatives did not represent an evolution toward a less ideological and more conventional national form of diplomacy on the part of the Soviet government. They should be compared with Soviet diplomacy under Lenin during the N.E.P; they were similar calculated steps taken on the basis and within the framework of a long-range ideological policy. Similar emphasis on peaceful coexistence and businesslike relations with the capitalist world and a similar use of high-level contacts with non-communist governments can be seen in Soviet diplomacy leading up to the Genoa conference of 1922. This was a period in which Lenin himself advocated the use of moderate language, avoiding in particular words suggesting that violence and terror played any part in Soviet tactics.
The Soviet government's proposals to the UN General Assembly on full and complete disarmament and the call for a world conference on trade are even more strikingly similar to Soviet proposals in the 1920's. The so-called moderate Soviet diplomacy of the 1960's was a repetition of Lenin's activist foreign policy of gaining specific benefits for the Soviet Union by exploiting the contradictions within and between non-communist countries. If this historical basis for Soviet diplomacy in the 1960's is taken into account together with Lenin's pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, it is easier to understand why the emphasis on coexistence and businesslike cooperation between states with different social systems in the 1960's was accompanied by an intensification of the ideological struggle inside and outside the Soviet Union. Khrushchev's calls for peaceful coexistence and disarmament were combined with outspoken attacks on capitalism and predictions of upheavals in the West, which were made during and after his visits to the United States in 1959 and 1960.10 Even more important was the intensification of support for revolutionary and national liberation movements abroad, most conspicuously in Vietnam and Africa. The year 1960 saw the foundation in the Soviet Union of a new university, Lumumba University, intended for the training of revolutionary leaders for the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The resemblance between Soviet initiatives in the 1920's and those in the late 1950's and early 1960's did not escape the notice of all Western analysts. For example, David M. Abshire, in his contribution to the book Detente, said that more striking than any adjustment currently being made to meet changing conditions was the adjustment of the N.E.P in the 1920's.11
Similarly, Lazar Pistrak, in his book The Grand Tactician, observed that Khrushchev had "resumed Lenin's methods of an active foreign policy and the simultaneous spreading of world-revolutionary ideas by means of unprecedented propaganda devices."12
A third Western observer, G. A. von Stackelberg, pointed out the inconsistency between peaceful coexistence and the foundation of a university for training revolutionary leaders for the Third World. He drew a direct comparison between Lumumba University and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, set up almost forty years earlier under Lenin to train cadres for the Eastern Soviet republics of Turkestan, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus. As he pointed out, it could also be compared with the Sun Yat-sen University, which trained cadres for the communist revolution in China.13
Despite the talk of peaceful coexistence, Soviet policy provoked or contributed to a series of crises in the decade following 1958, including the Berlin crisis of November 1958, when Khrushchev proposed to terminate the city's occupied status; the U-2 crisis in 1960, which Khrushchev used to wreck the summit conference; the Soviet decision to resume nuclear testing in 1961; the Cuban crisis of 1962; and the Middle East crisis of 1967.
Again the explanation is to be found in the experience of the N.E.P and the Leninist view of foreign policy as a form of ideological struggle in which both peaceful and non-peaceful methods should be used. Peaceful coexistence was defined under Khrushchev, as it was under Lenin, as a form of class struggle between antagonistic social systems based on the active exploitation of the contradictions within and between non-communist countries.14
The revival of an active Leninist foreign policy was confirmed, for example, in the Soviet military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on July 18, 1963, in an article that stated: "The Leninist foreign policy carried out by the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U and the Soviet government is a high-principled, flexible, active policy always on the offensive. It has fully justified itself and is bearing excellent fruit. . . Communists do not keep it a secret that coexistence is necessary for world-wide victory of Marxist-Leninist ideas, that there are deep-rooted differences between the two world systems of socialism and capitalism. To solve those differences, Marxists-Leninist's hold, war is not an obligatory means in economic, political and ideological struggle."
Soviet foreign policy in the 1960's was not moderate; it was more offensive than in the years preceding and following Stalin's death, when the crisis of the regime forced it onto the defensive. The notion that it was more moderate, more conventional, more nationalist, and less ideological is the product of deliberate disinformation and the systematic use of terms, such as peaceful coexistence, that are themselves intentionally misleading.
The Soviet intelligence and security services played their part in misrepresenting the nature of Soviet foreign policy, in particular by projecting and underlining the common interests between communist and non-communist countries. The participation of prominent Soviet agents of influence in the scientific field, like Academician Topchiyev, and the role they played in Pugwash and other conferences, recall the use of the Eurasian movement by Dzerzhinskiy in the 1920's.
Chinese and Albanian accusations that the Soviet regime had departed from Leninist principles of revolutionary policy contributed to Western acceptance of the notion that this was so. Since, as this analysis has shown, the charge was without foundation and since the Chinese and Albanians were parties to the adoption of the long-range policy, their accusations should be seen as another element in a joint disinformation effort.
Similarly a not always consistently maintained moderation in the Soviet press line on the West and continuing emphasis on common interests between the communist and non-communist worlds did not indicate revisionism or an increase in Western or nationalist influences in the Soviet Union, but rather a tactical shift within the framework of the long-range policy.
It is true that the new, educated, post revolutionary generation that grew up in the Soviet Union (as in Eastern Europe) presented a largely silent challenge to the basic principles of the communist system and its ideology; there was strong latent anxiety and opposition, especially among intellectuals and young people, and a genuine, deep-rooted sense of nationalism among the Russian and other peoples of the Soviet Union hostile to the regime. The hostility of the young was aggravated by the repression to which the older generation had been subjected. This genuine opposition, and the decline in the influence of ideology that reached its nadir in the immediate post Stalin years, presented the regime with a serious problem. It could either revert to mass repression on Stalinist lines or adopt a new, more flexible Leninist approach. Stalinist methods having clearly failed, Leninist methods were the obvious choice.
The economic gap between the privileged "new class" and the workers and collective farmers was narrowed, the use of terror and repression was restricted, and more sophisticated methods were used to counter religious, nationalist, and Western influences. A more flexible, Leninist approach was adopted toward the "lost" younger generation. Using the techniques of the N.E.P period, the regime managed to increase its prestige, relieve the internal crisis, and neutralize actual and latent internal opposition. The only real change in the ideological substance of the regime was its increased effectiveness.
Among other factors that contributed to Western belief in the decline in the influence of ideology were, for example, the replacement of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" by the "state of the whole people"; the alleged degeneration of Soviet leaders from genuine revolutionaries into reformists and revisionists; the alleged growth of special interest groups in Soviet society, and the emergence of some kind of embourgeoise middle class; the revival of de-Stalinization; the increased accessibility of Soviet scientists, writers, and other intellectual and cultural figures; the larger numbers of Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate; and Chinese and Albanian accusations of Soviet revisionism.
According to the 1961 program of the C.P.S.U, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (in other words, the dictatorship of the communist party) had served its purpose.15 The "state of the whole people" was to be maintained "until the complete victory of communism." Far from indicating a weakening of ideological party control, this new formula should be seen as part of the overall attempt to broaden the political base of the party and enhance its influence by giving it a more moderate and less exclusive image. The party retained its monopoly of power, policy, and ideas. The gulf between the Soviet and non-communist social systems in fact widened even while the myth of common interests between them was being propagated. Intolerance of any genuine, uncontrolled political opposition in the Soviet Union was and is as severe as ever. All actions inside and outside the country are carried out with direct or indirect references to the abiding principles of Leninism. Ideological and political considerations override national and economic considerations as never before. Any expectation of a genuine increase in revisionist, nationalistic, or Western influences on the regime is unrealistic, especially given present Western attitudes toward the system.
Even less well-founded is the notion that Soviet leaders and party members are less ideologically motivated than before and have abandoned revolution for reformism and revisionism. Although to some extent the adjustments after 1958 were introduced under pressure from a discontented population, among whom the influences of ideology had suffered a genuine decline, those adjustments were also in line with the ideological long-range policy objectives to which all the leaders were committed.
The up-and-coming younger generation of leaders like Shelepin, Polyanskiy, and Andropov were not and are not revisionists or "Young Turks," as some Western commentators dubbed them. Shelepin's report and the KGB activity for which he and Andropov have been responsible demonstrate that they are zealous revolutionaries who are committed to an ideological, Leninist policy and are qualified to take over the burden of power from the older generation because of their commitment to that policy and because of their achievements in implementing it. There are no liberals, moderates, or conservatives in the Soviet leadership; there are only communists whose actions are determined by the requirements of the long-range policy. They may take on a public guise of liberals or Stalinists, but only if required to do so by the Presidium of the party in the interests of that policy.
Equally unfounded is the notion that the professional strata of the Soviet Union are becoming less ideologically minded or more independent of the party. The fact is that, normally, leading officials, generals, scientists, and professional bureaucrats are party members who know that their well-being depends on their standing with the party and the government and that they would suffer if the regime were to be weakened. In general they are less skeptical about communist doctrine than they were in Stalin's years. Since arrests among them are now unusual and take place only if they participate actively in opposition to the regime, they are in fact more loyal than before. They know that the authority of the party leadership is unchallengeable. Since everything is under the control of the party, there are no divisions between the party leadership and the professionals. If the professionals play a more important role in the implementation of policy, they do so under party control. It is erroneous to suppose that the professionals in any field can be independent politically, as they are in the West. They have significant influence, but no independence. Unofficial evidence that military and economic professionals or technocrats play an independent role in the policy-making process can be discounted. If some professionals resign or express critical views in the Soviet press or in contact with foreigners, it can be assumed that they are doing so on the instructions of the party. The adjustments in economic policy were not a response to pressure from economists, technocrats, or scientists, as is sometimes supposed, but were planned and implemented on the initiative and under the control of the party apparatus acting in accordance with the requirements of its ideological long-range policy based on N.E.P experience. The adjustments were not intended for the enrichment of individuals or groups, but for the enrichment and stabilization of the regime and the fulfillment of communist policy. The technocrats and other professionals have not lost their ideological zeal; they remain leading party officials who have simply received new assignments from the party. If any of them depart noticeably from communist norms of life or degenerate into middle-class revisionists, they are removed from their positions and replaced. Their ideological zeal is maintained through nonviolent purges, systematic ideological education, and strict party control.
Soviet workers and collective farmers are not becoming middle class, as some observers like to think. The improvement in the lot of rank-and-file workers is still modest. They have a long way to go yet until they reach a decent standard of living. Furthermore, in Soviet conditions the emergence of a middle class is impossible because the party has different objectives and, when necessary, intensifies the ideological struggle against middle-class philosophy and practice to exclude such developments from Soviet society.
The major party and bloc documents of lasting significance, such as the record of the C.P.S.U's Twenty-first Party Congress, the Manifesto of November 1960, Khrushchev's report of January 6, 1961, and the 1961 program of the C.P.S.U, confirmed the fundamental principles of the Soviet regime and its ideology, as well as the final ideological objectives of the Soviet Union and the bloc. These documents directed the communist movement to an intensification of the ideological struggle against alien ideologies domestically and externally; they called for more and better communist ideological education. The evidence does not support the conclusion that, despite these documents, the Soviet regime has been evolving into a less ideological and more conventional national system. On the contrary, it points to a deliberate decision by the regime to pursue its acknowledged ideological goals the more effectively by distracting Western attention from them. This it has sought to do by misrepresenting tactical, pragmatic shifts in its practices as fundamental and spontaneous, thereby projecting a false image of a system evolving in a direction opposite to its declared purposes. In planning and executing this misrepresentation it has used the doctrine and historical experience of Lenin's N.E.P.
Pervukhin had been a member of the opposition to Khrushchev in June 1957. He was therefore identifiable in the West, though wrongly, as a hard-liner. He was appointed as ambassador to East Germany at a time when the Berlin crisis of 1958 was being prepared by the bloc's strategists. His appointment can be regarded as the first calculated attempt to provide the West with a plausible explanation of an international crisis being provoked by the influence of the hard-liners within the Soviet system. In fact, the crisis was created within the framework of long-range policy and the major spokesman on it was none other than Khrushchev himself.
Serov's case was different in that he had long been a supporter of Khrushchev, but, as has already been explained, his notorious past involvement in repressions and his narrow-minded attitudes made him unsuitable for a leading role in the implementation of the new long-range policy. The background of Shelepin, a former leader of Soviet youth, provided a useful contrast, which in turn contributed to Khrushchev's and Shelepin's liberal images.
The renewed criticism at the Twenty-second Party Congress of the anti-party group of Molotov, Malenkov, Bulganin, Voroshilov, and others for their role in past repressions and of Pervukhin's "resistance to the policy of reform" were perhaps the most striking and persuasive instances of the calculated use of spurious de-Stalini-zation. The issues involved had been settled with the ending of the power struggle and the establishment of a homogeneous team of leaders committed to a long-range policy. The display of "differences" between moderates and Stalinists was linked with the decision of the Twenty-second Party Congress on November 1, 1961, to remove Stalin's body from the Lenin mausoleum and rebury it in the Kremlin wall. Another staged display was the conspicuous refusal by KGB bodyguards, in front of foreign diplomats and journalists, to allow Voroshilov to join other Soviet leaders on top of the Lenin mausoleum for the official parade in November 1961.
One purpose of these staged displays of de-Stalinization was to create a favorable climate for the conversion of former internal enemies of the regime into active allies in the promotion of its long range policy. Khrushchev in person had meetings with several children of the rehabilitated officials. In the effort to involve all sectors of Soviet society with the new policy, rehabilitation was extended outside the political field. Khrushchev had a well-publicized meeting with a thief who had been released from prison. The KGB was given a special role in rehabilitating former prisoners and returning them to the party ranks. The KGB helped such people to obtain apartments and jobs through its contacts in factories and other institutions. Those who were considered suitable were recruited by the KGB for political assignments.
The explanation of the Molotov affair is more complicated and deserves detailed examination. According to official and semiofficial accounts, Molotov used his appointment as ambassador to Mongolia to establish contact with the Chinese leaders. When the Soviet leaders found out about this liaison, Molotov was recalled and appointed in 1960 to be the chief Soviet representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A) in Austria. According to Satyukov, the chief editor of Pravda, and other communist leaders including Kuusinen, on the eve of the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, Molotov circulated a letter to the members of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U criticizing the draft of the new party program as "revisionist, non-revolutionary and pacifist."16 Molotov allegedly knew that the Chinese leaders shared his views. Molotov was recalled from Vienna to Moscow at the time of the Twenty second Congress, but he played no part in it. Shortly afterward he returned to Vienna, where he was said to be under house arrest. A few days later he was back in Moscow. On January 8, 1962, the Soviet foreign ministry announced that he would be returning to Vienna. Within days, this statement was withdrawn.
There are many curious anomalies in this story. Molotov was sent to Mongolia by Khrushchev to isolate him and to lower his prestige in the Soviet diplomatic service. He was kept under surveillance there by informers controlled by General Dobrynin, chief adviser to the Mongolian security service and former head of the KGB's surveillance directorate. Continuing unauthorized contact between Molotov and the Chinese would have been virtually impossible. If such contact had taken place and had been reported, it is most unlikely that Molotov would have been posted to the I.A.E.A in Austria. Like Malenkov, Bulganin, and others, he would have been sent off to retirement in a small town in the Soviet Union. Moreover, misconduct of this kind on Molotov's part would have been made known as before to party members in a secret letter as further evidence of his anti-party behavior. This did not happen. There was no reference to Molotov, in the confidential party explanation of the decisions of the congress, containing such criticisms. Furthermore, the criticisms attributed to him look most unlikely. The draft program was based on the decisions of the Eighty-one-Party Congress of November 1960, which ratified the new, revolutionary bloc policy and strategy. For Molotov to have criticized the program on the grounds alleged would have made him a laughingstock within the communist movement.
Molotov did, however, criticize Khrushchev's policy on the eve of the Twenty-first Party Congress two years earlier, in January 1959, and this was stated in the confidential circular to party members in Moscow on the decisions of that congress signed by Vladimir Ustinov, who had become a Moscow party secretary. Molotov's criticisms were described as a mixture of dogmatism and quotations from Lenin. This episode was not mentioned by Satyukov and in fact has never been disclosed to the public by the Soviet leadership.
It is therefore reasonable to deduce that Molotov's actual criticisms in 1959 were modified and only disclosed at a time suited to meeting the needs of policy in 1961. It is also possible that use was made of Molotov in this way with his knowledge and consent; as a party member, he would have had no option but to agree.
The unusual publicity given to Molotov's movements between Moscow and Vienna may well have been intended to attract Western attention to the affair at a time of alleged Sino-Soviet differences. In this connection it should be noted that Satyukov, supported by Mikoyan and other speakers, accused Molotov of predicting political conflicts with imperialism that would mean war. Mikoyan accused Molotov of rejecting peaceful coexistence. Another party official said that Molotov was opposed to high-level diplomatic contacts between Soviet and Western leaders. Satyukov summed up with this emphatic statement: "We say to Molotov—'no!' The C.P.S.U has done its best ... to guarantee peace for the U.S.S.R ... on the basis of the Leninist policy of peaceful co-existence." Clearly this exposure of Molotov's alleged warmongering could have been intended to support the moderate image of the Soviet leadership and the sincerity of their interest in peaceful coexistence and detente, in contrast with the "warmongering" of Molotov and the Chinese leadership.
Two further aspects of Satyukov's attack on Molotov should be mentioned. He accused Molotov, first, of trying to assume the role of an interpreter of Lenin, and second, of criticizing the new party program as pacifist and insufficiently revolutionary. Both these criticisms were to be used by the Soviets against the Chinese leaders, at first without naming them, but later explicitly. It can therefore be suggested that the Molotov affair was used to support the authenticity of the alleged differences between the Soviets and Chinese on the issue of peaceful coexistence.
The conspicuous revival of the de-Stalinization issue at the Twenty second Congress and Khrushchev's public attack on the Albanians apparently angered the Chinese to such an extent that Chou En-lai, the leader of the Chinese delegation, withdrew from the congress. As has already been explained, the issues of revisionism and Stalin's distortions of communism had already been settled between the leaders of the communist bloc at the end of 1957. Because they had been settled, there was no foundation for differences between communist parties on them. The conclusion may therefore be drawn that the revival of the issues at the Twenty-second Congress was artificial and that the differences between the Soviet and the Albanian and Chinese parties on Soviet "revisionism" and Chinese and Albanian "Stalinism" were calculated and agreed within the terms and in the interests of the long-range policy.
It should be noted that one of the objects of the display of differences was to add credibility to the notion of Soviet "moderation" and to present Khrushchev as a revisionist. The conclusion that the display was staged provides another argument for regarding the notion of Soviet moderation as unfounded.
The use of scientists in particular as agents of influence and channels for disinformation involved certain changes in their status. The Central Committee apparatus and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the KGB, developed closer relations with them. Many of them were given intelligence training individually and in schools. The regime, instead of keeping them in isolation at home as before, began to promote both their accessibility at home and their travels abroad with a view to widening and exploiting their contacts with Western scientists.
The complaints of Academicians Kapitsa and Sakharov and the biologist Zhores Medvedev about the difficulties encountered by Soviet scientists wishing to travel and meet their Western colleagues were incomplete, and distract attention from the real grounds for complaint by Western and Soviet scientists alike, which lie in the use of these contacts by the Central Committee and the KGB for collecting intelligence, conveying disinformation, and exercising political influence.18 In fact, the majority of Soviet scientists lend themselves willingly to intelligence work against foreign scientists because of the opportunities it gives them to increase their knowledge and advance in their careers. Like Fadeyev, they find it in better taste to spy on foreign associates than on their Soviet friends and colleagues.
The use of Soviet scientists as agents of influence and channels for disinformation entailed changes in Soviet practice over the disclosure of secret information. Although the most significant areas, especially the process of policy making and the technique of its implementation, remained as secret as ever, certain aspects of Soviet science and society were opened up; the obsession with secrecy appeared less total than in Stalin's days.
The greater accessibility of Soviet scientists made its own contribution to the impression of evolution in the Soviet system. More important, however, was the promotion through Soviet scientists of the notion of common interests between the Soviet Union and the West. The attendance of KGB agents, such as Academicians Topchiyev, Artobolevskiy, and Khvostov, at international scientific conferences and their role in promoting the idea of the Soviet Union's common interest with the United States in avoiding nuclear conflict deserve the closest scrutiny for the bearing they may have had on American willingness to engage in strategic arms control and disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union and the voluntary decision by the United States in the early 1960's to surrender its nuclear superiority in the naive belief that if the Americans reduced the rate of development of their nuclear arsenal, the Soviets would do the same.
As in the case of the scientists, the KGB's use of its expanded assets among Soviet writers (especially among those with well-known names) had its internal and external aspects. Shelepin's plans to introduce false opposition on Dzerzhinskiy's lines found concrete expression in the controlled debates between the "conservative" and "liberal" writers, in which the main protagonists on both sides, Kochetov and Tvardovskiy, were collaborating with the Central Committee and the KGB. This debate, together with the general increase in East-West cultural contacts, made a useful contribution to the myth of "evolution."
• Undermine Western unity.
• Induce the advanced industrial nations to contribute to the growth of the economic and military potential of the bloc by agreeing to increase East-West trade, grant long-term credits, and supply advanced technology.
• Distract Western attention from the growth in the military strength of the bloc and the Soviet Union in particular.
• Engage the West, especially the United States, in arms control and disarmament negotiations, with a view to swinging the military balance of power in favor of the communist bloc.
• Create favorable conditions for communist parties to form united fronts with socialists and trade unionists in the advanced countries and with nationalist movements in the developing countries.
At home the main objective of the adjustments to the regime and the exaggeration of their significance through disinformation was to create favorable conditions for the further construction of socialism and the eventual transition to communism by neutralizing internal opposition and securing a reduction in external pressure on the regime from the West.
Subsidiary objectives of the revival of de-Stalinization were to:
• Provide a foundation for open reconciliation and cooperation between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia without revealing the full extent of Yugoslavia's membership in the bloc and commitment to its long-range policy.
• Provide grounds for Soviet-Albanian and Sino-Soviet "differences" in preparation for the pursuit of coordinated, dual foreign policies by the Soviet Union and China.
• Support further disinformation operations concerning disunity and disarray in the world communist movement ostensibly brought about by the decline in the influence of ideology and the resurgence of independent nationalist tendencies in communist parties inside and outside the bloc.
next
The Third Disinformation
Operation: The Soviet-Albanian
"Dispute" and "Split"156s
notes
Chapter 13: The First Disinformation Operation:
The Soviet-Yugoslav "Dispute" of 1958-60
1. Pravda, June 4, 1958.
2. The author was a subordinate of Grigorenko in the Counterintelligence Department in 1951. On one occasion in December 1959 Grigorenko visited the Information Department, where the author was then working, seeking staff with expertise on Yugoslavia and Albania for service in his department. The nature of this quest obliged Grigorenko to give information on the kind of work for which the officers were required. The information on Pushkin's involvement in this operation was confirmed to the author independently by another KGB officer, Kurenyshev.
3. Georgiy Maksimovich Pushkin, Soviet diplomat since 1937, ambassador in East Germany until the beginning of 1958, with previous experience in Hungary, Sinkiang, and Middle East affairs. Listed officially as Deputy Minister of foreign affairs from 1959.
4. Yugoslav Facts and Views, no. 56, 1958.
5. CSP, Leo Gruliow ed., (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), vol. 3, p. 62. Khrushchev stated: "On many questions of foreign policy we speak a common language."
6. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, English ed. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), pp. 701-2.
7. Ibid., p. 641: "Subsequently, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on its own initiative, took steps to restore norma] relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia. "The policy of friendship and mutual assistance, pursued by the CPSU, triumphed. The mistakes made occasionally in the relations with fraternal countries were of a secondary, accidental character. The essence of these relations was genuinely Socialist, and accorded fully with the principles of proletarian internationalism. The CPSU directed all its efforts to strengthening friendship with People's China and the other People's Democracies, and this policy was entirely successful. The joint activities of the CPSU and the other Communist Parties standing at the helm of their respective States, resulted in the establishment of a fraternal community of Socialist countries, and no amount of intrigue on the part of their enemies could, or can, shake their solidarity and unity. This unity is a source of the strength of the Socialist camp. . . The problem of relations between the Socialist countries was, for all its complexity and novelty, successfully solved in the interests of each country and of the entire Socialist camp."
8. CSP, vol. 3, pp. 68-69,
9. GSE (1961), p. 374.
Chapter 14: The Second Disinformation, Operation:
The "Evolution" of the Soviet Regime (Part One: The Major Changes in the USSR)
1. For an example, see Pravda, September 9, 1962.
2. Officially introduced in 1961.
3. Izvestiya, May 19, 1959.
4. Izvestiya, January 28, 1959, p. 9: "There is not now condemnation by the courts in the Soviet Union for political crimes. It is a big achievement which speaks for the exceptional unity of the political views of the people with the Central Committee of the Party."
5. Kommunist, no. 11 (1960), p. 44.
6. The author learned this from Grigorenko, whose department helped Shul'gin to write and publish the brochure.
7. See, for example, the letter from Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko to the United Nations, September 20, 1958, about a 10-15 percent reduction in the military budgets of the major powers. (Pravda, September 1958)
8. On June 6, 1958, Pravda published Khrushchev's letter of June 2 to President Eisenhower in which he forwarded to the American government the Soviet government's proposal for "joint measures for an increase in trade." The letter stated that the Soviet Union and the US, as the two most economically powerful states, could "carry on trade with one another on a wide scale."
9. See Khrushchev's report to the Twenty-second CPSU Congress in October 1961 (CSP, vol. 4, p. 69): "the Soviet Union is giving particular attention to the development of ties with its neighbours. The differences between our social and political systems have not been preventing the development of friendly, mutually beneficial relations between the USSR and such countries as Afghanistan and Finland. Our relations with Austria and Sweden are coming along quite well. We have been making efforts to improve our relations with Norway and Denmark and shall continue doing so. Relations with neighbouring Turkey have been improving of late. We want these relations to develop still further."
10. See, for example, Khrushchev's report to the Twenty-second CPSU Congress (CSP, vol. 4, p. 46): "To-day, the USA, which has become the centre of world reaction, takes the role of the chief aggressive nucleus. The US imperialists are acting in alliance with the West German militarists and revanchists and threatening the peace and security of peoples. . . ." Ibid., p. 45: "Comrades, the 20th party congress, analysing the situation in the countries of capitalism, came to the conclusion that they were moving steadily toward new economic and social upheavals. Has this conclusion been borne out? Yes, it has. In the years that have elapsed there has occurred a further sharpening of contradictions, both within the capitalist countries and among them; colonial empires have collapsed and the struggle of the working class and the peoples' national liberation movement have assumed tremendous proportions."
11. Detente: Cold War Strategies in Transition, ed. Eleanor Lansing Dulles and Robert Dickson Crane (Published for the Center for Strategic Studies, Georgetown University, by Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1965), p. 268.
12. Lazar Pistrak, The Grand Tactician (New York, Praeger 1961), p. 269.
13. G. A. von Stackelberg, Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, vol. 7, no. 4 (April 1960), pp. 16-20.
14. A penetrating explanation of Soviet provocation of the Berlin Crisis as being based, in large part, on Lenin's Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder was given by Nikolay Galay, "Berlin and Soviet Foreign Policy," Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, vol. 6, no. 6 (June 1959).
15. See CSP, vol. 4, p. 23: "Having brought about the complete and final victory of socialism, the first phase of communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historical mission and has ceased to be essential in the USSR from the point of view of internal development. The state which arose as a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat has turned into a state of the entire people, which expresses the interests and will of the people as a whole."
16. Satyukov said {CSP, vol. 4, p. 176): "The delegates to the 22nd congress should know that in October of this year, just before the congress opened, Molotov sent a letter to the Central Committee. Without having a word to say about his subversive, factionalist work against the Leninist party and against the decisions of its 20th congress, he tries afresh in this letter to pose as interpreter of Leninism and again attacked the Central Committee and the draft of the CPSU programme. Molotov declares in his letter that the draft programme fails to co-ordinate communist construction in the USSR with the prospects for the revolutionary struggle of the working class in capitalist countries, with the prospects for socialist revolution on an international scale. And this at a time when the draft programme has been unanimously approved not only by our party and the Soviet people but by the international communist movement. . . . His contentions lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to continue the advance to communism without the most serious political conflicts with the imperialist countries, and hence without war. We say to Molotov: no, the CPSU has been and is doing everything possible to ensure peace for the Soviet people, the people who are building communism. The Leninist principle of peaceful co-existence has been and remains our general line in foreign policy. This is plainly stated in the new programme and the party will pursue this line consistently."
17. The Soviet Academy of Sciences includes historians, lawyers, and economists as well as scientists in the conventional sense. The expression "Soviet Scientists" should be interpreted as including these additional categories.
18. Mose L. Harvey, Leon Goure, and Vladimir Prokofieff, Science and Technology as an Instrument of Soviet Policy (Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, 1972), pp. 93-94.
• To pin the revisionist label firmly on the Yugoslav party and to identify its policies and doctrines as one extreme of a variety of different brands of communism.
• At a later stage, to project Khrushchev and the Soviet leaders as veering toward Yugoslav revisionism and thereby to assist Soviet activist, detente diplomacy in its dealings with the advanced countries.
• To gain experience, to provide support, and to create a favorable atmosphere for the development of other disinformation operations, along similar lines, on Soviet-Albanian and Sino-Soviet splits and, at a later stage, on Romanian independence.
14
The Second Disinformation Operation:
The "Evolution" of the Soviet Regime,
Part One:
The Major Changes in the USSR
CERTAIN DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SOVIET UNION since 1958 have
been widely interpreted in the West as reflecting a moderation in
the rigors of communist ideology and a decline in its influence
over the practical handling of affairs of state. These apparent trends
are usually thought of as being associated with the growth of the
Soviet Union into a great power increasingly pursuing its national
interests along traditional lines and facing familiar internal political
problems, in particular the emergence of a dissident movement. While
it is true that changes have been made in various economic, political,
diplomatic, and ideological aspects of the regime, a distinction must
be made between the changes themselves and the manner in which
they have been presented if the nature and purpose of disinformation
about them is to be understood.
Economic Changes
From the late 1950's onward, changes in Soviet economic practice
included the improvement of material incentives to production in
industry and agriculture, the promotion of competition, and the
broadening of the private market in the cities. Sensational evidence
suggesting the revival of capitalism appeared in the Soviet press in the
form of articles on the black market and on underground capitalists in
the Soviet Union. The confessions of a "former Soviet underground
millionaire" appeared in Izvestiya in 1959 or 1960. It is true that there is and, on a varying scale, always has been a private market in the Soviet Union in which collectivized peasants and some private individuals have sold the agricultural produce grown on their lots. In the N.E.P period, when private ownership and private enterprise were permitted, this private market reached its post revolutionary zenith. With the ending of the N.E.P and the collectivization of agriculture, it shrank to insignificant proportions. During and after the Second World War, it revived again for a short period, only to be drastically curtailed in the last years of Stalin's rule. Since his death, with the new emphasis on incentives and the abolition of deliveries of goods to the State by farmers from their private lots, the private market has once more grown in scale. It now exists in two principal forms: the main market, in the cities where collective farmers and some private individuals sell their agricultural produce; and a small black market, especially in Moscow and Leningrad, in which illegal transactions in currency and goods take place between Soviet speculators and foreign diplomats and visitors.
The growth of the main market has been strictly limited because the introduction of greater incentives for farmers and other workers was not accompanied by the legalization of private enterprises; the emphasis throughout has been on increasing production and efficiency not in private enterprises, but in collective farms and state-owned industries and trading enterprises. There can be no significant widening of the private market in healthy competition with the state sector unless private ownership and enterprise are reintroduced. The Soviet government shows no sign of doing this; on the contrary, the regime maintains its hostile attitude to private ownership and the ultimate objective of party policy is still the total extinction of the private sector.
As for the black market, it is, as foreign diplomats know, extremely limited and illegal. What is less widely known is that it is secretly controlled and actively exploited by the Anti-contraband Department of the KGB. Significantly this department was created in 1959 on the lines of a similar department set up in the GPU during the N.E.P period. Its function is to control the activities of domestic speculators and foreign businessmen and to blackmail and recruit as agents members of the diplomatic colony and other foreign visitors who engage in illicit transactions. The head of this new department, Sergey Mikhaylovich Fedoseyev, was so successful in recruiting foreigners, including Americans, that in 1961 he was promoted to be Chief of the American Department, responsible for the recruitment of officials of the US Embassy in Moscow.
Tendencies toward private enterprise have existed in the Soviet Union since the revolution. Arrests of embezzlers and speculators who have enriched themselves at state expense have not always been reported. If in the period 1959-62 such arrests were given wide publicity, this did not indicate, as some Western observers believed and as the Soviet regime wished them to believe, that capitalism in the Soviet Union was reviving; on the contrary, it indicated that the regime was stepping up its traditional ideological policy of eliminating the "remnants of capitalism" while at the same time promoting the myth that capitalism was being restored.
Since the end of the 1950's a measure of industrial reorganization has been in progress. Greater powers of initiative have been given to local economic management without weakening central control. Local councils of people's economy have been created. The authority of economic officials has been enhanced.
In Western terminology, these officials are described as "technocrats," who are said to be increasingly taking over control. But what Western observers largely ignore is that these so-called technocrats are in reality party members who, having received industrial or other specialized training, are applying the party line in their place of work. Through them the party exercises a more efficient control over Soviet industry, which, despite the appearance of recent changes, is now more comprehensively planned and more effectively coordinated than before.
From 1962 onward there was a protracted debate in the official Soviet press on the introduction of the profit motive, on the concept of a market-regulated economy, and on the creation of a trust system in industry. The Soviet economist Professor Liberman played a prominent role in the debate.1 According to Liberman, factories should be given no more than basic production plans, which should be based mainly on commercial orders. Within the framework of the basic plan, factories should be free to determine their own wages, costs, and profits. A proportion of the profits should be paid into an incentive fund, which would pay bonuses to managers and workers. The introduction of state trusts that would function on a profit basis was encouraged by the government. In fact some trusts of this kind were created from 1962 onward; for example, small shoe factories were combined experimentally into one complex in the firm Progress in Lvov, and other trusts were set up in Gorky and elsewhere.
The resemblance of these reforms to capitalism is only superficial. Their effect has been to strengthen, not to weaken, party control over industry. The fundamental differences between the Soviet and capitalist systems in their basic objectives, their principles of ownership and management, and the distribution of national income and political power remain. The emphasis in the Soviet capital investment program is still on heavy industry and especially on armaments, including military satellites and nuclear missiles.
It should be noted that the economic reforms reflected to some extent the experience of the N.E.P. Some of Liberman's ideas, as well as the creation of trusts in industry, were directly modeled on the N.E.P pattern, but in fact the changes of the 1960's were less far-reaching than those of the 1920's. Private ownership of enterprises was not reintroduced after 1960; agriculture remained collectivized. Such reforms as were carried out in the 1960's and 1970's did not signal a fundamental change in the regime; they were carefully calculated steps taken by the regime within the framework of its long-range policy. Their object was not to change the nature of the system, but to stabilize it by making the economy more efficient and party control more effective.
There are, in short, fewer objective grounds for concluding now that the economic nature of the regime has been evolving since 1960 in the direction of capitalism than there were in the N.E.P period. In the 1960's and 1970's, however, the same technique has been used as in the 1920's to exaggerate and misrepresent the nature of such changes as have occurred to suggest a weakening of ideological influence and a tendency toward the restoration of capitalism.
The KGB has played an active part in this misrepresentation. For example, the confessions of an underground millionaire were supplied to Izvestiya by the KGB at the personal instigation of Shelepin. A more widespread KGB technique has been used to influence directly the opinions of visiting Western tourists, businessmen, scholars, and correspondents. For instance, Western economists who visit the Soviet Union naturally wish to meet their Soviet colleagues. It is normal practice for the latter to clear such meetings in advance with the party and the KGB. They are then briefed on the line to be taken in "frank" discussions with their Western colleagues on the faults in the Soviet system and the direction in which it is evolving.
Given that there has been no restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, Chinese and Albanian charges to this effect in their polemics with the Soviet leaders in the 1960's were unfounded and can therefore be seen as part and parcel of an agreed bloc disinformation effort carried out in accordance with the long-range policy decisions reached, with Chinese and Albanian participation, in the period 1958- 60.
Political Changes
Western belief in a moderation in the Soviet attitude toward internal
and external political problems during the 1960's was based on various
changes introduced from 1958 onward. They can be briefly listed. A
new formula was evolved to replace the "dictatorship of the
proletariat," in official communist language. This was the concept of
the "state of the whole people."2
Certain legal changes were made.
Steps were taken ostensibly to reduce the role and influence of the
security service. The All Union Ministry of Internal Affairs was
abolished in 1959—but only for a short time. The Chairman of the
KGB, the notorious police professional General Ivan Serov, was
dismissed on December 9, 1958; he was replaced two weeks later by
the former leader of the Soviet youth movement and alleged liberal
Shelepin. The use of terror was reduced. It was decreed that "socialist
legality" should be observed. The KGB was represented as a reformed
organization, hard on the enemies of the regime but "humanistic" in its
approach to the Soviet people, as was its forerunner in Dzerzhinskiy's
days. Khrushchev told editors of the West German social democratic
press that state security organizations were not really needed at all in
the Soviet Union; they could at most be used to deal with cases of
petty larceny.3 Khrushchev and Shelepin repeatedly denied that there
were political prisoners in the Soviet Union.4
According to
Kommunist: "The state security organs are now laying more and more
emphasis on preventive, educational work . . . they are expanding their prophylactic
work."5
This line was in sharp contrast with the earlier emphasis
on repression in the work of the security services. A more tolerant attitude was ostensibly adopted toward religion. The Chairman of the Directorate for Affairs of the Orthodox Church, a KGB official named G. Karpov, was replaced by Kuroyedov, a former secretary of a party provincial committee. More religious leaders were allowed to travel abroad.
A more liberal attitude was adopted toward writers, scientists, and other creative workers. There were occasional, apparently independent and spontaneous, expressions of public opinion. Unofficial critical comments about the regime were sometimes published. While traditional socialist realism in art continued to receive official encouragement, well-publicized exhibitions of abstract painters were held in Moscow. They were roundly criticized by Khrushchev. As in painting, so in literature; alongside traditional hard-line writing, certain well-known Soviet poets and authors published controversial material in the Soviet and foreign press. Some were harassed and punished in consequence. A Yevtushenko poem including criticism of Stalin was published in the Soviet Union. So was Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a description of life in a Soviet prison by an author who had himself been a prisoner under Stalin. Works by other former prisoners, such as Dyakov and Georgiy Shelest, appeared in the early 1960's. More Soviet tourists traveled abroad, including writers who made critical and controversial comments about the regime. Some were allowed to leave the Soviet Union permanently. Within the Soviet Union the well-known writer Kochetov emerged as the leader of the "conservative" wing of the writers' union, while the late poet Tvardovskiy, who sponsored Solzhenitsyn's writings, led the "liberals." The liberals were joined by the poets Yevtushenko and Voznesenskiy, also by prominent scientists and other dissidents.
With the help of these apparently more liberal official attitudes, the image of the Soviet Union presented to the outside world was changed; the political fundamentals of the regime were not. The "state of the whole people" was still a dictatorship ruled exclusively, and now more effectively, by the communist party through the party apparatus and other organs, including the KGB. The KGB was still one of the pillars of the strength and stability of the regime. True anticommunist political opposition was suppressed as before, but on a selective basis. The real nature of the Soviet regime and the KGB and their intolerance of ideological opposition were demonstrated in October 1959 by the assassination in West Germany by the KGB of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. The regime was no less ruthless inside the Soviet Union when dealing with nationalist or other opposition movements. Despite Khrushchev's disclaimers, political prisoners still existed, though their numbers were reduced. Political trials were normally still held in secret.
The scale of repression cannot be judged by the show trials, which were sometimes publicized, or by information that, following the example of the 1920's, was sometimes leaked for political or tactical considerations through samizdat and other sources. According to Mironov, its former chairman, the KGB branch in Leningrad in 1958- 59 was still arresting 35 percent of the anti-Soviet elements it detected; the other 65 percent were let off with prophylactic warnings.
Soviet intellectuals were still controlled officially through party organizations in the various institutes, academies, and writers' and other unions. Unofficially they were still controlled by the security services through secret agents. There was no free, independent, spontaneous expression of political views in the Soviet Union. Although the use of terror was diminished in comparison with Stalin's time, true reform went no further than in the thaw between 1953 and 1956.
The so-called political evolution of the regime can be understood in the light of Shelepin's secret report as the implementation of the long range policy of stabilizing and strengthening the regime by adopting the methods used with success in the 1920's. The policy entailed not diminishing the power of the KGB, but giving it a wider, more active, sophisticated, and influential political role in shaping and conditioning the life of society. The statements by Khrushchev and others quoted above on the reduction in the KGB's importance were untrue and are in themselves evidence of the deliberate creation of a false image of Soviet society. The KGB itself participated with the party and the Soviet leadership in the creation of this false image. Prominent Soviet legal experts, including several from the KGB Institute like Professor of Law Viktor Chikvadze, helped the Soviet leaders to formulate the new concept of the "state of the whole people." They also helped to prepare the false statements quoted above on the restricted role of the KGB and the nonexistence of political prisoners. When the puzzled staff and students at the KGB Institute (including the author) pointed out the inaccuracy of Khrushchev's remarks and asked for an explanation, they were told that such statements were required for political and tactical considerations. In fact, the statements were made in order to mask the KGB's new role.
Further evidence of the role of the KGB in shaping the new, false image of the regime, evidence that illustrates the linkage in technique between the N.E.P period and the 1960's, can be found in the case of Shul'gin.
Shul'gin was a former monarchist emigre leader who became a victim of the O.G.P.U's Trust and unwittingly was used by the O.G.P.U to influence Western views on Soviet evolution. In September 1925 he was lured by the Trust into the Soviet Union, and under Trust auspices visited Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad, meeting the defense, foreign affairs, and finance "ministers" of the Trust's "underground organization." In 1927 he wrote a book about his visit to the Soviet Union entitled Three Cities. After clearance with the Trust (in effect, with the O.G.P.U), the book was published outside the Soviet Union. One of its main themes was that foreign intervention in Soviet affairs was superfluous, since communism was a declining force.
After the Second World War Soviet security agents arrested Shul'gin in Belgrade. He was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for his involvement with the Trust in the 1920's. In 1960 he was released from prison and was used by the KGB, this time wittingly, to publish a brochure in which he stated some of the reasons for suggesting that the Soviet regime was evolving toward a more tolerant and democratic system.6
Changes in Diplomacy
From 1958 onward the Soviet leadership laid special emphasis on
peaceful coexistence, trade and economic relations with the West, and
a moderate and businesslike approach to negotiations and agreements. Soviet diplomacy entered an active phase; top-level
personal diplomacy became normal practice. Khrushchev and other
Soviet leaders visited the United States and France; Western leaders
were invited to the Soviet Union. Approaches were made to the
governments of advanced capitalist countries, including Great Britain,
the United States, West Germany, France, and Japan, for the purpose
of improving political, economic, and cultural relations with them.
The Soviets showed interest in summit conferences and international
meetings on disarmament and trade. On December 4, 1958, the
Soviets issued a declaration on the cessation of nuclear tests, preceded
and followed by other proposals on disarmament.7
The Soviets
expressed a desire to obtain capital equipment from the industrially
advanced non-communist world on the basis of long-term credits.8
Countries bordering on the Soviet Union received special attention.9
In May 1962 Khrushchev suggested a world conference on trade. These initiatives did not represent an evolution toward a less ideological and more conventional national form of diplomacy on the part of the Soviet government. They should be compared with Soviet diplomacy under Lenin during the N.E.P; they were similar calculated steps taken on the basis and within the framework of a long-range ideological policy. Similar emphasis on peaceful coexistence and businesslike relations with the capitalist world and a similar use of high-level contacts with non-communist governments can be seen in Soviet diplomacy leading up to the Genoa conference of 1922. This was a period in which Lenin himself advocated the use of moderate language, avoiding in particular words suggesting that violence and terror played any part in Soviet tactics.
The Soviet government's proposals to the UN General Assembly on full and complete disarmament and the call for a world conference on trade are even more strikingly similar to Soviet proposals in the 1920's. The so-called moderate Soviet diplomacy of the 1960's was a repetition of Lenin's activist foreign policy of gaining specific benefits for the Soviet Union by exploiting the contradictions within and between non-communist countries. If this historical basis for Soviet diplomacy in the 1960's is taken into account together with Lenin's pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, it is easier to understand why the emphasis on coexistence and businesslike cooperation between states with different social systems in the 1960's was accompanied by an intensification of the ideological struggle inside and outside the Soviet Union. Khrushchev's calls for peaceful coexistence and disarmament were combined with outspoken attacks on capitalism and predictions of upheavals in the West, which were made during and after his visits to the United States in 1959 and 1960.10 Even more important was the intensification of support for revolutionary and national liberation movements abroad, most conspicuously in Vietnam and Africa. The year 1960 saw the foundation in the Soviet Union of a new university, Lumumba University, intended for the training of revolutionary leaders for the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The resemblance between Soviet initiatives in the 1920's and those in the late 1950's and early 1960's did not escape the notice of all Western analysts. For example, David M. Abshire, in his contribution to the book Detente, said that more striking than any adjustment currently being made to meet changing conditions was the adjustment of the N.E.P in the 1920's.11
Similarly, Lazar Pistrak, in his book The Grand Tactician, observed that Khrushchev had "resumed Lenin's methods of an active foreign policy and the simultaneous spreading of world-revolutionary ideas by means of unprecedented propaganda devices."12
A third Western observer, G. A. von Stackelberg, pointed out the inconsistency between peaceful coexistence and the foundation of a university for training revolutionary leaders for the Third World. He drew a direct comparison between Lumumba University and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, set up almost forty years earlier under Lenin to train cadres for the Eastern Soviet republics of Turkestan, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus. As he pointed out, it could also be compared with the Sun Yat-sen University, which trained cadres for the communist revolution in China.13
Despite the talk of peaceful coexistence, Soviet policy provoked or contributed to a series of crises in the decade following 1958, including the Berlin crisis of November 1958, when Khrushchev proposed to terminate the city's occupied status; the U-2 crisis in 1960, which Khrushchev used to wreck the summit conference; the Soviet decision to resume nuclear testing in 1961; the Cuban crisis of 1962; and the Middle East crisis of 1967.
Again the explanation is to be found in the experience of the N.E.P and the Leninist view of foreign policy as a form of ideological struggle in which both peaceful and non-peaceful methods should be used. Peaceful coexistence was defined under Khrushchev, as it was under Lenin, as a form of class struggle between antagonistic social systems based on the active exploitation of the contradictions within and between non-communist countries.14
The revival of an active Leninist foreign policy was confirmed, for example, in the Soviet military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on July 18, 1963, in an article that stated: "The Leninist foreign policy carried out by the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U and the Soviet government is a high-principled, flexible, active policy always on the offensive. It has fully justified itself and is bearing excellent fruit. . . Communists do not keep it a secret that coexistence is necessary for world-wide victory of Marxist-Leninist ideas, that there are deep-rooted differences between the two world systems of socialism and capitalism. To solve those differences, Marxists-Leninist's hold, war is not an obligatory means in economic, political and ideological struggle."
Soviet foreign policy in the 1960's was not moderate; it was more offensive than in the years preceding and following Stalin's death, when the crisis of the regime forced it onto the defensive. The notion that it was more moderate, more conventional, more nationalist, and less ideological is the product of deliberate disinformation and the systematic use of terms, such as peaceful coexistence, that are themselves intentionally misleading.
The Soviet intelligence and security services played their part in misrepresenting the nature of Soviet foreign policy, in particular by projecting and underlining the common interests between communist and non-communist countries. The participation of prominent Soviet agents of influence in the scientific field, like Academician Topchiyev, and the role they played in Pugwash and other conferences, recall the use of the Eurasian movement by Dzerzhinskiy in the 1920's.
Chinese and Albanian accusations that the Soviet regime had departed from Leninist principles of revolutionary policy contributed to Western acceptance of the notion that this was so. Since, as this analysis has shown, the charge was without foundation and since the Chinese and Albanians were parties to the adoption of the long-range policy, their accusations should be seen as another element in a joint disinformation effort.
The Influence of Ideology
The changes in the economic, political, and diplomatic practice of
the Soviet government, which have been described above, contributed
to the belief in the West that the influence of ideology in the Soviet
system had declined. This was not so. On the contrary, the changes
and readjustments were calculated, controlled, and pragmatic. They
did not touch the economic and political fundamentals of the regime;
in fact, they contributed to the restoration and strengthening of
ideology, as compared with the Stalin period. Similarly a not always consistently maintained moderation in the Soviet press line on the West and continuing emphasis on common interests between the communist and non-communist worlds did not indicate revisionism or an increase in Western or nationalist influences in the Soviet Union, but rather a tactical shift within the framework of the long-range policy.
It is true that the new, educated, post revolutionary generation that grew up in the Soviet Union (as in Eastern Europe) presented a largely silent challenge to the basic principles of the communist system and its ideology; there was strong latent anxiety and opposition, especially among intellectuals and young people, and a genuine, deep-rooted sense of nationalism among the Russian and other peoples of the Soviet Union hostile to the regime. The hostility of the young was aggravated by the repression to which the older generation had been subjected. This genuine opposition, and the decline in the influence of ideology that reached its nadir in the immediate post Stalin years, presented the regime with a serious problem. It could either revert to mass repression on Stalinist lines or adopt a new, more flexible Leninist approach. Stalinist methods having clearly failed, Leninist methods were the obvious choice.
The economic gap between the privileged "new class" and the workers and collective farmers was narrowed, the use of terror and repression was restricted, and more sophisticated methods were used to counter religious, nationalist, and Western influences. A more flexible, Leninist approach was adopted toward the "lost" younger generation. Using the techniques of the N.E.P period, the regime managed to increase its prestige, relieve the internal crisis, and neutralize actual and latent internal opposition. The only real change in the ideological substance of the regime was its increased effectiveness.
Among other factors that contributed to Western belief in the decline in the influence of ideology were, for example, the replacement of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" by the "state of the whole people"; the alleged degeneration of Soviet leaders from genuine revolutionaries into reformists and revisionists; the alleged growth of special interest groups in Soviet society, and the emergence of some kind of embourgeoise middle class; the revival of de-Stalinization; the increased accessibility of Soviet scientists, writers, and other intellectual and cultural figures; the larger numbers of Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate; and Chinese and Albanian accusations of Soviet revisionism.
According to the 1961 program of the C.P.S.U, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (in other words, the dictatorship of the communist party) had served its purpose.15 The "state of the whole people" was to be maintained "until the complete victory of communism." Far from indicating a weakening of ideological party control, this new formula should be seen as part of the overall attempt to broaden the political base of the party and enhance its influence by giving it a more moderate and less exclusive image. The party retained its monopoly of power, policy, and ideas. The gulf between the Soviet and non-communist social systems in fact widened even while the myth of common interests between them was being propagated. Intolerance of any genuine, uncontrolled political opposition in the Soviet Union was and is as severe as ever. All actions inside and outside the country are carried out with direct or indirect references to the abiding principles of Leninism. Ideological and political considerations override national and economic considerations as never before. Any expectation of a genuine increase in revisionist, nationalistic, or Western influences on the regime is unrealistic, especially given present Western attitudes toward the system.
Even less well-founded is the notion that Soviet leaders and party members are less ideologically motivated than before and have abandoned revolution for reformism and revisionism. Although to some extent the adjustments after 1958 were introduced under pressure from a discontented population, among whom the influences of ideology had suffered a genuine decline, those adjustments were also in line with the ideological long-range policy objectives to which all the leaders were committed.
The up-and-coming younger generation of leaders like Shelepin, Polyanskiy, and Andropov were not and are not revisionists or "Young Turks," as some Western commentators dubbed them. Shelepin's report and the KGB activity for which he and Andropov have been responsible demonstrate that they are zealous revolutionaries who are committed to an ideological, Leninist policy and are qualified to take over the burden of power from the older generation because of their commitment to that policy and because of their achievements in implementing it. There are no liberals, moderates, or conservatives in the Soviet leadership; there are only communists whose actions are determined by the requirements of the long-range policy. They may take on a public guise of liberals or Stalinists, but only if required to do so by the Presidium of the party in the interests of that policy.
Equally unfounded is the notion that the professional strata of the Soviet Union are becoming less ideologically minded or more independent of the party. The fact is that, normally, leading officials, generals, scientists, and professional bureaucrats are party members who know that their well-being depends on their standing with the party and the government and that they would suffer if the regime were to be weakened. In general they are less skeptical about communist doctrine than they were in Stalin's years. Since arrests among them are now unusual and take place only if they participate actively in opposition to the regime, they are in fact more loyal than before. They know that the authority of the party leadership is unchallengeable. Since everything is under the control of the party, there are no divisions between the party leadership and the professionals. If the professionals play a more important role in the implementation of policy, they do so under party control. It is erroneous to suppose that the professionals in any field can be independent politically, as they are in the West. They have significant influence, but no independence. Unofficial evidence that military and economic professionals or technocrats play an independent role in the policy-making process can be discounted. If some professionals resign or express critical views in the Soviet press or in contact with foreigners, it can be assumed that they are doing so on the instructions of the party. The adjustments in economic policy were not a response to pressure from economists, technocrats, or scientists, as is sometimes supposed, but were planned and implemented on the initiative and under the control of the party apparatus acting in accordance with the requirements of its ideological long-range policy based on N.E.P experience. The adjustments were not intended for the enrichment of individuals or groups, but for the enrichment and stabilization of the regime and the fulfillment of communist policy. The technocrats and other professionals have not lost their ideological zeal; they remain leading party officials who have simply received new assignments from the party. If any of them depart noticeably from communist norms of life or degenerate into middle-class revisionists, they are removed from their positions and replaced. Their ideological zeal is maintained through nonviolent purges, systematic ideological education, and strict party control.
Soviet workers and collective farmers are not becoming middle class, as some observers like to think. The improvement in the lot of rank-and-file workers is still modest. They have a long way to go yet until they reach a decent standard of living. Furthermore, in Soviet conditions the emergence of a middle class is impossible because the party has different objectives and, when necessary, intensifies the ideological struggle against middle-class philosophy and practice to exclude such developments from Soviet society.
The major party and bloc documents of lasting significance, such as the record of the C.P.S.U's Twenty-first Party Congress, the Manifesto of November 1960, Khrushchev's report of January 6, 1961, and the 1961 program of the C.P.S.U, confirmed the fundamental principles of the Soviet regime and its ideology, as well as the final ideological objectives of the Soviet Union and the bloc. These documents directed the communist movement to an intensification of the ideological struggle against alien ideologies domestically and externally; they called for more and better communist ideological education. The evidence does not support the conclusion that, despite these documents, the Soviet regime has been evolving into a less ideological and more conventional national system. On the contrary, it points to a deliberate decision by the regime to pursue its acknowledged ideological goals the more effectively by distracting Western attention from them. This it has sought to do by misrepresenting tactical, pragmatic shifts in its practices as fundamental and spontaneous, thereby projecting a false image of a system evolving in a direction opposite to its declared purposes. In planning and executing this misrepresentation it has used the doctrine and historical experience of Lenin's N.E.P.
The Revival of De-Stalinization
Perhaps the most important technique used to project a moderate
image of Soviet policy in the late 1950's and early 1960's was the
revival of de-Stalinization and the related issue of "revisionism." This
can be seen, for example, in the appointment of Pervukhin as Soviet
ambassador to East Germany in 1958; the replacement of Serov by
Shelepin as Chairman of the KGB; the renewed denunciation at the
Twenty-second C.P.S.U Congress in October 1961 of the anti-party
group as Stalinists for their past role in the repressions; the revived
criticism of Stalin himself for these repressions, and the removal of
his body from the Lenin mausoleum; the special exploitation of the
Molotov affair; and the display of differences in attitudes toward
Stalin between the Soviet leaders on the one hand and the Albanians
and Chinese leaders on the other. Pervukhin had been a member of the opposition to Khrushchev in June 1957. He was therefore identifiable in the West, though wrongly, as a hard-liner. He was appointed as ambassador to East Germany at a time when the Berlin crisis of 1958 was being prepared by the bloc's strategists. His appointment can be regarded as the first calculated attempt to provide the West with a plausible explanation of an international crisis being provoked by the influence of the hard-liners within the Soviet system. In fact, the crisis was created within the framework of long-range policy and the major spokesman on it was none other than Khrushchev himself.
Serov's case was different in that he had long been a supporter of Khrushchev, but, as has already been explained, his notorious past involvement in repressions and his narrow-minded attitudes made him unsuitable for a leading role in the implementation of the new long-range policy. The background of Shelepin, a former leader of Soviet youth, provided a useful contrast, which in turn contributed to Khrushchev's and Shelepin's liberal images.
The renewed criticism at the Twenty-second Party Congress of the anti-party group of Molotov, Malenkov, Bulganin, Voroshilov, and others for their role in past repressions and of Pervukhin's "resistance to the policy of reform" were perhaps the most striking and persuasive instances of the calculated use of spurious de-Stalini-zation. The issues involved had been settled with the ending of the power struggle and the establishment of a homogeneous team of leaders committed to a long-range policy. The display of "differences" between moderates and Stalinists was linked with the decision of the Twenty-second Party Congress on November 1, 1961, to remove Stalin's body from the Lenin mausoleum and rebury it in the Kremlin wall. Another staged display was the conspicuous refusal by KGB bodyguards, in front of foreign diplomats and journalists, to allow Voroshilov to join other Soviet leaders on top of the Lenin mausoleum for the official parade in November 1961.
One purpose of these staged displays of de-Stalinization was to create a favorable climate for the conversion of former internal enemies of the regime into active allies in the promotion of its long range policy. Khrushchev in person had meetings with several children of the rehabilitated officials. In the effort to involve all sectors of Soviet society with the new policy, rehabilitation was extended outside the political field. Khrushchev had a well-publicized meeting with a thief who had been released from prison. The KGB was given a special role in rehabilitating former prisoners and returning them to the party ranks. The KGB helped such people to obtain apartments and jobs through its contacts in factories and other institutions. Those who were considered suitable were recruited by the KGB for political assignments.
The explanation of the Molotov affair is more complicated and deserves detailed examination. According to official and semiofficial accounts, Molotov used his appointment as ambassador to Mongolia to establish contact with the Chinese leaders. When the Soviet leaders found out about this liaison, Molotov was recalled and appointed in 1960 to be the chief Soviet representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A) in Austria. According to Satyukov, the chief editor of Pravda, and other communist leaders including Kuusinen, on the eve of the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, Molotov circulated a letter to the members of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U criticizing the draft of the new party program as "revisionist, non-revolutionary and pacifist."16 Molotov allegedly knew that the Chinese leaders shared his views. Molotov was recalled from Vienna to Moscow at the time of the Twenty second Congress, but he played no part in it. Shortly afterward he returned to Vienna, where he was said to be under house arrest. A few days later he was back in Moscow. On January 8, 1962, the Soviet foreign ministry announced that he would be returning to Vienna. Within days, this statement was withdrawn.
There are many curious anomalies in this story. Molotov was sent to Mongolia by Khrushchev to isolate him and to lower his prestige in the Soviet diplomatic service. He was kept under surveillance there by informers controlled by General Dobrynin, chief adviser to the Mongolian security service and former head of the KGB's surveillance directorate. Continuing unauthorized contact between Molotov and the Chinese would have been virtually impossible. If such contact had taken place and had been reported, it is most unlikely that Molotov would have been posted to the I.A.E.A in Austria. Like Malenkov, Bulganin, and others, he would have been sent off to retirement in a small town in the Soviet Union. Moreover, misconduct of this kind on Molotov's part would have been made known as before to party members in a secret letter as further evidence of his anti-party behavior. This did not happen. There was no reference to Molotov, in the confidential party explanation of the decisions of the congress, containing such criticisms. Furthermore, the criticisms attributed to him look most unlikely. The draft program was based on the decisions of the Eighty-one-Party Congress of November 1960, which ratified the new, revolutionary bloc policy and strategy. For Molotov to have criticized the program on the grounds alleged would have made him a laughingstock within the communist movement.
Molotov did, however, criticize Khrushchev's policy on the eve of the Twenty-first Party Congress two years earlier, in January 1959, and this was stated in the confidential circular to party members in Moscow on the decisions of that congress signed by Vladimir Ustinov, who had become a Moscow party secretary. Molotov's criticisms were described as a mixture of dogmatism and quotations from Lenin. This episode was not mentioned by Satyukov and in fact has never been disclosed to the public by the Soviet leadership.
It is therefore reasonable to deduce that Molotov's actual criticisms in 1959 were modified and only disclosed at a time suited to meeting the needs of policy in 1961. It is also possible that use was made of Molotov in this way with his knowledge and consent; as a party member, he would have had no option but to agree.
The unusual publicity given to Molotov's movements between Moscow and Vienna may well have been intended to attract Western attention to the affair at a time of alleged Sino-Soviet differences. In this connection it should be noted that Satyukov, supported by Mikoyan and other speakers, accused Molotov of predicting political conflicts with imperialism that would mean war. Mikoyan accused Molotov of rejecting peaceful coexistence. Another party official said that Molotov was opposed to high-level diplomatic contacts between Soviet and Western leaders. Satyukov summed up with this emphatic statement: "We say to Molotov—'no!' The C.P.S.U has done its best ... to guarantee peace for the U.S.S.R ... on the basis of the Leninist policy of peaceful co-existence." Clearly this exposure of Molotov's alleged warmongering could have been intended to support the moderate image of the Soviet leadership and the sincerity of their interest in peaceful coexistence and detente, in contrast with the "warmongering" of Molotov and the Chinese leadership.
Two further aspects of Satyukov's attack on Molotov should be mentioned. He accused Molotov, first, of trying to assume the role of an interpreter of Lenin, and second, of criticizing the new party program as pacifist and insufficiently revolutionary. Both these criticisms were to be used by the Soviets against the Chinese leaders, at first without naming them, but later explicitly. It can therefore be suggested that the Molotov affair was used to support the authenticity of the alleged differences between the Soviets and Chinese on the issue of peaceful coexistence.
The conspicuous revival of the de-Stalinization issue at the Twenty second Congress and Khrushchev's public attack on the Albanians apparently angered the Chinese to such an extent that Chou En-lai, the leader of the Chinese delegation, withdrew from the congress. As has already been explained, the issues of revisionism and Stalin's distortions of communism had already been settled between the leaders of the communist bloc at the end of 1957. Because they had been settled, there was no foundation for differences between communist parties on them. The conclusion may therefore be drawn that the revival of the issues at the Twenty-second Congress was artificial and that the differences between the Soviet and the Albanian and Chinese parties on Soviet "revisionism" and Chinese and Albanian "Stalinism" were calculated and agreed within the terms and in the interests of the long-range policy.
It should be noted that one of the objects of the display of differences was to add credibility to the notion of Soviet "moderation" and to present Khrushchev as a revisionist. The conclusion that the display was staged provides another argument for regarding the notion of Soviet moderation as unfounded.
The Position of Soviet
Scientists and Other Intellectuals
Extensive preparations were made by the Central Committee and
the KGB in 1958-60 to use scientists, writers, and other intellectuals
for political and disinformation purposes in accordance with the
requirements of the new long-range policy.17 This new approach to
the intellectuals had its internal aspect; by seeking their collaboration
in some form of political activity, the regime sought to forestall
opposition from them. But it is with the external, strategic implications
of the intellectuals' role in bringing influence to bear on Western
public opinion and governments that the present chapter is concerned.
Fadeyev's posthumous advice to the Central Committee to use
intellectuals for exerting influence, not for spying on one another, had
been well taken and was put into effect. The use of scientists in particular as agents of influence and channels for disinformation involved certain changes in their status. The Central Committee apparatus and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the KGB, developed closer relations with them. Many of them were given intelligence training individually and in schools. The regime, instead of keeping them in isolation at home as before, began to promote both their accessibility at home and their travels abroad with a view to widening and exploiting their contacts with Western scientists.
The complaints of Academicians Kapitsa and Sakharov and the biologist Zhores Medvedev about the difficulties encountered by Soviet scientists wishing to travel and meet their Western colleagues were incomplete, and distract attention from the real grounds for complaint by Western and Soviet scientists alike, which lie in the use of these contacts by the Central Committee and the KGB for collecting intelligence, conveying disinformation, and exercising political influence.18 In fact, the majority of Soviet scientists lend themselves willingly to intelligence work against foreign scientists because of the opportunities it gives them to increase their knowledge and advance in their careers. Like Fadeyev, they find it in better taste to spy on foreign associates than on their Soviet friends and colleagues.
The use of Soviet scientists as agents of influence and channels for disinformation entailed changes in Soviet practice over the disclosure of secret information. Although the most significant areas, especially the process of policy making and the technique of its implementation, remained as secret as ever, certain aspects of Soviet science and society were opened up; the obsession with secrecy appeared less total than in Stalin's days.
The greater accessibility of Soviet scientists made its own contribution to the impression of evolution in the Soviet system. More important, however, was the promotion through Soviet scientists of the notion of common interests between the Soviet Union and the West. The attendance of KGB agents, such as Academicians Topchiyev, Artobolevskiy, and Khvostov, at international scientific conferences and their role in promoting the idea of the Soviet Union's common interest with the United States in avoiding nuclear conflict deserve the closest scrutiny for the bearing they may have had on American willingness to engage in strategic arms control and disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union and the voluntary decision by the United States in the early 1960's to surrender its nuclear superiority in the naive belief that if the Americans reduced the rate of development of their nuclear arsenal, the Soviets would do the same.
As in the case of the scientists, the KGB's use of its expanded assets among Soviet writers (especially among those with well-known names) had its internal and external aspects. Shelepin's plans to introduce false opposition on Dzerzhinskiy's lines found concrete expression in the controlled debates between the "conservative" and "liberal" writers, in which the main protagonists on both sides, Kochetov and Tvardovskiy, were collaborating with the Central Committee and the KGB. This debate, together with the general increase in East-West cultural contacts, made a useful contribution to the myth of "evolution."
Objectives of Strategic Disinformation
on Soviet "Evolution" and
"Moderation"
The main external objective of strategic disinformation in the early 1960's
on the "evolution" and "moderation" of the Soviet regime and its "common
interests" with the West was to create a suitable climate for activist, detente
diplomacy by the Soviet Union and other communist states and to condition
favorable, and erroneous, Western responses to communist initiatives. The
five specific aims of communist diplomacy were to: • Undermine Western unity.
• Induce the advanced industrial nations to contribute to the growth of the economic and military potential of the bloc by agreeing to increase East-West trade, grant long-term credits, and supply advanced technology.
• Distract Western attention from the growth in the military strength of the bloc and the Soviet Union in particular.
• Engage the West, especially the United States, in arms control and disarmament negotiations, with a view to swinging the military balance of power in favor of the communist bloc.
• Create favorable conditions for communist parties to form united fronts with socialists and trade unionists in the advanced countries and with nationalist movements in the developing countries.
At home the main objective of the adjustments to the regime and the exaggeration of their significance through disinformation was to create favorable conditions for the further construction of socialism and the eventual transition to communism by neutralizing internal opposition and securing a reduction in external pressure on the regime from the West.
Subsidiary objectives of the revival of de-Stalinization were to:
• Provide a foundation for open reconciliation and cooperation between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia without revealing the full extent of Yugoslavia's membership in the bloc and commitment to its long-range policy.
• Provide grounds for Soviet-Albanian and Sino-Soviet "differences" in preparation for the pursuit of coordinated, dual foreign policies by the Soviet Union and China.
• Support further disinformation operations concerning disunity and disarray in the world communist movement ostensibly brought about by the decline in the influence of ideology and the resurgence of independent nationalist tendencies in communist parties inside and outside the bloc.
next
The Third Disinformation
Operation: The Soviet-Albanian
"Dispute" and "Split"156s
notes
Chapter 13: The First Disinformation Operation:
The Soviet-Yugoslav "Dispute" of 1958-60
1. Pravda, June 4, 1958.
2. The author was a subordinate of Grigorenko in the Counterintelligence Department in 1951. On one occasion in December 1959 Grigorenko visited the Information Department, where the author was then working, seeking staff with expertise on Yugoslavia and Albania for service in his department. The nature of this quest obliged Grigorenko to give information on the kind of work for which the officers were required. The information on Pushkin's involvement in this operation was confirmed to the author independently by another KGB officer, Kurenyshev.
3. Georgiy Maksimovich Pushkin, Soviet diplomat since 1937, ambassador in East Germany until the beginning of 1958, with previous experience in Hungary, Sinkiang, and Middle East affairs. Listed officially as Deputy Minister of foreign affairs from 1959.
4. Yugoslav Facts and Views, no. 56, 1958.
5. CSP, Leo Gruliow ed., (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), vol. 3, p. 62. Khrushchev stated: "On many questions of foreign policy we speak a common language."
6. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, English ed. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), pp. 701-2.
7. Ibid., p. 641: "Subsequently, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on its own initiative, took steps to restore norma] relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia. "The policy of friendship and mutual assistance, pursued by the CPSU, triumphed. The mistakes made occasionally in the relations with fraternal countries were of a secondary, accidental character. The essence of these relations was genuinely Socialist, and accorded fully with the principles of proletarian internationalism. The CPSU directed all its efforts to strengthening friendship with People's China and the other People's Democracies, and this policy was entirely successful. The joint activities of the CPSU and the other Communist Parties standing at the helm of their respective States, resulted in the establishment of a fraternal community of Socialist countries, and no amount of intrigue on the part of their enemies could, or can, shake their solidarity and unity. This unity is a source of the strength of the Socialist camp. . . The problem of relations between the Socialist countries was, for all its complexity and novelty, successfully solved in the interests of each country and of the entire Socialist camp."
8. CSP, vol. 3, pp. 68-69,
9. GSE (1961), p. 374.
Chapter 14: The Second Disinformation, Operation:
The "Evolution" of the Soviet Regime (Part One: The Major Changes in the USSR)
1. For an example, see Pravda, September 9, 1962.
2. Officially introduced in 1961.
3. Izvestiya, May 19, 1959.
4. Izvestiya, January 28, 1959, p. 9: "There is not now condemnation by the courts in the Soviet Union for political crimes. It is a big achievement which speaks for the exceptional unity of the political views of the people with the Central Committee of the Party."
5. Kommunist, no. 11 (1960), p. 44.
6. The author learned this from Grigorenko, whose department helped Shul'gin to write and publish the brochure.
7. See, for example, the letter from Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko to the United Nations, September 20, 1958, about a 10-15 percent reduction in the military budgets of the major powers. (Pravda, September 1958)
8. On June 6, 1958, Pravda published Khrushchev's letter of June 2 to President Eisenhower in which he forwarded to the American government the Soviet government's proposal for "joint measures for an increase in trade." The letter stated that the Soviet Union and the US, as the two most economically powerful states, could "carry on trade with one another on a wide scale."
9. See Khrushchev's report to the Twenty-second CPSU Congress in October 1961 (CSP, vol. 4, p. 69): "the Soviet Union is giving particular attention to the development of ties with its neighbours. The differences between our social and political systems have not been preventing the development of friendly, mutually beneficial relations between the USSR and such countries as Afghanistan and Finland. Our relations with Austria and Sweden are coming along quite well. We have been making efforts to improve our relations with Norway and Denmark and shall continue doing so. Relations with neighbouring Turkey have been improving of late. We want these relations to develop still further."
10. See, for example, Khrushchev's report to the Twenty-second CPSU Congress (CSP, vol. 4, p. 46): "To-day, the USA, which has become the centre of world reaction, takes the role of the chief aggressive nucleus. The US imperialists are acting in alliance with the West German militarists and revanchists and threatening the peace and security of peoples. . . ." Ibid., p. 45: "Comrades, the 20th party congress, analysing the situation in the countries of capitalism, came to the conclusion that they were moving steadily toward new economic and social upheavals. Has this conclusion been borne out? Yes, it has. In the years that have elapsed there has occurred a further sharpening of contradictions, both within the capitalist countries and among them; colonial empires have collapsed and the struggle of the working class and the peoples' national liberation movement have assumed tremendous proportions."
11. Detente: Cold War Strategies in Transition, ed. Eleanor Lansing Dulles and Robert Dickson Crane (Published for the Center for Strategic Studies, Georgetown University, by Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1965), p. 268.
12. Lazar Pistrak, The Grand Tactician (New York, Praeger 1961), p. 269.
13. G. A. von Stackelberg, Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, vol. 7, no. 4 (April 1960), pp. 16-20.
14. A penetrating explanation of Soviet provocation of the Berlin Crisis as being based, in large part, on Lenin's Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder was given by Nikolay Galay, "Berlin and Soviet Foreign Policy," Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, vol. 6, no. 6 (June 1959).
15. See CSP, vol. 4, p. 23: "Having brought about the complete and final victory of socialism, the first phase of communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historical mission and has ceased to be essential in the USSR from the point of view of internal development. The state which arose as a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat has turned into a state of the entire people, which expresses the interests and will of the people as a whole."
16. Satyukov said {CSP, vol. 4, p. 176): "The delegates to the 22nd congress should know that in October of this year, just before the congress opened, Molotov sent a letter to the Central Committee. Without having a word to say about his subversive, factionalist work against the Leninist party and against the decisions of its 20th congress, he tries afresh in this letter to pose as interpreter of Leninism and again attacked the Central Committee and the draft of the CPSU programme. Molotov declares in his letter that the draft programme fails to co-ordinate communist construction in the USSR with the prospects for the revolutionary struggle of the working class in capitalist countries, with the prospects for socialist revolution on an international scale. And this at a time when the draft programme has been unanimously approved not only by our party and the Soviet people but by the international communist movement. . . . His contentions lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to continue the advance to communism without the most serious political conflicts with the imperialist countries, and hence without war. We say to Molotov: no, the CPSU has been and is doing everything possible to ensure peace for the Soviet people, the people who are building communism. The Leninist principle of peaceful co-existence has been and remains our general line in foreign policy. This is plainly stated in the new programme and the party will pursue this line consistently."
17. The Soviet Academy of Sciences includes historians, lawyers, and economists as well as scientists in the conventional sense. The expression "Soviet Scientists" should be interpreted as including these additional categories.
18. Mose L. Harvey, Leon Goure, and Vladimir Prokofieff, Science and Technology as an Instrument of Soviet Policy (Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, 1972), pp. 93-94.
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