KGB "Evangelism": Agents and Jehovah's Witnesses in Soviet Ukraine

2011

Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2020

The article is devoted to the publication of the directive documents of the NKGB of the USSR on the intensification of the battle against the sect of the Khlysty. To date, the existence of the old Russian sectarianism in the Soviet Union has been an area of little study. Practically the only sources are documents from repressive Soviet era governmental bodies, still virtually inaccessible to researchers. The opening of the archives of the Soviet secret services in some post-Soviet countries opens up new opportunities for the study of religious movements in the USSR. The religious policy of the Soviet government created a situation where the main 'researchers' of religious movements were not scientists but investigators and the operational officers of the special services. The agents, by virtue of their profession, were inclined to exaggerate the significance of vertical ties in religious communities. In their eyes, the sect of the Khlysty appeared as a centralised organisation with a hierarchical leadership structure. As a result, a very peculiar 'research program' was formed in the heads of the state security workers, to which the collection of operational material was adjusted and to which the investigation was oriented. The approach of the Soviet special services practically differed little from the approach of prerevolutionary officials and missionaries. The published materials contain a brief history of the sect of the Khlysty as seen by the Soviet Chekists, and provides intelligence information about the ritualism of the Christian faith in the Soviet period.

Chinese Business Review, 2019

In this study, former Soviet Union's secret service, Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB) has been investigated by limited aspects. As the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)'s intelligence agency, KGB was the ordinary primary secret service in the world. This paper has been investigated USSR's secret service, KGB's secret activities in all over the world. It is popularity was extra ordinary before the Cold War 1990.

In: Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State, edited by Aaron Retish and Immo Rebitschek (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2023), 263-297, 2023

The young Muscovite Sergei Sytov, an officially unemployed man in his early twenties, bought goods from foreigners for resale. Eventu ally, he was summoned to the Moscow KGB Directorate, and in Janu ary 1959 the newspaper Komsomol'skaia pravda published a feuilleton on him based on the data provided by the secret police.1 Sytov was then warned by the militsiia that if he did not find a permanent job within three weeks, he would be expelled from Moscow under the anti-parasite law. Informed by the KGB of Sytov's misconduct, the Party, Komsomol, and the procurator's office jointly decided to bring him to administra tive responsibility and try his case before the people's court visiting session, a form of show triaP Sytov was then detained by the militsiia. On the procurator's order, his fitness for work was determined by the Serbskii Institute, later ill-famed for its abuse of psychiatry. Finally, in January 1962 the Baumann district people's court decided to evict the young man from Moscow for five years and confiscate his property. The case garnered extensive media coverage.3 This story, which appeared in the in-house journal of Soviet coun terintelligence KGB Sbornik, reflects a new approach to ensuring state security and social control that emerged in the USSR after the death of Joseph Stalin and reached full swing in the late 1950s and early 1960s.4 During this period, as Oleg Kharkhordin has argued, "chaotic and punitive terror of the Stalinist years" gave way to "a relentless and rational system of preventive surveillance."5 Generally, this approach was based on a comprehensive and multichannel social control associ ated with a return of mutual surveillance practices in new forms and the congruent transformation of the secret police's ideological tenets and working methods.6 The emphasis was now placed on preventing crime and strengthening secrecy, with novel tacit forms of control and manipulation being introduced. Although, as the above case shows, * This chapter was prepared as part of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), project no. 403506742. The author 's special gratitude goes to the archivists of the Lithuanian Special Archives in Vilnius, the Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, and personally to the SBU Archives director Andriy Kohut for their assistance and support.

Historians.in.ua, 2020

The shorter typewritten version has the title "Razvedyvatel'naia i kontrrazvedyvatel'naia deiatel'nost' v tylu protivnika (Ibidem, ark.269-353). War and transferred to the USA following the defeat of the Third Reich). 4 The limitations of the source base correspondingly limited research agendas. In line with ideological orientations of different eras, these gravitated either towards the nature of the Soviet governance, the conflict between the "state" and "society," and mass repression (at the height of the Cold War) or towards the structures of the perceived legitimacy of the Communist government and the social dimensions of the Soviet Union's violent modernization (during the years of the Détente). 5 The ideological and historiographical differences between adherents of the "totalitarian model" and "revisionists" aside, the systematic exploration of the inner workings of the Soviet government and its coercive apparatus was hardly an option until the 1990s. A few specialized studies that did appear before or shortly after the collapse of the USSR suffered from significant empirical and conceptual limitations. 6 The reason was quite prosaic: access to relevant Soviet archives was limited to Communist Party officials, security professionals, and trusted historians and journalists with appropriate credentials. 7 Within the USSR, mass repression was an ideological taboo until the late 1980s, which, if violated, would immediately place the transgressor beyond the pale of "Soviet society." 8 At the same time, security and intelligence agencies were not absent from the Soviet public discourse. Indeed, while Western scholars skirmished over defining the fundamental parameters of the Soviet system, the number of celebratory publications on the history of the Soviet security service kept rising, reaching a few thousand by the end of the Soviet era. 9 Novels and cinema offered additional opportunities for institutional commemorations, particularly after the

2010

, and the eastern part-in the Soviet Ukraine. To understand the situation and circumstances of the period 1945-1950 in Halychyna adequately, it's necessary to keep in mind that liquidation of the UGCC was carried out during several often simultaneous processes, among them: 1. process of the repatriation of the local Polish population into Poland and the Ukrainian population from Poland to Ukraine, 2. process of sovietisation of the western Ukraine, including collectivisation of its agricultural sector (was regarded as complete in the year 6 The 2 nd Department NKGB was responsible for the fight with the anti-Soviet elements and agents of foreign intelligence service inside the country. Its 4 th section worked with clergy, churchmen and sectarians.

MEMORY OF NATIONS: DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION GUIDE – THE RUSSIAN EXPERIENCE

1994