On 13 January, 1971, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov issued a memorandum to the Central Committee of the CPSU on the intensification of the activities of Moscow correspondents of foreign media to collect information from “antisocial elements” (Andrei Sakharov, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in particular) during preparations for the 24th Congress of the CPSU. The correspondents, primarily from the US, would be doing numerous rounds of stirring up provocative anti-Soviet sentiment to “discredit the Soviet system in the eyes of the world community and reduce the significance of the upcoming congress of the CPSU.”
Fortunately for all (?), Andropov reports that “the KGB is taking measures to suppress the enemy’s subversive actions.”
The memorandum has been translated and is presented here.
13 January 1971
The KGB has received signals that the propaganda organs of the leading capitalist countries, and first and foremost the United States, are planning to conduct a slanderous anti-Soviet campaign in the Western press, timed to coincide with the preparation and holding of the XXIV Congress of the CPSU. The main goal of this campaign is to prove that there is allegedly a large opposition in the Soviet Union, which is constantly growing stronger and gaining more and more supporters.
To lend credibility to this thesis, Western propaganda hopes to use materials received by bourgeois journalists in Moscow from antisocial elements, primarily about arrests, trials of Zionist-minded individuals, “samizdat” literature, etc.
Since, according to the plans of the propagandists, the anti-Soviet campaign must assume the broadest possible scope, those foreign correspondents accredited in the USSR who had hitherto refrained from covering themes related to the so-called “resistance movement” in the Soviet Union are also being drawn into participating in it.
The editorial boards of a number of Western press organizations have already given their correspondents in Moscow the appropriate assignments to activate contacts with antisocial elements and obtain from them the materials necessary for carrying out actions hostile to the Soviet Union. The attention of the correspondents is focused on the allegedly emerging consolidation of such opposition-minded individuals as Academician SAKHAROV, writer SOLZHENITSYN, cellist ROSTROPOVICH, and others.
American journalists were additionally given instructions to obtain materials about allegedly existing fundamental disagreements among Soviet leaders and their “incompetence.”
Such reports from the USSR should, according to the enemy, discredit the Soviet system in the eyes of the world community and reduce the significance of the upcoming congress of the CPSU.
In an effort to cover the largest possible number of antisocial elements, to receive information from them in a timely manner, and also to complicate the work of state security agencies in preventing contacts between antisocial elements and foreigners, bourgeois journalists in Moscow established special duty stations to collect information “on the activities of the opposition.”
The KGB is taking measures to suppress the enemy’s subversive actions.
CHAIRMAN OF THE KGB ANDROPOV
Translating History 