Russian Active Measures. Группа авторов
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Brookings, 14 August 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/08/14/why-paper-is-considered-state-of-the-art-voting-technology/ (accessed 20 May 2020). Yet, the safety of this system is as debatable as the online system.
33 Yurii Piskulov, “Informatsionnaia voina: Pochemu my proigryvaem Zapadu,” Svobodnaia Pressa, 1 February 2020, https://svpressa.ru/blogs/article/256047/ (accessed 20 May 2020).
KGB Special Operations, Cultural Consumption, and the Youth Culture in Soviet Ukraine, 1968–1985
Sergei I. Zhuk
A retired Ukrainian KGB officer has recently noted that “since 1945 until the collapse of the USSR, capitalist America was the main real adversary of the Soviet leadership and the KGB. But after the opening of Soviet Ukraine to various Western influences under Khrushchev, and especially under Brezhnev, this adversary, the U.S.A., created a new front inside Soviet society, affecting the Soviet youth culture. After 1945, enduring Ukrainian nationalism, Zionism, and religious sects became traditional targets of KGB operations in Soviet Ukraine. Since 1968, after the massive participation of Czech youth, influenced by American imperialist propaganda, in the events of the Prague Spring, a new object had emerged for KGB active measures and special operations. This object was Soviet Ukrainian youth culture, which was shaped by alien Western, especially American, influences.1
The author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine
This study explores KGB active measures and special operations against Americanization/Westernization of Soviet youth culture which is analyzed here through the prism of cultural consumption in Soviet Ukraine. The first persecutions of “mass alien” groupings of college students who imitated American hippies in 1968 and campaigns against high school student neo-Nazi punks during the Andropov era is the focal point of this archival research. Through an analysis of declassified KGB documents, this study adds depth to prior attempts to analyze KGB operations targeting the youth culture in Soviet Ukraine during late socialism.2
After the Second World War, the Soviet political police and major intelligence agency, the KGB, targeted the United States of America as the “main enemy in the world” for the USSR.3 By late 1947, under Stalin, the United States, former major Soviet political ally in the war against Nazi Germany, had gradually become a main political and ideological enemy of the Soviet Union.4 In this new geopolitical confrontation, the most important domestic target of the KGB was Ukrainian nationalism, which was believed to be connected to and funded by Americans. According to KGB archival documents, from 1953 until 1991, approximately 50% of all criminal cases focused on “dangerous” Ukrainian nationalists. The second most important target of the KGB in Ukraine was another type of nationalism, Judaism and Zionism (which comprised more than 30% of all criminal cases). Religious sects were identified as the third threat for the USSR (10%). The remaining 10% was allotted to American espionage and foreign visitors as agents of Western intelligence. As the head of Ukraine’s KGB, a general-major Vitalii Nikitchenko, noted, on 12 March 1954, “the major threat for Soviet Ukraine consist[ed] of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, Zionists, and religious sectarians,—all of them [were] funded and organized by intelligence services of the United States and England.”5
In 1968, thirteen years later, KGB officials expanded the scope of their special operations in Soviet Ukraine. Besides the perpetrators of Ukrainian nationalism, Jewish Zionism, and religious sects, the KGB concentrated on the problems of youth culture and American influences which, in the KGB’s view, were associated with the old issues of dissident activities in Soviet society. Targeting Western influences on Soviet youth, KGB operations became an important part of active measures.
These KGB activities began during the World Youth Festival in 1957 in Moscow, when Soviet youth were exposed to contact with Western guests. As early as June 1956, Ukraine’s KGB ordered the formation and special training of a group of special operatives, undercover KGB agents, to be sent to the World Youth Festival in 1957 in Moscow as official members of the delegation from Soviet Ukraine. According to official lists, composed by the KGB in Kyiv, more than 60 % of the representatives of Soviet Ukrainian youth in Moscow were undercover KGB agents.6
The events of the Prague Spring of 1968, which involved the mass participation of Czechoslovak youth, contributed to the KGB’s anxieties about political and ideological stability in the USSR. On 21 March 1968, during the CPSU Politburo meeting in Moscow, the Ukrainian Communist Party leader Petro Shelest, frightened of “American dangerous ideological influences” being spread from Czechoslovakia to Ukraine and to the “entire socialist camp,” proposed to suppress those developments immediately. Supported by Yuri Andropov, the KGB’s new head, Shelest emphasized that, although it was “essential to seek out the healthy (pro-Soviet) forces in Czechoslovakia more actively,” immediate “military measures” there would also be necessary. This was especially important for prevention of similar developments elsewhere, especially in Soviet Ukraine.7
As a result, Ukraine’s KGB directed its efforts on special operations against its main enemy, capitalist America, and its influences on young Ukrainians. In the 1970s, Ukrainian nationalism in both capitalist America and socialist Ukraine was still a major concern of KGB operatives (20% of all cases). Jewish nationalism/Zionism followed suit (20%). Various Christian sects continued to be a serious problem for the KGB in Ukraine (20%). A rising problem was Crimean Tatar nationalism/Muslim activism (10%). Western intelligence in various forms, including espionage, was among the aforementioned targets of the Ukrainian KGB leadership (10%). Perceived as the United States’ creation and inspiration, the Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the Soviet human rights movement posed a new threat for the KGB. A special KGB operation codenamed “BLOK” was designed to curtail the political activism of Ukrainian intellectuals, constituting approximately 10% of the KGB’s counterintelligence operations.8 Finally, a new and serious problem for the KGB campaigns, “the threat of westernization” of Soviet youth, constituted the major focus of approximately 10% of all criminal and “prophylactic” cases in the 1970s, and nearly 20% of all cases in the 1980s.9 KGB analysts realized that “capitalist America” became not only the main, but also the “seductive adversary,” creating political forms, cultural products, and practices, attractive for young Soviet consumers.10
The KGB, College Students, and Soviet Hippies
While observing the events in Czechoslovakia in 1967–1968, KGB officials emphasized the active involvement of Czechoslovak youth and college students in the Prague Spring.11 In this context, KGB analysts realized an urgent necessity to seriously investigate various youth social groups in the Soviet Union. According to former KGB officers and archival documents, the most volatile, ideologically unreliable, and susceptible to Western (especially American) influences was the group of college students,12 a notion that was consistent with the Czech trends of 1967–1968. As early as May 1967, immediately after Yuri Andropov was appointed the head of the KGB, the intelligence analysts initiated a series of research projects to study various Soviet college student groups. The KGB realized that the official sociological data provided by Komsomol ideologists and researchers from various departments of social sciences