Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The West German intelligence thought that it was too dangerous for him to stay in Germany. They sent him under a different name to South Africa. So that's the story of Stashinsky himself. But going back to Bandera, of course, the fact that he confessed and it became known that KGB assassinated Bandera, that added to the image and to general mythology about Bandera.
It depends on the period. At the time that we just described, late 50s and early 60s, they were not powerful at all. And the reasons for that was that people like Khrushchev were really concerned about the secret police becoming too powerful. It became too powerful in their mind under Stalin, under Beria,
And it was concern about Beria's power as a secret police chief that led to the coup against Beria. And Khrushchev came into power and Beria was arrested and executed. And what Khrushchev was trying to do after that was trying to put, since 54, the name was already KGB, KGB under his control.
So he was appointing the former Komsomol leaders as the heads of the KGB, so the people who really owned everything to him, that sort of position. And the heads of the KGB were not members of Politburo. It changed in the 70s with Andropov, where KGB... started to play, again, a very important role in the Soviet history.
Let's say decisions on Afghanistan and the Soviet troops marching into Afghanistan were made, apart from Brezhnev, by the trio of the People who would be called today Sylviki, maybe, or not all of them were Sylviki, but one, of course, was on the drop of the head of the KGB.
Another was the Minister of Defense, and then there was Secretary in Charge of the Military-Industrial Complex, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. But the head of the KGB became really not just the member of Politburo, but the the member of that inner circle.
And then the fact that Andropov succeeds Brezhnev is also a manifestation of the power that KGB acquired really after Khrushchev in the 1970s and then going into the 1980s.
The CIA, it's the organization that is charged with the information gathering and all sorts of operations, including assassinations in the 50s and 60s abroad. The KGB was the organization that really had both the surveillance over the population within the Soviet Union and also the operations abroad. And its members, its leaders were members of the inner circle for making decisions.
Again, from what I understand about the way how how politics and decisions work and decisions are made in the United States, the CIA, the chief of the CIA is not one of the decision-making group providing information. So I would say it's not day and night, but their power, political influence, political significance, very different.
Certain things we know, others we don't, because the Stasi archives are open and most of the KGB, especially in Moscow, they're not. But we know that the KGB combined not only the internal... secret police functions at home and counterintelligence branch and intelligence branch abroad, but also the border troops, for example. Really, institutionally, it was a huge, huge mammoth.
Another thing that we know, we can sort of extrapolate from what we know from the Stasi archives, that the surveillance at home was really massive. The guess is the Soviets were not as effective and as meticulous and as scrupulous and as methodical as probably as Germans were, but that gives you a basic idea of how penetrated the entire society was.
From my research, including on the Stashinsky, what I understand is that in KGB, and it was a powerful organization, again, less powerful in the 50s and 60s, but still a very powerful organization. There was, on the one hand, the understanding of the situation in the country and abroad that probably other organizations didn't have. They had also first peak in terms of the selecting cadres.
The work in the KGB was well paid and considered to be very prestigious. That was part to a degree of the Soviet elite in terms of whom they recruited. They had a resentment toward the party leadership. They didn't allow them to do James Bond kind of things that they would want to do because there were political risks.
After this scandal with Stashinsky, at least on many levels, the KGB stopped the practice of the assassinations, political assassinations abroad, because it was considered politically to be extremely dangerous. The person who was in charge of the KGB at the time of Bandera assassination, Shalepin, was one of the candidates to replace Khrushchev.
Brezhnev used against him that scandal abroad, eventually to remove him from Politburo. The KGB was really looking at the party leadership as to a degree ineffective, corrupt, and who was on their way. From what I understand, that's exactly the attitudes. that people like Putin and people of his circle brought to power in Kremlin.
So the methods that KGB use, they can use now, and there is no party or no other institution actually stopping them from doing that. And they think about, my understanding, the operations abroad, about foreign policy in general in terms of the KGB mindset of planning operations and executing particular operations and so on and so forth.
I think a lot of culture that came into existence in the Soviet KGB now became part of the culture of the Russian establishment.
The key moments would be first the year 2004, known for Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and then the year 2013, known as the Revolution of Dignity. Both were the revolts against something that, by a significant part of the Ukrainian population, was considered to be completely unacceptable actions on the part of the government and people in the government at that time.
So the Orange Revolution of 2004 was a protest against falsified presidential elections. and rejection of a candidate that was supported by Russia, publicly supported by Russia. I remember being in Moscow at that time and couldn't believe my eyes when in the center of Russia I saw a billboard with Yanukovych.
The trick was that there were a lot of Ukrainians in Russia and in Moscow in particular, and they had the right to vote. It led to the election of, as Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, who put on the agenda the issue of Ukraine's membership in NATO. So it was very clear pro-Western orientation.
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