Yegor assigned the job of assailing the most formidable bastion of Soviet power to two young female reporters – Yevgenia Albats and Natalia Gevorkyan. Albats tracked down Stalinist investigators who were still alive and grilled them about themselves and their victims.[1] Gevorkyan mainly dealt with the KGB’s present. ‘Yegor called me in and told me: “I want you to write about these bastards – the security services, the KGB, you know…” I told him that I had never even read a law book in my life. “Never mind: you will go to these KGB guys, cross one leg over another and look at them with your silly eyes – you will see they will tell you stuff that they would never tell any man.” It worked.’4
The reason for choosing Gevorkyan for the job was not just her good looks and journalistic talents: she was someone Yegor had an affinity with and could trust. The granddaughter of an old Bolshevik, she was the next generation of the Soviet aristocracy – with roots not dissimilar to his own. Her father was at the heart of the Soviet intelligence service – first at the United Nations in New York where he befriended Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, then in Ethiopia. At the time when she walked into Yegor’s office, in 1989, her father had just retired as the chief of the American department at News Press Agency (APN) to which Moskovskie novosti was subordinated. Like Yegor, she had spent time in Prague (as a journalism student she specialized in Czechoslovakia) but instead of returning to the Soviet Union at the end of her year out, she had married a foreigner and stayed in Czechoslovakia – a move which turned her into a renegade in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, closing most career paths.
One of Gevorkyan’s first articles about the KGB was based on an open letter, which a former KGB staffer sent to Moskovskie novosti. The man was neither a senior KGB officer nor even a member of the party. He was an English-language interpreter mistakenly sent to work in Dresden. After he quit the service the KGB barred him from travelling to West Germany to see a friend, so he wrote to Moskovskie novosti to complain. All he did in Dresden, he wrote, was take the wives of KGB officers shopping and deliver matches and soap to his boss.
The years when the unfortunate interpreter served in Dresden – 1985 to 1988 – coincided with the service of another young KGB operative there: Vladimir Putin. (Gevorkyan’s next-door neighbour in Moscow was Putin’s boss in Germany.) Fast forward to 2000 and Gevorkyan, by that time a star reporter, was chosen, along with two other people, to interview Putin for a book to be called First Person. He told her how in 1989, in Dresden, he burnt documents fearing that an angry crowd could storm the KGB headquarters at any moment. When the crowd appeared outside the building where Putin worked, he came out to talk to them. ‘These people were in an aggressive mood. I called our group of forces and explained the situation. And I was told: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”’5
Eventually, Putin said, military personnel did come and the crowd dispersed, but Moscow’s silence stayed with him: ‘At that moment I had a feeling that the Soviet Union had disappeared.’ That feeling of betrayal experienced by many KGB officers around the Soviet bloc was exploited – with significant damage to the country – when former KGB men seized power in Russia a decade later. But in 1990 many of them felt uncertain and were desperately looking for political cover. Vladimir Putin ended up working for Anatoly Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St Petersburg. Then a far more senior man – Major-General Oleg Kalugin who was in charge of Soviet counter-intelligence – came to knock on the door of Moskovskie novosti.
Kalugin had spent thirty years as one of the most senior Soviet intelligence officers; his code name was Petrov. In the late 1980s clouds started gathering over Kalugin’s head and he was put under surveillance personally authorized by the KGB chief as a suspected double agent (Kalugin always denied this). The day when Kalugin was forced into retirement, he ‘handed’ himself over to the ‘democratic camp’.
A few months later he gave an interview to Gevorkyan. He did not disclose any secrets, but he made a political statement: ‘The KGB remains untouchable. Its structure remains unchanged and so does its mighty potential which for years was the main power base of Soviet dictators. Even after five years of Perestroika, it is a state within a state, an organ endorsed with enormous power, able to trample down any government.’ At the end, Gevorkyan asked Kalugin why he was undermining the system which he had loyally served for thirty years. In reply, Kalugin quoted Donald Maclean, a British diplomat who had spied for the KGB. ‘Maclean said: “People who read Pravda every day are invincible”. People who are well-informed and get their information from different sources inevitably start thinking,’ Kalugin explained.6
Within days of Moskovskie novosti running the interview, Kalugin was stripped of his military rank and his medals. But this only boosted his ‘martyrdom’ status. Moskovskie novosti rushed to his defence, demanding explanations from the government. A few months later, Kalugin was elected as a parliament deputy and began his political career.[2] There was a certain irony in Kalugin’s relationship with the media: a man who had used a journalistic cover when he served as a Soviet spy in America, went to a newspaper for political cover when the power moved away from the KGB. Going to a foreign embassy would have meant treason. Going to Moskovskie novosti meant insurance. Kalugin even deposited his medals in its safe.
A month after Kalugin’s interview, Moskovskie novosti ran another interview – also by Gevorkyan – this time with Jan Ruml, the new Czech minister of the interior, a former dissident and a friend of the Czech president, Václev Havel. He told Gevorkyan how the new government had compiled a list of 140,000 people who collaborated with the State Security Service (STB). ‘We wish the reformers in Czechoslovakia good luck, particularly since many of their problems are inseparable from ours. We hope that their ideals will never again be countered with Soviet tanks,’ Gevorkyan concluded her article.7 In 1990, the Soviet KGB was still immensely powerful, but the prospect of sharing the fate of their Czechoslovakian counterparts was alarming and real. The liberal media were a power to be reckoned or sided with.
The KGB was particularly demoralized by Gorbachev’s resolution not to resort to force. At a Politburo meeting on 3 January 1990, Gorbachev explained his reasons.
I was nine years old when my grandfather was arrested. He spent fourteen months in jail, they [the investigators] beat him up, tortured him, blinded him with a lamp. He was the head of a collective farm… After they had arrested him, we became untouchable in the village; nobody would come and see us, people would not say ‘hello’ to us – of course, [we were the family of] the enemy of the people! Grandfather came back a different person. He told us what they had done to him, cried.
Then without the slightest pause, Gorbachev switched back to the present. ‘I think my greatest task is to take the country through Perestroika without a civil war. Some casualties are inevitable. Here and there someone gets killed – you can’t get away from this. But to use force, weapons – that is a different matter. I will not do it.’9
Emboldened by Gorbachev’s aversion to violence and repression, regional elites started to pull away from Moscow, declaring ‘sovereignty’ in their own affairs. Lithuania, which had been occupied by the Soviet forces since the Second World War, was among the first to use this window of opportunity. Its Communist Party quit the all-Soviet structure. ‘Do you really want to leave?’ Gorbachev questioned the Lithuanian intelligentsia as he tried to persuade them to stay with the flock. ‘Yes’ came a resolute answer.
In May 1990 Yeltsin was elected president of Russia – the largest and most important of the Soviet republics – and a month later, on 12 June 1990, Russia’s Supreme Soviet followed the example of Lithuania and voted for Russia’s sovereignty. On the same day the Soviet government abolished censorship and passed a new media law that turned freedom of speech from a privilege granted from above into a legal right. The coincidence of dates was symbolic.
Gorbachev desperately tried to stop Yeltsin’s being elected as Russia’s leader. The KGB planted stories about him in Pravda and showed embarrassing videotapes of Yeltsin’s visit to America where he appeared to be drunk. But with the media no longer under central control, this did not have much impact: few people in 1990 read Pravda or paid attention to the party line. Yeltsin enjoyed mass popular support and was unstoppable.
The attitude of Perestroika reformers towards Yeltsin was more ambivalent. On the one hand Yegor and his circle of journalists refused to participate in a campaign against Yeltsin. On the other hand, they considered Yeltsin as a dangerous populist force who was calling for the break-up of the Soviet Union under the guise of Russian sovereignty. At the end of May 1990, Rodric Braithwaite, the British ambassador in Moscow, who dropped in on Yegor, found him unusually depressed. ‘He says that the new government structures are simply not working, and there is a real risk of chaos… He is as gloomy as I’ve ever seen him: not the volatile gloom to which the Moscow intelligentsia has always been subject, but a settled depression which is much more worrying.’10 Yegor was not alone in this. Braithwaite himself was apprehensive.
Foreign governments felt far more comfortable with an enlightened party man like Gorbachev, in whom they had heavily invested, than with a popular leader like Yeltsin. When, in September 1990, Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, and Braithwaite went to see Yeltsin, they were almost hostile in their predisposition.
1
Albats also wrote one of the best political profiles of the KGB:
2
‘I have a feeling that he was really eyeing the job as the head of the [pro-Yeltsin] KGB,’ Gevorkyan said later.8