Getting Ready to Fight Dissidents: The KGB, Ideological Subversion, and Soviet Intellectuals during the Khrushchev Era

Abstract This article explains how the USSR's State Security Committee (KGB) inadvertently spurred the rise of a dissident movement in the Soviet Union. Under the leadership of Vladimir Semichastnyi in 1962 and 1963, the KGB launched a new offensive against “ideological subversion,” aimed primarily at Soviet intellectuals who were skeptical but not hostile in their views of Soviet Communism. These intellectuals had been mostly left alone for a year or two after the dismantling of a special “ideological counterintelligence” unit within the KGB's Fourth Main Directorate in 1960, but by 1963 they once again were being characterized in KGB documents as “potentially dangerous” individuals and “enemies.” The deadly upheaval in Novocherkassk in June 1962 was the main catalyst for the crackdown, combined with the political fallout from the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The KGB's adoption of greater internal repression after the domestic and international crises of 1962 confirms that the Soviet system was unable to exist without the continuous use or threat of coercion.