Russian Active Measures

Archival Sources

Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Dnipropetrovskoi oblasti (DADO, State Archive of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast), Dnipro, Ukraine.

Fond 19. Dnepropetrovskii obkom KPU (Kommunisticheskoi partii Ukrainy).

Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy (HDA SBU, Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine), Kyiv, Ukraine.

Fond 1. 2-GE Upravlinnia (Kontrrozvidky) MGB-KGB URSR.

Fond 16. Sekretariat GPU-KGB URSR.

Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromadskykh Obiednan Ukrainy (TsDAHOU, Central State Archive of the Civil Organizations of Ukraine), Kyiv, Ukraine.

Fond 7. Tsentralnyi Komitet LKSMU. Viddil kultury. Viddil propahandy i ahitatsii.

Interviews

Interview with Ihor T., a retired KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

Interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

Interview with Oleksandr Beznosov, 19 July 2008, the Department of History, Dnipropetrovsk University, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

Interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

Interview with Stepan K., a retired SBU/KGB officer, 2 February 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

1 Stepan Ivanovich referred to “active measures” that were defined by Vladimir Bukovsky as “[a]ctions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) ranging from media manipulation to outright violence.” See Vladimir Bukovsky, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, trans. Alyona Kojevnikov (Westlake Village, CA: Ninth of November Press, 2019), 629.

2 I refer to the pioneering study by William Jay Risch, “Soviet ‘Flower Children’: Hippies and the Youth Counter-Culture in 1970s Lviv,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 3 (2005): 565–84, and his book, The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. 237–44. Juliane Fürst is writing now a book about Soviet hippies. See her recent publications: “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine: Life in a Leningrad Commune,” in Dropping out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc, eds. Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 197–207; and “If You’re Going to Moscow, Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair: The Soviet Hippie Sistema and Its Life In, Despite and With Stagnation,” in Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era, eds. Dina Fainberg and Artemy Kalinovsky (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 123–46. On some aspects of Soviet youth culture, see Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press & Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010). For these publications, the authors (including myself) did not use KGB documents from the SBU Archive in Kyiv.

3 According to Christopher Andrew, “throughout the Cold War, Soviet intelligence regarded the United States as its ‘main adversary.’ In second place at the beginning of the Cold War was the United States’ closest ally, the United Kingdom. In third position came France.” See in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 150.

4 On the transformation of the United States’ image under Stalin and Khrushchev, see Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. 73, 151.

5 Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy (hereafter: HDA SBU), f. 16, op. 1, spr. 902, ark. 35, 142. Unless otherwise stated, all excerpts from archival documents have been translated by the author from Russian into English. Compare with the original: “Главную угрозу советской Украине представляют украинские буржуазные националисты, сионисты и сектанты—все на службе и финансовой поддержке разведок США и Англии.”

6 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 919, ark. 60–61.

7 Rudolf Pihoia, “Chekhoslovakia 1968 god (Part 1),” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 6 (1994): 24–28. See also Mark Kramer, ed., “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Part I): New Evidence from the Diary of Petro Shelest,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 10 (1998): 234–47; Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, 251.

8 Vitalii K. Vrublevskii, Vladimir Shcherbitskii: zapiski pomoshchnika: slukhi, legendy, dokumenty (Kyiv: Dovira, 1993), 167–68.

9 It is based on my calculations of criminal cases from 1971 (HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1017) to 1989 (spr. 1271). An analysis of various official KGB reports to Ukraine’s Communist Party leadership has confirmed the preliminary calculations (spr. 1056, ark. 1–311; spr. 1115, ark. 5–310; spr. 1115, ark. 25–301; spr. 1209, ark. 25–290).

10 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1249, ark. 147–49. On the Soviet youth’s fascination with American jazz and rock music as early as September 1964, see especially the September 1964 KGB report in HDA SBU, f. 1, op. 1, spr. 1567, ark. 151–52.

11 See the material about the KGB operations and Prague Spring in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, 247–61.

12 The author’s interview with Ihor T., a KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

13 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 253–88.

14 This survey was submitted to the KGB on 13 September 1968. See “Obzor: Odesskoe studenchestvo. 1968 god” [“The Odessa College Students (1968)”] in HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 255–88.

15 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 258–59.

16 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 275–76.

17 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 275.

18 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 273.

19 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 274.

20 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 275.

21 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 274.

22 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 277–78. For a detailed discussion about Ukrainian speakers’ Russification who moved to the city of Dnipropetrovsk from the Ukrainian countryside, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 176–79.

23 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 263, 281.

24 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 280–81.

25 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 281–82. For more details about the cult of The Magnificent Seven among Soviet youth, see Sergei I. Zhuk, Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018 [London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019]), 138–140.

26 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 281–83.

27 Banderovtsy was derived from the name of Stepan Bandera, a leader of the OUN radical branch. His name became a symbol of the Ukrainian national cause in western Ukraine since the late 1940s. See Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 125–28, 141–51.

28 Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Dnipropetrovskoi Oblasti (hereafter: DADO), f. 19, op. 52, spr. 72, ark. 9.

29 See the original text of this letter in Ukrainian in Raisa Lysha, Yurii Vivtash, and Orysia Sokulska, eds., Porohy: Vybrane, vol. 1–9 (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2009), 432–38. In August of 1968, this letter was sent to the Head of the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR V. V. Shcherbytskyi, the Candidate Member of the Politburo of the Central Party Committee F. D. Ovcharenko, and the Secretary of the Writers’ Union D. V. Pavlychko.

30 See the English translation of this letter in The Ukrainian Review XVI, no. 3 (1969): 46–52. This text entitled “Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk” was published without the author’s name. As a result of international publicity of this case, the first scholarly analysis of these events appeared in English in Kenneth C. Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Post-Stalin Era: Myth, Symbols and Ideology in Soviet Nationalities Policy (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980), 158–59. Compare with Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, trans. Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 40. See also HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 367–71.

31 For more details, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 48–64.

32 As early as 1996, KGB documents on Soviet hippies were quoted in a book by a prominent Soviet dissident. See Bukovsky, Judgment in Moscow, 136.

33 HDA SBU, f. 16, op.1, spr. 974, ark. 114–15.

34 Ibid. See also Amerika, no. 150, April 1969, pp. 12–18. Amerika was a monthly periodical published in Russian by the U.S. Information Agency, beginning from 1959. KGB analysts discussed a shorter version of Keniston’s article published in Amerika in Russian translation. For a full version, see Kenneth Keniston, “Youth, Change and Violence,” The American Scholar 37, no. 2 (1968): 227–45. The KGB was concerned about the Soviet hippies who, like their American counterparts, might use political violence and create alternative political structures that would disrupt the political status quo. According to Keniston’s interpretation, that is what American hippies tried to accomplish. Those Soviet hippies planned to participate “in the all-Union congress during this summer (1969) either in Riga, or Tallinn.” Even recent graduates of high schools demonstrated a similar behavior in 1969 and 1970. Some of them organized a secret society in the city of Slaviansk (Donetsk oblast), known as “Koka-Kola,” “expressing their protest against the existing political order.” See HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1009, ark. 167–68. Among numerous studies on hippies as part of American counterculture, the best historical analysis was offered by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle in their “Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s” to Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5–14.

35 HDA SBU, f. 16, op.1, spr. 1011, ark. 81–92 (with a hand-written note by a party secretary “Report personally on the measures” on ark. 81). See a copy of the same report in HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1009, ark. 317–28.

36 On those groups, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 79–92, 97–105.

37 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 81.

38 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 82.

39 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 85.

40 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 84. “In April 1970, more than 100 hippies from different cities of the USSR, including Lviv, met in Vilnius, where they had a non-official festival of acoustic music (without electric instruments).”

41 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 85–86. The third part of Gorky’s Old Izergil entitled “The Flaming Heart of Danko” was an obligatory reading in Russian literature classes in Soviet high schools. Writing the report, a KGB officer, by mistake, presented the British rock band “The Animals” as American. (“Amerikanskii modernistskii ansambl ‘Zhivotnyie’” in the original, ark. 86).

42 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 87–88; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 993, ark. 358–61; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 325.

43 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 88–89.

44 On Pokalchuk, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1095, ark. 182–85; for more on the hippies’ engagement with the Orthodox Church in Kupiansk, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1089, ark. 321; for a report about the substantial growth of Krishnaites in Ukraine, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1175, ark. 132–34, and f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1184, ark. 36–37. See also DADO, f. 19, op. 60, spr. 85, ark. 7, 17, and Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 200, 201, 205. Some police officers reported that the hippies had publicly displayed various religious symbols, such as Christian crosses and icons, as well as portraits of Krishna and Buddha.

45 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1162, ark. 126.

46 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1162, ark. 128.

47 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1249, ark. 147.

48 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 90. KGB officers, who studied local hippies, distanced themselves from the “ideological nonsense” of Komsomol periodicals, which wrote that the “American hippies were a satanic sect embracing a mixture of palmistry, astrology, and black magic, and that the hippies were looking for a virgin girl for their devilish black mass ritual and could not find such girls among themselves.” See the author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine. He referred to Mykola Solomatin, “Zhertvy chornoi magii,” Ranok, no. 1, January 1974, pp. 18–19.

49 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 324–25.

50 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 323.

51 Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 102, 103, 170–71, 267–79.

52 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68; the author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

53 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68.

54 Squadrismo is an Italian term for the Italian fascist movement, based on armed squads and led by Benito Mussolini. See Roberta Suzzi Valli, “The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 35 (2000): 131–50.

55 The author’s interview with Stepan K., a retired KGB/SBU officer, 2 February 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.

56 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68.

57 Ibid.

58 The author’s interview with Stepan K., retired SBU/KGB officer, 2 February 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine. For more details about these Italian films, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 145–48.

59 Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (London: Omnibus Press, 1987), 42–43.

60 Even during Gorbachev’s perestroika, local journalists and KGB officials still employed these materials. They reprinted some of the British punks’ declarations for Komsomol ideologists’ needs and tasks. See L. Gamolsky, N. Efremenko, and V. Inshakov, Na barrikadakh sovesti: Ocherki, razmyshleniia, interviu (Dnipropetrovsk: Politizdat, 1988), 139. The author’s interview with Igor T., a KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine; the author’s interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. For a discussion about similar practices in Hungary, see Anna Szemere, Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

61 The author’s interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine; see also the Communist Party veteran Nadezhda Sarana’s open letter entitled “We Declare War against Everybody Who Interferes in Our Lives and Work!” [Boi tem, kto meshaet nam stroit i zhit!], denouncing the local punks, and A. Liamina and L. Gamolskii, “Grazhdaninom byt obiazan” about the 22 December 1982 public trial in Dnipropetrovsk in Dnepr vechernii, 23 December 1982, p. 3. Compare these texts with that of the activists’ reaction in “Iz vystuplenii uchastnikov sobraniia,” in Dnepr vechernii, 23 December 1982, p. 3. See also L. Vasilieva, “Takim ne mesto sredi nas!” Dnepr vechernii, 10 January 1983, p. 3.

62 Heavy metal music, known as “metal,” is a genre of rock music that emerged in the late 1960s and further developed in the early 1970s in the United Kingdom and the United States.

63 Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, Na barrikadakh sovesti, 133.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.,134. In 1984–1985, some university students suffered persecutions for having posters of the British band Black Sabbath. The author’s interview with Oleksandr Beznosov, 19 July 2008, the Department of History, Dnipropetrovsk University, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

66 Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, 135–36.

67 The journalist continued: “Let’s think again! There is no justification for collecting the Nazi regalia! Many people in the West understand this. Leon Rappoport, an American professor from the University of Kansas, was absolutely right, when he sincerely declared: ‘Collecting Nazi relics is certainly one of the forms of fascist propaganda.’” See Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, 135–36; the author’s interview with Mikhail Suvorov, 1 June 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

68 Yu. Lystopad, “Ideolohichna borotba i molod (Notatky z oblasnoi naukovo-praktychnoi konferentsii),” Prapor iunosti, 17 December 1983, p. 2.

69 Gamolsky, Efremenko, and Inshakov, 137.

70 For more about this film and similar cases during perestroika, see Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 152, 168, 170; interview with Ihor T., a retired KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine; Ihor T. also mentioned the Italian film’s influences on Ukraine’s youth.

71 Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromadskykh Obiednan Ukrainy (TsDAHOU), f. 7, op. 20, spr. 3087, ark. 43 (“Otchet Dnepropetrovskogo OK LKSMU ot 23 dekabria 1983 g.”).

72 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1197, ark. 30–31, 68–69; spr. 1200, ark. 236–237; interview with Ihor T., a retired KGB officer, 15 May 1991, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

73 On how Soviet young consumers used films about the Italian mafia by Damiano Damiani to criticize the USSR as a mafia state, see Sergei I. Zhuk, “‘The Disco Mafia’ and ‘Komsomol Capitalism’ in Soviet Ukraine during Late Socialism,” in Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities, ed. Graham H. Roberts (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 173–95.

74 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1192, ark. 68–69; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1199, ark. 49.

The KGB Operation “Retribution” and John Demjanjuk

Olga Bertelsen

From 1950 to 1952, Jim McDonald, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Second World War who received three battle stars, worked closely with the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission and Edward Mark O’Connor, its Commissioner and world expert on refugees and human migration. McDonald’s task was to screen refugees to prevent those who had criminal or espionage backgrounds from entering the United States. In the mid-1980s, Edward Mark O’Connor’s son, Mark J. O’Connor, an attorney defending John Demjanjuk (1920–2012), invited McDonald to gather evidence in Poland pertaining to this complex case. McDonald agreed and, from 1986 to 1987, he served as principal investigator for the defense in the Demjanjuk case, traveling to Israel, Germany, and Poland.1

John Demjanjuk, a retired Ukrainian-born autoworker from Cleveland, allegedly exterminated thousands of Jews, while working at the Nazi concentration camp near Treblinka, Poland. His case exemplifies the most typical Soviet approach to active measures, and deserves a detailed analysis in light of recently discovered KGB documents. This case became the most successful KGB operation that complicated Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the West for generations and obscured the issue of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. But before analyzing the case, as well as the failure of the U.S. state institutions to protect an innocent American citizen from foreign covert action, it seems prudent to briefly discuss McDonald’s findings that may serve as an introductory chapter to a much broader story about the Soviet covert operation code named “Vozmezdiie” (Retribution).

Demjanjuk was drafted into the Red Army in 1942. He was badly wounded in one of the first battles and hospitalized. After his recovery, he was sent back to the front. In the spring of 1942, he was taken prisoner in Crimea during the Battle of Kerch, and was transported as a POW to a transit camp at Rivne, Ukraine to be taken later to a large POW camp at Chełm in eastern Poland adjacent to the Soviet border. The Germans used him for forced labor, digging pits, repairing railroad tracks, and the like. He was incarcerated at Chełm for approximately eighteen months until the spring of 1944. A Holodomor survivor, Demjanjuk wanted to fight the Soviets, and the Germans sent him to Graz where he joined the Vlasov Army.2 This element of Demjanjuk’s biography ultimately made him ineligible to be working in any extermination camps. German documents specifically stipulated this exclusion to prevent information leaks about camp practices to the Soviets in case a vlasovets was taken prisoner by the Red Army.3 Demjanjuk was placed in Camp Heuberg, a Vlasov training camp near Stuttgart, and even served for a brief period of time as a bodyguard for Vlasovite General Fiodor Trukhin who was under direct command of General Andrei Vlasov.

After 1945, Demjanjuk resided in several Displaced Persons (DP) camps at Danzig, Landshut, Regensburg, and Feldafing, and was even trained by the U.S. Army of Occupation, being hired as a truck driver. In a DP camp he met his future wife Vera Kowlowa, and in 1952 they, as a married couple, emigrated from West Germany to the United States. They settled in Cleveland, Ohio, and had three children. For nearly thirty years, Demjanjuk worked as an autoworker for the Ford Motor Company.4

The Demjanjuks’ normal life ended abruptly in 1977, when on the basis of eyewitness testimonies by Holocaust survivors John was accused of having been a guard known as “Ivan the Terrible,” being notoriously famous because of his violence and cruelty toward the prisoners at the Treblinka death camp. The court stripped Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship, and he was extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial. In 1988, he was convicted and received a death sentence, but in 1993 he was acquitted by the Israeli Supreme Court. In 1993, Demjanjuk was allowed to return to Ohio, but in 2002 his citizenship was revoked again and, in 2009, he was extradited to Germany where he was tried for being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor. In 2011, the court convicted and sentenced Demjanjuk to five years in prison. He died on 17 March 2012 before the Court of Appeals delivered its final verdict. Ultimately, he died a free man, according to German law.

McDonald found three witnesses in Poland, the survivors of the atrocities at Treblinka. Immediately upon McDonald’s arrival in Warsaw, the Israeli press published articles suggesting that he went to Poland to find “false witnesses” to defend Demjanjuk, offering them trips to the Unites States and money.5 The most fascinating details of McDonald’s trips to Warsaw and Treblinka are that the description of “Ivan the Terrible” as a giant did not coincide with the appearance of Ohio’s Demjanjuk who was only six-feet tall, and that the Treblinka guard was nearly forty-years-old at the time of the Nazi occupation of Poland, “which would have been almost double that of the twenty-two-year-old John Demjanjuk.”6 Most importantly, two witnesses (the third one had passed away) who agreed to testify in the United States and in Israel and confirm the drastic discrepancy between the real Ivan the Terrible that they knew and John Demjanjuk learned that their visas to the United States were “suddenly and mysteriously cancelled with no explanations” after they had been approved by the U.S. State Department.7

This study is an attempt to decipher the meaning of the Demjanjuk tragedy on the basis of newly discovered archival documents retrieved from the former KGB archives in Kharkiv and Kyiv, Ukraine. They shed light on how the KGB facilitated the creation of the U.S. Office of Special Investigation (hereafter: OSI) that played a crucial role in the Demjanjuk case, and reveal the anatomy of a KGB operation that produced an unexpected result—Demjanjuk’s enduring show trial that transcended national and political boundaries. The importance of the recently discovered documents rest in their ability to contextualize and to better understand why Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk was denaturalized twice, extradited twice, and was put on trial four times in the United States, Israel, and Germany as an accessory to the murder of thousands of Jews. It reveals with absolute clarity that, designed in the early 1970s, the special KGB operation “Retribution” was a response to the human rights activism of “Ukrainian nationalists” and “Zionists” in North America. Some of them were former OUN members and members of other groups, such as the Vlasov Army that fought against the Soviets during the Second World War. Demjanjuk happened to be a member of both anti-Soviet groups, the OUN and the Vlasov Army. This operation helped the chekists eliminate their former and present enemies and opponents by proxy, through Western institutions.8