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 and humanities in Soviet universities (i.e., History of the Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Political Economy, and Scientific Communism) were extremely orthodox, cautious and, overall, unreliable. Therefore, the KGB administration decided to employ various non-orthodox sources of information that provided them with necessary information.
The KGB operatives selected the most articulate representatives of the college student community who were ready to share their sociological analyses with the state police. They prepared special reports/surveys of Soviet college student groups, which the KGB sent on to the Communist Party leadership. The KGB department in Kyiv sponsored a special study involving Odesa college students, which was disseminated in 1968 among all KGB officers and the party leadership as a “model” survey of a college group in Soviet Ukraine.13 Interestingly, the most controversial and shocking observation of this 1968 survey, emphasizing the apolitical and cynical character of the students and their gradual distancing from the communist ideology, were used by the KGB in their active measures to counter the “dangerous ideological influences” in Soviet youth culture through the entire decade of the 1970s.14 Many trends in youth behavior noted by that KGB survey of college students in 1968 survived throughout the 1980s and spread to other more numerous and much younger categories of Soviet Ukrainian youth, a phenomenon that required much more sophisticated and diverse active measures to eradicate it.
The 1968 survey highlighted the increasing political indifference, apathy, and the cynical attitude toward life among Soviet college students.15 The students openly demonstrated their scepticism about the party and Komsomol leadership and their own membership in these organizations, which they used mainly for self-promotion purposes to advance their careers in college and enhance their opportunities on the job market.16 According to the survey, the students’ “encounters with the party and Komsomol leadership at colleges gave the impression that the Communist Party and Komsomol organizations were led by completely ignorant people who hopelessly lagged behind the modern requirements of life.” As the author of the survey noted, “the college Communist Party leadership’s ignorance of fashionable music, of the views of the favorite heroes of the youth, of the youth’s expectations from their senior colleagues, and a lack of cultural knowledge among the communist leaders—[all this] leads to their students’ perceptions of them as dogmatists and reactionaries.”17
At the same time, college students exhibited their own shocking ignorance of Marxist and Leninist philosophy, as well as of the modern trends in Western philosophy, culture, and political thought. They tried to compensate for this by listening to the broadcasts of Western radio stations and by reading the literature available at the time. They discussed what they learned with their classmates during their drinking parties either in the dorms or in bars. As a result of these experiences, students developed their own notions of the Communist Party as “the sole ruling corrupt political organization” that routinely “re-produce[d] the Soviet bourgeoisie.”18 They were ready to accept the Western propaganda’s clichés about the “degeneration of the Communist Party” in the Soviet Union. According to the 1968 survey, the students no longer believed that there were “real communists” anywhere. The very word “communist” was discredited among the Soviet youth.19 The Komsomol lost its ideological control over college students together with “its prestige and attractiveness to young people.” The main reason behind the Komsomol’s ideological failure rested in its inability to discover new forms of working with youth, and its absolute dependence on the institutional, party, and trade union administrations.20 Students were sceptical about the anti-capitalist propaganda pouring from Soviet television and radio. They tried to avoid watching and listening to any kind of ideological shows that criticised the Western way of life.21
The 1968 survey designed to enlighten KGB officers also revealed that college students in the cities of eastern and southern Ukraine, such as Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk, exhibited their complete Russification. They “called the Ukrainian language a ‘kolkhoz tongue,’ considering its public usage ridiculous and bewildering” and arguing that the “knowledge of Ukrainian language is unnecessary” because of its provincial nature: “[this is] a rural language, the language of ignorant and poorly educated people.” They resented the idea that southern Ukrainian cities, like Odesa, were to be Ukrainized and expressed their negative attitude toward Kyiv, “a city and a national center, where [Ukrainian] nationalists resided.” In addition, the author of the survey emphasized
