D. D. Guttenplan, “Critics Worry about Influence of Chinese Institutes on U.S. Campuses,” The New York Times, 4 March 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/us/critics-worry-about-influence-of-chinese-institutes-on-us-campuses.html (accessed 20 May 2020).
24 The Guillaume affair is one of the most well-known espionage scandals in Germany during the Cold War. The exposure of Günter Guillaume revealed that he was an East German Stasi spy who was working as a close aide to the first Social Democratic Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt. After Guillaume’s arrest in 1974, Brandt resigned. The Stasi was the secret service of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
25 Willy Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten: Die Jahre 1960–1975 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1976), 586.
26 Rajeev Syal, “PM’s Tennis Match with Wife of Former Putin Minister Will Go Ahead, Say Tories,” The Guardian, 31 July 2014.
27 Greg Miller and Adam Entous, “Declassified Report Says Putin ‘Ordered’ Effort to Undermine Faith in U.S. Election and Help Trump,” The Washington Post, 6 January 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/intelligence-chiefs-expected-in-new-york-to-brief-trump-on-russian-hacking/2017/01/06/5f591416-d41a-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story.html (accessed 20 May 2020).
28 Rebecca Savransky, “Poll: Political Identity Largely Affects Belief in Conspiracies,” The Hill, 27 December 2016, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/311949-poll-belief-in-conspiracies-largely-depends-on-political-identity (accessed 20 May 2020).
29 “Facebook Data Gathered by Cambridge Analytica Accessed from Russia, Says MP,” The Guardian, 18 July 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/18/facebook-data-gathered-by-cambridge-analytica-accessed-from-russia-says-mp-damian-collins (accessed 20 May 2020).
30 Caroline Wheeler, Richard Kerbaj, and Tom Harper, “Revealed: The Russia Report,” The Times, 17 November 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/revealed-the-russia-report-kz6c9mwxf?ni-statuscode=acsaz-307 (accessed 20 May 2020).
31 Oscar López-Fonseca and Fernando J. Pérez, “Spain’s High Court Opens Investigation into Russian Spying Unit in Catalonia,” El País, 21 November 2019, https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/21/inenglish/1574324886_989244.html (accessed 20 May 2020).
32 Rajkaran Gambhir and Jack Karsten, “Why Paper is Considered State-of-the-Art Voting Technology,” 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
