Russian Active Measures. Группа авторов

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 that “even the rural [Ukrainian-speaking] students in [the city] turned to Russian language because they wanted to appear more cultured and civilized.”22

The survey’s detailed and quite convincing description of the massive commercialization and Americanization of the youth culture in cities like Odesa appears to be the most astonishing revelation for researchers. For many students, the labels and the expression “made in the USA” became the benchmarks of how good quality products and, more broadly, successful economic and social developments could be measured. They strongly believed that the Soviet economic conditions did not leave any space for the entrepreneurial talents of Soviet people to develop and become effective drivers of the socialist enterprise. The youth contended that, like in the United States, economic competition was necessary to force out low quality products from the Soviet market. Students appreciated the freedom of opinion and expression, which they thought existed only in the West. In their minds, the main criterion of “human success was defined by the level of his/her personal material prosperity (well-being).”23

It is noteworthy that, on the eve of the September 1968 Plenum of the CPSU that focused on the problems of transition to the new system of planning, the city youth discussed the revival of private entrepreneurship in light industry and the service sphere. College students preferred the black market to lecture halls, demonstrating a high propensity for commercial activities. They routinely joked that “the Americans are wise people, and therefore they have no ruling Communist Party, [only a market].”24

      The author of the 1968 survey further argued that beyond commercialization, the hero cult was additional evidence of the effective penetration of American values into the consciousness of Soviet youth:

A contemporary young boy and a girl needed a real hero (as a role model), but our films showed them either unusual people in unusual situations, or personalities that were so dull and boring that they could not be an example for emulation. In this light, the heroes of Western films, strong handsome characters who solved their problems with a punch, unknowingly became the models for emulation. After watching the film The Magnificent Seven, half of college male students developed the walking style of Chris (the major character of the film). The youth love strength; that was why the body-building fashion, which came from the West and was initially criticized by our ideologists, achieved an unprecedented popularity in the country. Regarding this cult of strength, it is noteworthy that we witness a surprising rise of sympathy with fascism among some students. Agreeing with its blunders (such as the annihilation of Jews), they admire the attractive appearance of tall and handsome Arians (ariitsy), parading in the military marches …25

KGB analysts also identified another characteristic of the collective portrait of college students from Odesa—antisemitism and racist attitudes, especially toward African college students. Paradoxically, they physically attacked students from Africa, calling them “black-ass people” (chornozhopye), simultaneously supporting Czech students during the