In 1947, Stalin demoted Aleksandrov to director of the Academy Institute of Philosophy. However, Aleksandrov retained his contacts with Politburo members Malenkov and Suslov and his influence in official philosophy.236 In 1954, Aleksandrov was appointed minister of culture. After Aleksandrov’s supporter Georgii Malenkov was dismissed as chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksandrov was exiled to Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, where he worked at a local institute of philosophy.
In 1960, another of Aleksandrov’s deputies, Pyotr Fedoseev, also became an academician. Until 1947, he had been Aleksandrov’s deputy at Agitprop and later was appointed chief editor of Bolshevik magazine. In 1952, Fedoseev was dismissed and Bolshevik was renamed Kommunist.237 Despite the fact that a few popular brochures about the “harm” of religion published by Fedoseev were his only “contribution” to science, in the 1970s–1980s, he was vice president of the academy, headed the academy’s Publishing Council and the Scientific Council on the Studies of Problems of Peace and Disarmament. No wonder it was Fedoseev who awarded General Secretary of the Communist Party Konstantin Chernenko (who had no training in any field of science at all) with the highest Soviet Academy prize in 1985, a golden Karl Marx medal.238 It is at best naive to present the KGB/SVR head and a former Russian foreign and prime minister Primakov as a serious scientist. A talented administrator, he obtained his academician title while holding one of the highest positions in the Soviet hierarchy.
Yevgenii Primakov is an example of both the merger of the KGB with the academy and the merger of Soviet (now Russian) espionage with diplomacy. This alliance has a long history. During the last years of Stalin’s dictatorship, in 1947–1949, the MGB’s First (Foreign or Espionage) Directorate and the Military Intelligence were simply combined with the Foreign Ministry into a governmental structure, the Committee on Information, or KI.239 The KI was in charge of political, economic, and scientific-technical intelligence operations, and the Soviet ambassadors were in charge of intelligence and illegal (i.e., spy) networks. A good example is Aleksandr Panyushkin, who was the Soviet ambassador to the United States at the beginning of the Cold War, in 1947–1952.240 Documents recently released from the KGB archives show that besides his diplomatic duties, Panyushkin (under the alias “Vladimir”) also controlled and coordinated the activity of Soviet spies, including Americans involved in Wallace’s election campaign in 1948.241 In 1952–1953, he was also deputy chair of the “Small” Committee on Information, called the “Small KI,” under the USSR Foreign Ministry.242 The Small KI was the Foreign Ministry merged with a small group of intelligence service after the Military Intelligence (GRU) had returned to the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Intelligence had moved back to the MGB.243 It is not surprising that after this job, former Ambassador Panyushkin headed in 1954–1956 the KGB First Main Directorate, which after the fall of the Soviet Union became the SVR, headed by Primakov (in 1991–1996). Before 1991, not less than 50 percent of the staff of Soviet embassies and companies abroad were represented by KGB officers from the First Directorate.244 Currently, the percent of intelligence officers under diplomatic cover seems to have grown because of the smaller number of real diplomats, that is, the employees of the Russian Foreign Ministry.245
On May 12, 1999, Primakov was sacked by Russian president Boris Yeltsin and replaced by First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin.246 The FSB head, Vladimir Putin (later prime minister and then president), visited the former prime minister and gave him a traditional KGB gift,247 a hunting rifle, as “a reward for his help in protecting Russia’s security.”248 According to the Russian press, in the summer of 2000, Primakov was moved back to the presidential administration.249
“HONORARY RETIREMENT” FOR EXECUTIONERS
In 1990 I became Vice-Chancellor for International Relations [of St. Petersburg University]. I was, as we [i.e., the KGB/FSB/SVR officers] put it, in active reserve.
After Stalin’s death it became typical that retired MGB-KGB functionaries were appointed to work in science. This was not really anything new (more on this in Chapter 4). In the 1950s, science simply became a place for retired MGB/KGB veterans. This was more than the collaboration of individual scientists with the secret services; it was a general collaboration of academic institutions with the KGB system.
The example of Mairanovsky’s colleague Muromtsev, who became acting director of the Academy Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, has already been discussed. Another good example is Iosif (Joseph) Romual’dovich Grigulevich, who had been involved in many assassination cases, including that of Leon Trotsky and a plan to assassinate the Yugoslavian leader Tito. In 1960, after his deportation from Latin America, the experienced killer Grigulevich received another assignment: He was appointed to work as a “scientist” at the Academy Ethnography Institute in Moscow.251 Without any special education, he “worked” there until his death in 1988. In 1979, he even became a corresponding member of the academy, which was unquestionably due to his KGB connections and not to his scientific knowledge.252 Another former “diplomat,” Semyon Gonionsky, who during World War II was living (and spying) in the United States, was a “scientist”—and a party secretary—at the same institute in the 1960s–1970s. But the case of Vladimir Boyarsky is perhaps the most famous.
Until recently, this former NKVD-MGB investigator worked as a scientist at the Academy Institute of Problems of Complex Exploitation of Natural Resources. In 1958, Boyarsky was made a senior editor of the Academy of Sciences Press (Nauka) and a year later became editor in chief. Very few people knew that he had never been trained in chemistry and that his “scientific” career had been organized by an old friend, Academician Mikhail Agoshkov.253 In 1933–1941, Agoshkov, a mining expert, worked at the North Caucasus Mining Metallurgical Institute254 and became friends with Boyarsky. In 1941, Agoshkov moved to the academy’s Moscow Institute of Mining and in 1952 became its deputy director. He was head of the Academy Foreign Section (which was completely controlled by the KGB) until 1960. In 1961, he became deputy and in 1962 acting chief scientific secretary of the academy. It is interesting that during all of his “brilliant” career in academy administration, Agoshkov was only a corresponding (elected in 1953) and never a full member (he became an academician only in 1981). He had to have very powerful connections (evidently, with the KGB) in order to hold such high positions within the academy without being an academician. Agoshkov was Boyarsky’s coauthor of the textbook Development of Ore and Loose Deposits, which was the basis of Boyarsky’s doctoral dissertation.255