I do not feel guilty… I was only an executor. Here are copies of Yezhov’s and Beria’s orders. I kept them because I knew that I might be asked…211
THE “ACADEMICIANS” BRIDGING SECURITY AND POLITICS
In contemporary Russia, the connection between the academy and the former KGB structures remains tight. Academician Yevgenii Primakov, formerly director of the Institute for Oriental Studies (IVAN) and the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), in 1991 headed the KGB First Main Directorate and then, in 1991–1996, the Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR, a new agency that was previously the KGB First Main Directorate).212 Primakov’s close contact with the KGB started in the late 1950s, when he served as a Middle East correspondent for Pravda. As he told the investigative journalist Yevgeniya Albats privately, “no one who wanted to work abroad got away without some contact with the organs.”213 His KGB code name at that time was “Maxim,” and he was sent frequently on intelligence missions to the Middle East and the United States.214 According to Primakov himself, these missions were ordered by the Central Committee.215 During his years as a Pravda correspondent, Primakov published a series of anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda brochures: Who Is Behind Israel? (1959), The USSR Is a True Friend of Arab Nations (1969), and The Middle East Crisis Is a Threat to the World Peace (1969).216
In 1970, Primakov was appointed vice director of IMEMO.217 This institute was created in 1956. Anushavan Arzumyan, son-in-law of the Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, was its first director. He died in 1966 and Academy Corresponding Member Nikolai Inozemtsev (elected in 1964), vice chief editor of Pravda, was appointed IMEMO director. In 1968, he became an academician. Inozemtsev’s main duty was to write speeches for General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Having known Primakov through the work in Pravda, Inozemtsev invited him to IMEMO. Inozemtsev and Primakov changed the work of the institute from academically oriented research to the analysis of current political international events. IMEMO prepared secret reviews of the events to inform the Central Committee and Politburo. With the support of Inozemtsev, in 1974 Primakov was elected corresponding member of the Academy.218
In December 1977, Primakov was appointed director of the IVAN.219 Under his guidance, the institute became more involved in political than in academic studies. Primakov was especially interested in the study of Islam and the Middle East. In 1978 in Beirut, he published in Arabic the propaganda book USA Politics in the Middle East.
In 1979, Primakov was elected academician. It was widely known that he became an academician not as a scientist but because of his position as director of an academy institute.220 Academician Inozemtsev, who had many contacts within the Central Committee, as well as within the academy, personally asked academicians—representatives of the natural sciences—to vote for his protégé. Although he was not an economist, Primakov joined the Economic Division of the academy: there was no separate division on international affairs. Inozemtsev died in 1982, and Primakov was appointed director of the IMEMO in 1986, now with the support of Aleksandr Yakovlev, the new head of the Propaganda Division of the Central Committee.221
In 1986, Primakov became a nonvoting (alternate) member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and in 1989, he was named nonvoting member of the Politburo. At the same time, in 1988–1989, Primakov was academic secretary of the Academy Presidium. In 1995–1997, when Primakov headed the SVR, an official three-volume historical book published by the SVR, Essays on the History of the Russian Foreign Intelligence,222 was provided with his name as an honorary “editor in chief,” although his role in writing this book “can scarcely have been much more than nominal.” In fact, according to Primakov’s biographer Leonid Mlechin, this book was edited by Lolly Zamoysky, an analyst of the KGB First Directorate and later SVR, known as a fanatic believer in a global Masonic-Zionist plot.223 It seems that Primakov principally changed the orientation and working style of Russian foreign intelligence. He moved the main goal of intelligence from targeting “the main enemy,” meaning the United States, to targeting international problems such as weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, drug traffic, and terrorism.224
On January 9, 1996, Primakov was appointed Russian foreign minister. Primakov’s first SVR deputy, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, was appointed head of the SVR. Trubnikov’s professional career within the KGB began in the 1960s, after he graduated from Moscow State Institute of International Relations.225 Later, in 2000, Trubnikov was appointed first deputy foreign minister. In August 1998, Primakov became Russian prime minister for nine months. The respected science magazine Nature seemed very impressed by his academician status: “A former economist, Middle East expert, head of two research institutes, spymaster and diplomat, Primakov caps his impressive range of expertise with Russia’s highest scientific rank: that of academician.”226
Primakov was never an economist. Besides, I would like to remind the “C. L.” who signed this article that beginning in 1929, the Soviet nomenklatura often used the academician rank as a perk for those willing to do its dirty work. Alexander Vucinich wrote about these people in his study of the Soviet Academy: “Such individuals made it impossible for the Academy to justify its claim to be the true forum of the best representatives of Soviet scholarship.”227
In addition, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was an honorary academician. The notorious Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet chief prosecutor who organized and directed the show trials in the 1930s (including Bukharin’s trial) and then became foreign minister, was also an academician. Moreover, beginning in 1949, the Soviet press officially named Stalin “the main coryphaeus in all branches of science.”228 Some scientists wrote in their papers: “I. V. Stalin teaches us,”229 and so forth. Obviously, all this does not mean that the poorly educated Stalin (after one year at a seminary, he quit to become head of a gang, which robbed banks to fund the Bolshevik Party) was in fact a scientist. I have already mentioned examples of Soviet academicians who were simply appointed on the order of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1946, Stalin’s main official Marxist philosopher and head of the Directorate of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) of the Central Committee, Georgii Aleksandrov (1908–1961), was “elected” and became an academician and his deputy, Mikhail Iovchuk,230 became corresponding member.231 The “input” of Academician Aleksandrov has nothing to do with science. His articles were simply a eulogy for the leading role of the Party opinion in Soviet science:
The followers of progressive opinions and trends in science, supported by the Communist Party and by public opinion, gain the leading posts in science, direct its development, help to overcome errors and defects in the activities of various scientists and the wrong opinions which arise in isolated individuals among the Soviet intelligentsia under the influence of bourgeois ideologies.232
In 1932, Aleksandrov graduated from the Moscow Institute of History and Philosophy and soon began to work in the Comintern Executive Committee.233 In 1940, the thirty-two-year-old Aleksandrov was appointed head of Agitprop within the Central Committee after Andrei Zhdanov formally became the Central Committee secretary of ideology.234 In 1943, Aleksandrov received a Stalin Prize for his editorship of the third volume of Istoriya filosofii [History of Philosophy]. At the same time, he started an anti-Semitic campaign against Jewish artists and intellectuals. On July 15, 1943, he and his deputy, Tatiyana Zueva, sent a note to secretaries of the Central Committee, in which they claimed that “the leading staff [of the Bolshoi Theater] had been selected only because of their national origins, and with the prevalence of Jewish names.”235 In April 1944, the Politburo unexpectedly criticized Aleksandrov’s third volume of the History of Philosophy. Apparently, Aleksandrov’s chauvinism was too much even for Stalin at that time. From 1945, Aleksandrov played one of main roles in denouncing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and its members. This was easy for Aleksandrov, especially because he was chief editor of Agitprop’s magazine Kul’tura i zhizn [Culture and Life].