This point of view is widely shared by contemporary FSB officers in Russia. Opposition movements are largely considered to be sponsored by Western donors keen to organize a Russian version of the so-called Orange Revolution—a series of protests in Ukraine from November 2004 to January 2005 in response to what Ukrainians declared was a rigged vote, which ultimately led to a new vote in which pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko emerged victorious. These fears were strengthened on the eve of the Russian presidential elections of 2008.
After it was toppled from in front of the Lubyanka headquarters, the 15-ton statue of Dzerzhinsky was transferred to a small park behind a Moscow arts center. The park became known as the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments.
Every year some Russian politicians, including Communist revanchists, campaign for reinstating the statue. And each time, they are opposed by human rights activists. Some liberals feared Putin would re-establish the statue during his presidential term. But it never happened. During his term, Putin erected new monuments to Andropov and Dzerzhinsky but never attempted to resurrect the large statue in the square.
In reality, the myth of Andropov turned out to be largely directed at the security services’ rank and file; in one case, a statue of Dzerzhinsky was restored only inside a courtyard of a national police building at Petrovka 38. Putin and the security services seemed well aware that Russian society was indifferent to the legacy of Soviet state security, and they made no attempt to force it upon the general public. The supposed resurrection of the KGB’s pantheon of heroes pleased Putin only when this activity was limited by the secret services. Even as they attempted to create a new version of the Andropov legacy, the security services kept a lid on the evidence of the real history.
Today, archives concerning Soviet state security remain largely closed. Many holdings are available only to people in the secret services, and nineteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union it is still widely debated whether the KGB archives should be opened to the public. Meanwhile, some archives opened in the 1990s were closed down again in the decade Putin was in power.
In the early 1990s the Russian authorities were keen to declassify the KGB archives. In December 1991, a commission on declassifying the records of the Communist Party Central Committee was created under Dmitri Volkogonov, a leading Russian military historian.
In 1992, Yeltsin’s government invited the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky to testify at the trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Constitutional Court of Russia. To prepare for his testimony, Bukovsky was granted access to a large number of documents from Soviet archives. Using a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer, he managed to secretly scan many documents—including KGB reports to the Central Committee—and smuggle the files to the West. (As Bukovsky later told the authors, he was allowed to scan these documents simply because archive officials didn’t know what the scanner was.)
Bukovsky’s efforts resulted in a book,
Judgment in Moscow
, and a Web site.
12
In 1993 Russia joined the International Council on Archives, which created a group of experts formed to prepare an account of the archives of repressive regimes and offer recommendations for working with such archives. But after the bloody conflict between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet in October 1993, the question of transferring the archives of law enforcement ministries and secret services was dropped.
The majority of the Soviet Union-era secret service archives simply remained in the record offices of the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Military Office of the Public Prosecutor. Finally, an Interagency Commission to Protect State Secrets was created in place of the declassification commission. As a result, the collection of documents that had been publicly available before 1995 was closed. For example, Nikita Petrov, an expert from Memorial, the human rights organization, said that previously declassified Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party documents have been withdrawn from the Russian State Archive of Recent History by the foreign intelligence service.
13
IN MAY 2006, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, the National Security Archive at George Washington University posted on the Internet a series of documents from the former Soviet Union related to the Moscow Helsinki Group, including the KGB’s reports to the Central Committee about the “anti-social elements” who had started the group thirty years earlier, and the various repressive measures the KGB took “to put an end to their hostile activities.”
Most of the documents posted by the National Security Archive came from the Volkogonov Collection, which Volkogonov donated to the Library of Congress in the 1990s. Thus these reports documenting the regime’s efforts to suppress dissent were available on the Web in 2006 in Russian and in English translation, while in Russia these documents were sealed and classified throughout the decade of the 2000s on the basis of the State Secrets law.
14
In July 2007 the FSB claimed that 2 million documents about repression between 1920 and 1950 were open to the public. The statement was widely seen as evidence of the FSB’s openness and willingness to disclose the contents of the archives. But in fact the documents were unavailable to historians: Access to them is granted only to relatives of victims.
The same deceptive approach was employed with documents concerning the massacre of Katyn, an issue that is still a thorn in the side of Polish-Russian relations. In 1940, throughout Russia and the Ukraine (most notably in the Katyn forest in western Russia), thousands of imprisoned Polish officers were slaughtered. Soviet authorities denied responsibility, laying the blame on the Germans. Only in 1990 did Mikhail Gorbachev admit that the Soviets had killed the Polish prisoners. Yeltsin opened up classified files on the case for investigation, but in the Putin decade Russia’s military prosecutor shut down the inquiry.
In January 2009 Russia’s high court threw out a bid by campaigners to reopen an investigation on the grounds that all the perpetrators called to account in the inquiry have died, and relatives have failed to offer genetic evidence linking them to those killed in the massacres. According to Anna Stavitskaya, the lawyer for relatives of ten of the Katyn victims, “the decision meant the end of efforts by campaigners to resolve the issue in Russia,” and the group would now turn to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
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However, after the Polish president Kaczynski’s aircraft crashed near Smolensk on April 10, 2010, Medvedev handed over 67 volumes of documents on the Katyn massacre to Poland.
At the end of 2008, the FSB department in Tver, a region outside of Moscow, published a book celebrating the department’s ninetieth anniversary. In it, Dmitri Tokarev, a major in the NKVD (a predecessor to the KGB) was portrayed as having played a key role in the leadership of local state security. Tokarev led Tver’s NKVD in 1938- 1945 and was shown as a war hero and effective German spy catcher. But his department was also responsible for the execution of 6,000 Polish officers in the Ostashkov camp in the spring of 1940. The reports on executions—called “implementations”—were signed by Tokarev.
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No mention of the tragedy was made within the book.
THERE HAS NEVER been a full accounting of the misdeeds of the Soviet secret police. Any such airing of history would inevitably point to many who served in the KGB. The archives that would reveal these secrets have been steadfastly closed. The FSB, veterans of the KGB, want to keep it that way. In so doing, they perpetuate a more innocent history of Soviet-era events, while positioning Andropov as a hero to be celebrated.
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THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE
IMAGE-MAKING AND THE FSB
I
N DEALING WITH public opinion, the security services of Russia had their work cut out for them. They were the heirs of organizations—the KGB in particular—that had been paragons of secrecy and had never needed to explain themselves to the public. In the Soviet system, the state and party dominated all: There was no civil society to link the people with their rulers. But in the new Russia, a noisy, imperfect democracy was on the rise—green shoots of civil society that the security services could neither ignore nor hide.
In the decade of Putin, one way the FSB handled the tension between past and present was through propaganda films that portrayed security services as they wanted to see themselves—as special agents performing heroic deeds. Although there were many possible channels for influencing the public such as books, news media, and the Internet the FSB decided to put an emphasis on cinema and television. These efforts offer another window into how the resurgent security services operate in the new Russia.
In 2001, a series,
The Special Department
, appeared on television. In it, FSB agents in St. Petersburg prevented the theft and smuggling of valuable Russian artworks. The main hero of the show is a descendent of the city’s old intelligentsia who served in special forces in Afghanistan and has returned to protect the artifacts of Russian museums like the Hermitage.
Secret Watch
, a television series about the FSB Surveillance Service, began airing in the fall of 2005. The show, which featured secret agents following people and tracking down terrorists, was also produced with the support of the FSB. In 2007 Russian TV broadcast
Special Group
, a 16-part television movie about the Moscow FSB’s heroic acts, such as preventing a terrorist plot and investigating financial transactions. Once again, the FSB was behind the production.
In December 2004, the FSB’s biggest blockbuster premiered—the $7 million
Lichnyy Nomer
(or
Dogtag
, but titled
Countdown
in English).
1
The movie, a fictionalized account of two actual terrorist attacks (the 1999 Moscow apartment building bombings and the 2002 Dubrovka Theater siege), was intended to shed favorable light on the FSB.
The portrayal of the bombings in Moscow were left largely unaltered, but in the case of the Nord-Ost hostage crisis, the film’s producers replaced the actual theater with a circus. The protagonist was an FSB officer who was captured in Chechnya and forced to admit he had taken part in the bombings. (This was a fictionalized version of a real and controversial story of the military intelligence officer Alexei Galtin, who was captured by Chechens and had made a similar statement on video. Galtin was later to escape and to disavow his claims as made under torture.)
2
In the film, an oligarch named Pokrovsky, living in exile in the West, defied the Russian president and colluded with Arab terrorists and Chechens on a hostage-taking plan targeting the Moscow circus. Pokrovsky’s details bore a striking resemblance to those of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who fled to London in 2001. But the hostage taking is only the first stage of a much bigger terrorist attack—the planned bombing of the G8 summit in Rome. The main character, an FSB officer, saves the day by rescuing the hostages and defeating the terrorists.
The producers of the film made no secret of the fact that they were advised by Vladimir Anisimov, who was then deputy director of the FSB, or that the project was filmed with the service’s support.
3
Yuri Gladilshikov, a leading film critic, said, “We face the first private commercial counterterrorism blockbuster that appears to be made with the support of the secret services.” He added, “It was the first time since Soviet times that the state understood the power of cinematography.”
4
IN FEBRUARY 2006, the FSB reestablished a competition that had existed under Andropov, for the best literary and artistic works about state security operatives.
5
Oleg Matveyev, the officer of the FSB Center for Public Communications, acknowledged that the service was openly returning to KGB traditions. He told the newspaper
Kommersant
, “This is returning to past experience. From 1978 to 1988 there was a KGB award for art. It was also awarded to those who created a positive image of KGB employees. . . . Nowadays, whether in the cinema, in TV serials, or in detective series, it’s common for special services to be shown in a negative light, so we have decided to revive this competition, to reward those who do not discredit employees of the secret services, and to create a positive image of the defenders.”
6
The first year, the award went to
Lichnyy Nomer
.
The next movie hit was
Kod Apokalipsisa
(Apocalypse Code), in which the female protagonist—an attractive FSB colonel—saves seven world capitals. It was given the FSB award in 2007, and the movie
Likvidacia
(
Liquidation
), about the security service struggle against criminal gangs in Odessa soon after World War II, won in 2008.
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