The reverse side of the Soviet moon.

[Объединенное Детективное Бюро]

The reverse side of the Soviet moon
("Foreign Policy", USA)
Ten of the most exciting unsolved secrets of Russia.

The twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union has literally become a gold mine for historians. Gold-bearing thanks to valuable discoveries in archives and memoirs, and mine - due to the intense and sometimes generating disbelief in their strengths of labor, which was often required to bring them to light. In many ways, we are only slightly scratching the surface of Soviet history; what we have discovered so far concerns mainly fascinating and exciting twists and turns, which we learn about from records and evidence of once-secret events. But there is still a lot of what we do not know.

Take, for example, the hefty recent book Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe. This book is like a secret storehouse, which reveals the most impressive top-secret documents on the revolutions of 1989. Vladislav Zubok, one of the editors of the publication, compared it with the observed side of the moon - when on the other, back side there is still a lot of unknown.

In this regard, here is my completely arbitrary list of ten Soviet secrets that await us on the far side of the moon.

1. What happened to the gold and billions of dollars of money that the Communist Party allegedly had after the collapse of the USSR? Some reports of the foreign press at the time suggested that they were quickly transferred to accounts with foreign banks, but evidence of this was never presented. Yegor Gaidar, prime minister of the time of Boris Yeltsin, once hired an international private detective from Kroll Associates to help him find these funds, but to no avail. How many were there and where did they go?

2. Could the Soviet Union develop a portable “suitcase” with nuclear weapons? There were many of the strangest rumors and speculations on this subject, but no evidence has ever been given. Russian General Alexander Lebed in 1997 said that about a hundred such nuclear suitcases of the Soviet era were created, and about half of them disappeared. But Lebed’s calculations were vague and inconsistent, while others denied the presence of such suitcases or said that they could possibly confuse them with nuclear mines. And who was right?

3. In the first weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster at the end of April 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev strangely remained silent. He did not say anything on this subject until May 14, when more than two weeks have passed since the disaster. What was said and done at the highest level in these very first days of the emergency? Why did this man of action look so paralyzed?

4. Since the early 1970s, Soviet leaders have endorsed a secret biological weapons program. We know about these studies in general terms, but practically do not know anything about their military component. Was there some kind of “concept of application and use” or military doctrine for bacteriological warfare? And against whom was it supposed to lead? And in what territory? Was any special purpose weapon created for such hostilities? What happened to all this after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

5. We still lack key information about the Cuban missile crisis, as well as information about what Cuban revolutionaries such as Raul Castro and Che Guevara said during visits to the Soviet Union, and Fidel Castro also after. Although transcripts of political bureau meetings of that time and dispatches from the time of the crisis appeared, documentary evidence of their talks with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev before and after the crisis could shed new light on the question of why they deployed nuclear missiles and on the lessons they learned from this situation.

6. In his 1999 book, Ken Alibek, a defector who was deputy director of the Soviet preparatory program for bacteriological warfare, stated that the “main purpose” of the KGB Flute operation was to develop psychotropic and neurotropic biological agents for use in special operations KGB - including such “wet cases” as political killings. ” What were the volumes and final disposition of Operation Flute?

7. Since 1981, Moscow has sent urgent instructions to the KGB and GRU, Soviet military intelligence, to collect information about a possible American first nuclear strike. These instructions came to be known as the RYAN (nuclear missile attack). Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB agent who was spying on the British, leaked information about the RYAN to the West, and the details of this plan were eventually published by Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew in their 1990 work “KGB: Internal History” (KGB: The Inside Story). But we still do not know how the leaders in Moscow, in particular, Yuri Andropov, who became Secretary General in 1982, reacted to incoming messages. Could the Kremlin really be so paranoid about the nuclear threat? What did it look like?

8. In the early 1980s, the Soviets built a huge underground bunker in the mountains of the Urals, known as the “Grotto,” which was supposedly a reserve command post for the Strategic Missile Forces (Strategic Missile Forces), which could withstand a nuclear strike. U.S. intelligence spotted signs of a bunker building, but for a long time it was surrounded by mystery. What was the real purpose of the Grotto?

9. Sometimes secrets can be hidden in a whole heap of data. For years, the United States has been wondering - to no avail - about the real burden that placed defense and security on the Soviet economy. In the conditions of different systems, currencies, methods and materials, the cost of a tank for the Soviet state was definitely not at all the same as for the United States. Even modern insider reports, such as those collected by Vitaly Kataev, an employee of the Central Committee (CC), whose papers I found and used Dead Hand for my work, left many questions open, both in relation to facts and to analysis. According to Kataev’s estimates, approximately 20% of the Soviet economy worked for defense (the CIA estimate was 15-17%), but there was also a lot of unpredictable and unyielding, starting from how to calculate the real cost of labor and materials in a planned economy with central planning, and ending with the problems associated with the fact that Soviet defense plants also produced many more things, for example, televisions and sewing machines. So how heavy was the burden of the arms race for the Soviet Union?

10. How well did the KGB foreign intelligence network inform the Soviet leadership? When it came to clarifying the details of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as Kataev says, the KGB always overestimated the threat because the committee was afraid to underestimate it. Gordievsky said that KGB reports often consisted of clippings and excerpts from newspaper reports, because they lacked better sources. How good was KGB intelligence? How systemic was the tendency to communicate to the country's leadership what they wanted to hear?