RIA Novosti: Interview of Alexander Bondarenko, Soviet Intelligence Historian - The Story of Anna Ziberova, Veteran SMERSH Officer

On March 8, 2019, the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti published an interview of a journalist and intelligence historian, colonel Alexander Bondarenko. Bondarenko is the author of two books on Soviet military intelligence, including Heroes of SMERSH (2019) and the biography of Pavel Fitin, the WWII Soviet intelligence chief. He is currently working on the biography of Yury Drozdov, a long-time chief of the KGB Illegal Intelligence Department S. Below is my English translation available only on this blog.

Intelligence Historian Alexander Bondarenko: The Girl and the SMERSH - How Female Beauty Helped Catch Spies During the War

RIA Novosti March 8, 2019

The fairer half of humanity and intelligence services, the combination of mystery and secrecy with feminine charms thanks to which women can often do more than men – that is a topic that will never be boring. Many stories about the women who worked in the intelligence field have already been told - to the extent possible, of course. But very little is known about the women from the “opposite” service – the counterintelligence. No doubt remarkable people worked there, too. One of them was the military counterintelligence officer Anna Kuzminichna Ziberova.

This year, in the Molodaya Gvardiya book series “Lives of Remarkable People,” the book entitled Heroes of SMERSH was published, dedicated to the outstanding officers of the military counterintelligence service during the Great Patriotic War. Among the 21 heroes described in the book, there is only one woman - Anna Ziberova. In an interview with RIA Novosti, the author of the book, intelligence historian Alexander Bondarenko says that “this book is a memorial to all military counterintelligence officers, including Anna Kuzminichna whom I remember as a very soft-spoken, delicate, and sincere person.”

Trust through Charm

“In counterintelligence, including military counterintelligence, women were mainly employed in the staff positions - in office work, personnel department, etc. A female operative is a rarity in counterintelligence, especially in military counterintelligence, because the army is considered men’s business” - notes Bondarenko.

A graduate of a pedagogical university who had just received her diploma, and not just a pretty girl, but a real beauty, Anna could have taught literature in some high school, instilled a love of poetry and prose in her students, but ...

“But the war began. And many people who never even considered working for state security and intelligence services, but instead wanted to teach children, [or] build houses, factories, and cities, had to put on a uniform,” says Bondarenko. Anna was recruited into the Office of the Special Departments of the NKVD within which military counterintelligence operated at that time. She was assigned to do “investigations” – which meant finding out the identities of people who, for whatever reason, attracted the attention of the state security institutions. So, instead of checking school essays, she was checking people.

“And here Anna Kuzminichna turned out to be very useful,” Bondarenko notes. “Counterintelligence is generally built on trust and doing ‘investigations’ even more so. And trust arises from sympathy for a person. If someone with a heavy jaw and a narrow forehead approached you, and, in addition, couldn’t clearly explain what he wanted, you would quickly try to get away. But if, instead, a beautiful, intelligent woman approached you with a book in her hands and asked for something, any normal person would help her right away,” Bondarenko adds.

The Deadly Risk

The military counterintelligence service regime was harsh with no days off and no holidays. The discipline was very strict. The officers worked hard from morning till evening and did not spare themselves. In the morning they received their assignments and dispersed throughout Moscow. They returned late in the evening and reported what they had accomplished during the day.

In addition, doing “investigations” was fraught with mortal danger, although it does not seem like that. You walk around, meet the people of interest, talk to them while drinking tea (if you can obtain it despite war shortages), and write the reports later.

[And yet] here are two episodes. In the summer of 1943 (at that time, the Special Departments were already replaced by the SMERSH – The Main Counterintelligence Directorate of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Defense. SMERSH meant “Death to spies!”). Military counterintelligence officers had to neutralize a German agent who came on a business trip from the front and lived in his sister’s empty apartment in the center of Moscow on Rozhdestvenka Street, very close to the Lubyanka. Anna Kuzminichna had the apartment under surveillance. Suddenly, at some point, this officer transmitted a message by radio that on a certain day and a certain hour, he would leave the house to cross the front line and go over to the Germans. It was decided to arrest the spy on the street when he left the house.

Anna was supposed to be at the entrance and, seeing that the agent left the apartment, wave a white handkerchief through the window on the floor above. Preparing for this, counterintelligence officers had already taken the glass out of the window frame. Everything seemed pretty simple. Far away from the front, the center of Moscow, and somewhere on the street, one’s own colleagues from the arrest unit – what could go wrong?

She arrived at the place ahead of time, entered through the main entrance and suddenly saw that the agent was already going down the stairs: he left the apartment earlier than was supposed. Seeing the girl, the spy stopped and let her in. “With peripheral vision, I notice that he is looking after me. I go up the first floor, then the second, the third, but he is still standing there!” - Ziberova recalled in her memoir.

What to do now? When she reached the top floor, she knocked on the door of an apartment. Luckily, somebody lived there. An old woman opened the door. Anna asked her for a glass of water, and when the old  woman went back into the apartment, she took off her shoes, silently ran to the window, broke the glass (after all, the “prepared” window was on a floor below), cut her hand in the process, and waved with a blood-stained handkerchief …

When Anna saw that counterintelligence officers noticed her signal and were approaching the main entrance from all directions, she sat down on the stairs and began to cry – the stress was so great. In the meantime, the agent exited the building and was immediately captured.

But was this so serious? Well, she cut her hand. It hurt, of course, but did this cause her stress? “Such a reaction is understandable. The risk was actually great - after all, if the German agent had figured out who the girl was, he could have hit her on the head – he had nothing to lose - and then thrown her down the stairwell. Counterintelligence officers waiting in ambush wouldn’t know about it and the spy could calmly go out into the street and sneak away,” says Bondarenko.

A more serious case occurred during the same year [1943]. In the area of the ​​Taganskaya Square, a sleazy-looking colonel, a German agent who had also come from the front, had an apartment and, like the spy from the Rozhdestvenka Street, lived by himself. Likewise, counterintelligence officers knew that the colonel was about to return back to his paymasters across the front line.

The counterintelligence unit went to his apartment. Anna went first to find out if this person was at home. “I knock on the door, no one opens it. I turned my back to the door and began to kick it with my feet so that they could hear me. Suddenly the door opens, and I literally fall into the corridor. I feel that someone grabbed me by my collar and threw me into a small room, having locked the door on the latch from the inside. I realized that I was in the toilet,” she recalled.

“I hear someone running around the apartment. There is a strong knock on the door, someone runs to the back door, but our guys are already there waiting. They entered the apartment, one grabbed the colonel, the other ran to the front door, where they were still knocking” - wrote Ziberova. Anna’s commanding officer, who ran into the apartment, immediately asked the detainee: “Where is our girl?” “Had I known she was yours, I would have killed her!” the colonel shot back. “Therefore, on the ‘secret front’ there were just as many dangers as on the real front,” Bondarenko notes.

Anna worked successfully, delicately, trying not to arouse any suspicions of those whom she talked to, whom she interviewed. She knew Moscow extremely well and was familiar with all the courtyards and the back entrances. And, after a certain time, she began to receive the most difficult assignments.

Once she was even mistaken for a spy herself. When the Soviet atomic project began during the war, the organization with the provisional name the Laboratory No. 2 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences became its “center” - this is now the world-famous Kurchatov Institute. Its location was in a district on the then outskirts of Moscow on the territory of the Shchukinsky military town. And many of the residents of the town began to get jobs in the Laboratory No. 2. Anna was instructed to make “investigations” of those wishing to work at this facility. In order to do this, she took on a cover job as a maid on the territory of the military town.

And it so happened that one of the women, with whom she talked, suspected Ziberova of espionage and reported her suspicions to the criminal investigation department. The policemen detained Anna and brought her to the police station, where she refused to reveal her identity. At some point, Anna’s boss, Colonel Zbrailov, found out what was going on and personally came to rescue the “spy.” The police chief praised Anna to Zbrailov, saying that she stood firm no matter what they tried. “I wish I had staff like that” – he exclaimed wistfully.

The life of Anna Ziberova was no different from the lives of millions of Soviet people who lost their family members and close friends in the war. In 1944, Anna’s beloved husband, a military pilot, got killed. After that, she became so ill that she began to hallucinate. “I see a pilot on the street, I run after him, I grab his hand, he looks around, I see that this is a stranger, I turn away and run [in tears],” she recalled. In addition, Anna’s brother and two brothers of her husband also got killed in the war, and her father died. “So, the war affected Anna Kuzminichna in a horrible way,” says Bondarenko.

The Fearless SMERSH

Ziberova worked in the military counterintelligence service for about forty years. In 1996, for the first time after the war, Anna Kuzminichna visited her high school No. 464 on the 60th anniversary of its opening. There was a special program in the assembly hall. Ziberova was the only one left from her entire class. The portraits of her classmates who got killed in the war looked at her from the walls.

As the oldest graduate, Anna Kuzminichna was given the floor and asked to tell about her studies and the course of her later life. After talking about the school and her time as a student, she said – “And then I worked in the SMERSH...” After these words, as she recalled later, deadly silence enveloped the hall. Those who were looking at her with attention and interest [suddenly] dropped their eyes, as if she had said something shameful. Anna Kuzminichna said that at first she thought something was wrong with her clothes. And then, from the depths of the hall, somebody who, apparently, thought that he knew what he was talking about yelled out: “SMERSH is terrible [in a moral sense]!”

“This is not surprising. After all, at that time the history of our state security and intelligence services was portrayed in the darkest colors. One scary myth was followed by another, even scarier. SMERSH was generally presented exclusively as a punitive organization,” says Bondarenko. According to him, this happened because the history of military counterintelligence was kept classified. “Do you know where all this nonsense about SMERSH came from? From the Western spy fiction. Few people remember that the SMERSH was described for the first time by the British writer Ian Fleming in one of his James Bond novels, From Russia with Love. In the novel, Fleming presented it as a bunch of blockheads engaged in the liquidation of people. And his head of SMERSH was a general with a "bright" Russian family Grubozaboyshchikov [lit. brutal killer]” Bondarenko says.

Let’s go back to that school hall where the SMERSH was given such a “high rating.” In all likelihood, Ziberova should have been offended. But she laughed merrily in response. “Am I really that terrible?” - asked the short, still beautiful and very charming woman. Everyone in the hall was embarrassed.

And she began to tell in detail what her work consisted of and why it was so necessary for our country. The audience held their breath. And when the story ended, everyone stood up and applauded for a long time. There were flowers next to the stage to be given to all the visiting graduates. The director of the school, in a fit of emotion, grabbed all of them, and gave Anna Kuzminichna that huge bouquet.

 

Novaya Gazeta: Interview of Nikita Petrov, Soviet Intelligence Historian

On December 29, 2017, the liberal, anti-regime Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta published an interview of Nikita Petrov, a libertarian scholar of Soviet state security system. Petrov is the author of several books on Soviet state security, including the biographies of Nikolay Yezhov and Ivan Serov. He is a deputy board chairman of the Moscow-based human rights organization Memorial. Below is my English translation available only on this blog.

Elena Racheva: Intelligence Historian Nikita Petrov on Anachronism and Legal Nihilism in the FSB

Novaya Gazeta December 29, 2017

 

Nikita Petrov, an expert in the history of the Soviet state security and intelligence services, comments on the interview of the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov. In the interview, he finds old myths, fake statistics, and non-existent documents and explains why one should not take it seriously.

The FSB officers boisterously celebrated their professional holiday: on the eve of the centenary of the formation of the VChK-a on December 20, 1917, the current director of the Russian FSB, General of the Army Alexander Bortnikov, gave a  programmatic interview to the editor-in-chief of Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Entitled in the Soviet manner “What the FSB Emphasizes,” it traced the century-old history of the struggle of the state security against spies, terrorists and “white emigres,” depicted Russia as a fortress surrounded by enemies, transparently hinted at the guilt of many who were repressed under Stalin, deplored the collapse of the Soviet Union, and looked like a gigantic FSB press release published across two pages by a leading state newspaper.

The interview caused a public outrage. A group of academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences published an open letter criticizing the interview and stating that “for the first time since the 20^th Congress of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], one of the highest officials of our state justified the mass repressions of the 1930s-1940s.” [The letter] also noted that [during that time] “a large number of remarkable scientists were killed in the prime of their work.” The Congress of the Intelligentsia [a civil society organization] demanded the immediate resignation of Alexander Bortnikov who “made a number of outrageous statements discrediting the legal foundations of our country.” The statement of the Congress was signed, in particular, by Lyudmila Alekseyeva, Lev Gudkov, Irina Prokhorova, Lev Shlosberg, Svetlana Gannushkina, and Lev Ponomarev.

In particular, the outrage was caused by the fact that Alexander Bortnikov proudly derived the history of the current FSB from the VChK-a of the 1920s and the NKVD of the 1930s. We asked Nikita Petrov, a historian and a well-known expert in the history of Soviet state security organizations, to comment on the interview. [The interview was conducted by Elena Racheva]

-Let’s start from the beginning. What do you find problematic in Bortnikov’s interview?

- The first thing that sickened me was the statement that there was something objective behind the Moscow trials of 1937-1938.

- Here’s the quote [from the interview]: “The archival materials testify to the presence of an objective side in the significant number of the prosecuted cases, including those that formed the basis of the [Moscow] trials. The plans of L. Trotsky’s supporters to remove or even liquidate I. Stalin and his supporters in the leadership of the VKP(b) [the All-Union Communist Party - Bolsheviks] are by no means an invention, and neither are the links of the conspirators with foreign intelligence services.”

- In fact, Bortnikov is repeating A Short Course on the History of the VKP(b), which clearly states that the [anti-Stalin] opposition is the vanguard of the world [capitalist] reaction, that these are the villains who “took the path of organizing acts of sabotage and the path of espionage.” To repeat this today is not just an anachronism. It goes against all historical research. It runs counter to the policy of the current Russian government, which has erected a monument to the repressed. And it is contrary to the previously adopted legal decisions. I think that Bortnikov is aware that all the people who went through these court processes - with the exception of Genrikh Yagoda - were rehabilitated. To argue that there was something [objective] in the charges is not just retrograde obscurantism but is also legal nihilism. This is the first thing. The second thing that surprised me was the statistics of the repressed.

- Bortnikov says: “Already in the late 1980s, the 1954 document from the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was declassified about the number of people convicted of counter-revolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes, including banditry and military espionage from the period from 1921 to 1953. The number is 4,060,306 people. Out of this number, 642,980 were sentenced to capital punishment and 765,180 to exile and deportation.”

- These figures are an arbitrary quote from an archival source. Here is the document on the work of the VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB, signed by the acting head of the first special department of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, Colonel Pavlov in December 1953. It indicates that just from 1921 to 1938, the state security authorities arrested 4,835,937 people and by 1953, 6 million people. The document does state that the number of the conviction from 1921 to 1953 was 4,060,306 as pointed out by Bortnikov. But, at the same time, the number of those sentenced to death was 799,455. In addition to that, the document does not include the number of people repressed by the SMERSH and other significant cases, such as the “Katyn case.” According to Memorial [a human rights organization], the total number of those executed during that period of time is about one million. Any smaller numbers are an attempt to obscure the issue. Although, if you think about it, 4 million is also a huge number. In general, the state did not lift a finger to make public the official and verified number of the victims of Soviet terror. In addition, Bortnikov says: “765,180 people were sentenced to exile and deportation.” But where are the mass-deported ethnic minorities? Where are the former kulaks who were also deported? Here we are talking about those who were sentenced to deportation and exile [by the courts], and not about those deported through administrative measures. Bortnikov does not elaborate on this.

-Does the document Bortnikov referred to really exist?

- Yes, it is kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and has been published several times, for example, in the document collection GULAG in 2000. But it was not declassified in the late 1980s, as Bortnikov says. It remained classified as “top secret” even during the years of perestroika. During the Gorbachev period, quite a lot was written about the fact that there were mass repressions, and the process of rehabilitation was underway. But the numbers began to surface only after August 1991. Statistics always contradicted the official line. Bortnikov could go to the FSB archive, open the document fund No. 8, and sit for a month with those papers. Then he would come up with different numbers. But, in general, the interview creates a harmonious picture and is silent about the tragic pages. For example, we do not learn from it that all the people’s commissars [ministers] of state security, starting with Yagoda and ending with Beria, were shot and have not been rehabilitated to this day. How should we understand this fact? Did they shoot them correctly or not? Was Beria good or bad?

- Good, of course. The quote: “Under L. Beria, some of them [the repressed Chekists] were returned to work in the state security institutions.”

- Yes, and then comes a deception. The quote: “In total, from 1933 to 1939, 22,618 NKVD officers were subjected to repression.” Is this true? Yes, of course, there is such a document in the FSB archive. But it is clear that among these 22 thousand, there were mainly regular police officers, the employees of registry offices, firemen, border guards, and internal security personnel. And in the document, where this figure is given, it is indicated that they were convicted, including some with suspended sentences, for general violations and abuse: money issues, professional neglect, inability to properly organize counterintelligence work.

- That is, among those 22 thousand, there is probably a border guard who lost his rifle.

- … And Karatsupa when his dog ran away [Karatsupa was a well-known Soviet border guard known for the use of trained dogs; Petrov  is being sarcastic]. And on the counterrevolutionary charges, which is what Bortnikov is talking about, only a couple of thousand Chekists were repressed in 1937 and 1938. Let me remind you that at the beginning of 1937, only about 25 thousand people worked in the state security system (UGB–GUGB NKVD).

- It turns out that Bortnikov wants to create a myth that the Chekists themselves suffered from mass repression, and then Beria came around and put things in order.

- Beria did return some of these people into the state security institutions in 1941. The war began and there was no one to work in the military counterintelligence. And the Chekists, who had previously been arrested for violating Soviet laws, for beating up those under investigation, began to be assigned to the Special Departments of the NKVD, from where they were transferred to SMERSH in 1943, bringing along with them their habitual methods of work. Bortnikov could have said: “For a long time, the state security institutions were commanded by a handful of political adventurers who infiltrated their ranks.” That’s what they wrote in the history textbook of the CPSU, and even now everyone would understand it.

- But it would also cast a shadow on the state security system.

- Certainly. And therefore he decided it was best not to say anything about it at all.

- The director of the FSB says that the VChK-a was tasked with intelligence and counterintelligence but does not mention its role within the country itself.

- Yes. Why didn’t he say anything about the “Special Bureau for the Administrative Expulsion of the Anti-Soviet Elements of the Intelligentsia” created in 1922 in the Secret- Operational Directorate of the GPU? Or, in general, about the suppression of any forms of resistance [opposition] to Soviet power by the state security? It’s easy to hide behind the struggle against foreign intelligence services. And how about the fact that the state security institutions became an instrument of the Communist Party in the struggle against its own people? Or that, starting in 1937, the torture and beatings of those under investigation were widely used?

- There is only one place in the interview where there is the word “excesses”: “The brutal methods used by the state gave rise to the opposition within the Soviet public. Even within the OGPU, a conflict arose between the chairman G. Yagoda and his deputy S. Messing, who in 1931, together with a group of like-minded associates, spoke out against the mass arrests. The “purges” [within the OGPU] began and intensified even more after the murder of S. Kirov in December 1934. At the slightest suspicion of “unreliability,” highly skilled officers were transferred to the periphery, fired, or arrested. Their place was taken by people without any experience in operational and investigative work, but ready to carry out any [top-level] instructions for the sake of their careers. This partly led to the ‘excesses’ in the work of the OGPU – NKVD.”

- The conflict ended with the fact that Messing and several leading officers were indeed removed from the OGPU. But these people, who accused Yagoda of violating the law, violated the law themselves. For example, they fabricated the case of microbiologists, the case of bacteriological sabotage. They fought against Yagoda, not for the [ethical] purity of their work, and they kicked them out not because they violated the law, but because they violated the monolithic unity in the ranks of the OGPU. In Bortnikov’s account, all this is presented as the fight of the good state security officers against the bad ones. The same goes for the period under Andropov. Was this period good or bad?

-It was good. The quote: “A direction was taken towards the greater public openness about the KGB and the results of its activities (...) The emphasis shifted to preventive and administrative measures.”

- First, the greater openness did not begin under Andropov, but under Khrushchev. Secondly, the focus on “preventive measures” was announced as a component of Khrushchev’s general policies in 1959. It was now believed that a person was not so bad that the collective couldn’t re-educate him, and so there was no need to drag to prison everyone who, thoughtlessly, carried on anti-Soviet conversations, it was enough to do so with several dozen people a year and the rest would live in fear. This approach was later developed under Andropov, but Andropov did not invent it. Where in Bortnikov’s interview is the account of the fact that, under Andropov, the KGB enforced ideological control by repressing people who expressed critical judgments about the Soviet regime? That they were condemned to be under the supervision of the KGB, to sit in a psychiatric hospital, to undergo “preventive” measures, or to be sent to prison or forced to emigrate? How could you write about Andropov without writing anything about Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn?

- In the interview, the emphasis was placed on the struggle against “foreign,” as they say now, “partners.” Bortnikov describes how, during the entire hundred-year period, the state security fought against espionage and external enemies, but its domestic activities are left in the shadows. How unexpected is this for you?

- The pathos of the glorification of the KGB under Brezhnev consisted in this: we have our own unique line of historical development, we are developing a new socialist society for the first time, and therefore we are surrounded by the  “ideological enemies” while the ideological struggle is intensifying. In Stalin’s time, this concept of a “besieged fortress” was brought to a logical perfection, which is, apparently, admired by the current leadership of the FSB. The pathos of the struggle against foreign intelligence services and the suspicion of everyone of working for them is a common place in the Stalinist system of repression. Now we see the reflected light of the Stalinist era: we have again become hostile to the whole world, and it appears hostile to us. But Bortnikov’s ideological postulates about who we are, where we are, and who our enemies are – they are the reincarnation of Stalin’s A Short Course on the History of the VKP(b). But the most surprising thing for me in the interview is the real Chekist paranoia focused on the concept of “agent of influence.” Bortnikov is asked: is an agent of influence a modern slang? “No, this term was first used by Yu. Andropov in a report for the Politburo back in 1977 entitled ‘On the Hostile Activities of the U.S. CIA on Breaking Down the Soviet Society and Disorganizing the Socialist Economy Through the Agents of Influence.’”

- Was there such a report?

- There was no such report! And that’s the crux of the matter! In the summer of 1991, at a closed meeting of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union, the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, extensively quoted from a note allegedly from Andropov, which was allegedly submitted to the Central Committee of the CPSU. The term “agents of influence” appeared in it. They [the agents of influence] were trained and supported by the West, they sat in the Kremlin already under Andropov and ruined the country. Kryuchkov even stated the date of this note - January 24, 1977, but he never published it anywhere, indicating its source. That’s because he wrote it himself. In 1977, Kryuchkov was the head of the First Main Directorate of the KGB and, I believe, he himself prepared that note. Maybe he even handed it over to Andropov, but he was unlikely to send it to the Central Committee - that would have invited ridicule from others. “Agents of influence” is simply Kryuchkov's invention. I have read his text. That’s nonsense. That’s paranoia. Even in 1977, it was not possible to send something like this to the Central Committee of the CPSU. And now Bortnikov is trying to ascribe Kryuchkov’s invention to Andropov and states his belief in the “agents of influence”. Well, some also believe in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When the FSB cannot understand the motives behind the actions of this or that democratically minded person, it declares him an “agent of influence.” It’s convenient, you don’t need to prove anything. This way of thinking should be rejected by the head of an institution, which, among other things, is responsible for ensuring the compliance with the law.

- The interview lists several cases of the foreign spies being caught by the VChK-a. For example: “The first significant success of the Soviet counterintelligence was the exposure of the “Conspiracy of Ambassadors” of the Entente countries under the leadership of the head of the British diplomatic mission R. Lockhart in September 1918.” Was there such a conspiracy?

- The conspiracy of the Entente countries is a provocation of the VChK-a. It was done in a very simple way: several Chekists disguised as Latvian riflemen guarding the Kremlin came to the head of the British mission and said that there was an opportunity to overthrow the Bolshevik government. They were not driven out, but allegedly even given some money, which became the basis for discrediting the diplomatic corps. Other provocative operations, such as Operation Trust, were also carried out, and Bortnikov mentions them. Since then, the Soviet state security has become very fond of what we call the method of provocation. It was believed that using this method, one can control the actions of the enemy and distract him with a made-up story, with an invented organization. And, at the same time, one can show to the public that the opponents are in fact conspirators, enemies of the state.

-Does Bortnikov understand that it was a provocation?

- I am not so sure. In the official KGB textbook published in 1977 (in our country, it is still considered top secret, but it is available on the website of the U.S. Library of Congress) Lockhart’s conspiracy is presented as a glorious page in its history. Likewise, Operations Trust and Syndicate. There is no word “provocation,” it is stated that this was the modus operandi. Bortnikov believes that the method was a great success and presents it as such.

- It turns out that the director of the FSB does not just list Soviet myths, but that he believes in them, too?

- We can classify the features we see in the interview. First, the old [Soviet] myths “about the main thing,” which contemporary Chekists also believe in. Secondly, a statement of facts about something that really took place, which is either not presented completely, or is interpreted incorrectly. Somebody may say to me: “How do you know how to interpret correctly?” Well, if there was a mass rehabilitation of the victims of political repression, then it is not necessary to cast a shadow on it and call those who were rehabilitated guilty. Otherwise, this is not just an anachronism, but also legal nihilism. Third, there is the construction of a new ideology. According to this ideology, the state security institutions have always guarded the state and its sovereignty but the [Communist] party sometimes made wrong decisions and forbade them to do their work. According to the way that the KGB was positioned in the Soviet system, the state security officers were an armed detachment of the Communist Party and always subordinated to it. Now the director of the FSB is constructing a myth that the KGB has always been on the forefront of the protection of the state, but the state was ruled by an incompetent organization such as the CPSU. But then the question arises: if they have protected the state so well, why did it collapse? Bortnikov promotes a new myth that the disintegration of the KGB began during the years of Perestroika. The blame is attributed to Gorbachev who allegedly destroyed the Soviet Union.

- In the interview, there is a hint that the state security institutions fought for the preservation of the USSR but that they were not successful.

- Their main battle was the putsch in August 1991. The coup failed because the population did not support the KGB. In the Gorbachev era, the KGB was an extremely anachronistic organization that resisted the reforms. That is not stated in the interview.

- Nevertheless, Bortnikov derives the continuity of the FSB from the KGB.

- Yes, and I have a completely childish question: why? Wasn’t it easier to cast aside the past and say: “We must critically analyze the history of state security institutions and condemn their crimes”? Yeltsin proposed a new founding date for the FSB - January 24, 1992, the creation of the Russian Ministry of Security. They didn't like it. So, since 1995, the FSB returned to the old [Soviet] founding date - December 20, 1917. And now it has found itself under constant criticism only because it cannot cope with this past.

- I wonder what the director of the FSB was trying to achieve with this interview.

- We have the officially adopted documents, for example, “The State Policy for Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression,” we have a monument, The Wall of Grief. At its unveiling, President Putin said that there can be no excuse for mass repressions. These words represent the turning point.There are always such turning points in history: for example, Khrushchev’s report on the cult of personality, or Gorbachev’s speech on the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, where he said: “Stalin’s guilt is enormous and unforgivable.” These words signified a new step in relation to the past. But suddenly there is an interview with one of the top figures of the regime, which is completely contrary to the articulations of the state policy and, moreover, returns us to the ideological system of Stalin’s times. And the question arises: why? As soon as the interview came out, a claim appeared that this was a trial balloon, an attempt to see how the public would react. The public did not like this interview, there were numerous critical and negative responses. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories and I don’t believe that the Kremlin told Bortnikov: come on, be uncompromising, and let’s see the reaction, since we made too many concessions when unveiling the Wall of Grief. Of course, this would be neat, because it would mean that our country is governed according to a plan from the Center, which knows how to mix a bit of severity with a bit of meekness [Petrov is sarcastic here]. But we have a state where every top-level official can say what he wants. Bortnikov is no exception and he can freely broadcast his anachronistic views. I suspect he got this material from the FSB Center for Public Relations. They crammed a report with all the glorious successes of the state security institutions [sarcasm, again], and it sounded fine to Bortnikov. But, if he did not anticipate that society would be critical of this material, then he is cut off from social reality. And, you know, that often happens.

- To summarize then, it turns out that Bortnikov just wanted to add some flare to the celebration of the Chekist holiday. The piece in Rossiyskaya Gazeta is like a concert dedicated to the day of the Chekist with a military orchestra and Oleg Gazmanov [a pop singer].

- Yes, although the FSB, just like the Gazprom, could afford to invite Deep Purple, too. I see in this interview, first, a very symptomatic attempt to justify a century-long history of terror against our own people. Secondly, I see the futility and ultimate failure of these justifications, since Bortnikov’s material itself goes against them. Thirdly, I see that the freedom of opinion still exists in our country. It would surprise me if the Kremlin reprimands Bortnikov for this interview. This interview will hardly be remembered, the way few people remember what Kryuchkov said in his speech on the anniversary of October Revolution in 1989. Bortnikov’s attempt to create a positive and coherent history of state security institutions failed: the pieces of the interview are not logically connected and the plot is falling apart. This institution [FSB] does not have a convincing and thoughtful understanding of the Soviet past, just as there is no general understanding of how to study history in Russia today. The direction that the Kremlin would like to pursue is untenable because it contradicts the history itself. And the public knows well what the state security system is all about and why one should be afraid of it.