Munich Institute for Study of USSR Helped Destroy Soviet System, Baliyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 8 – Seventy years ago this week, one of the most remarkable research centers in the world was established, the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR. In the 22 years of its existence, it produced thousands of pages of information about developments in the Soviet Union that were reported nowhere else.

            Because it was an artifact of the Cold War – it was created and supported by the US Central Intelligence Agency and disbanded when it lost the ability to plausibly deny that link – the Institute employed hundreds of emigres from the Soviet bloc’s numerous nationalities and garnered information from the media and other emigres that has proved invaluable.

            The Institute is largely forgotten in the West, although researchers still make use of its publications. But it hasn’t been forgotten in Moscow, and on this round anniversary, commentator Aleksey Baliyev has published an attack that is also an appreciation of the Institute (stoletie.ru/territoriya_istorii/kak_v_munkhene_razrushali_sssr_984.htm).

            (This combination of ideological attack and genuine appreciation is an increasing feature of Russian discussions of such Western institutions and researchers, given that the authors of such works increasingly have to give enough information to make their attacks plausible. On this trend, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/09/attacks-on-falsifiers-of-history-now.html.)

            Baliyev entitles his article “How Munich Destroyed the USSR” and focuses on what he says is the role of the institute in identifying Soviet citizens who might be approached to become agents of the West and in training emigres and others to penetrate, report on and destabilize the Soviet Union during the final decades of its existence.

            But far more interesting and more valuable are the lines he devotes to the staff of the Institute and their works. The institute initially employed about 50 people but some 250 by the 1960s. By nationality, 23 percent were Russians, 28 percent were Ukrainians, and the remainder other Soviet, East European, Iranian, and Turkish people.

            Baliyev reports that the Institute issued monthly or quarterly bulletins as well as annual volumes in many languages of the USSR, as well as holding conferences and compiling files on thousands of citizens of the USSR. By the end, the Russian writer says, there were “more than 72,000” such files.

            According to the Moscow writer, “the Institute possessed an enormous amount of genuine statistical data which was concealed by Soviet statistics,” something that allowed its analysts to see the emergence of problems in the USSR often far earlier than the leaders in the Kremlin did.

            The author of this Window remains a frequent user of Institute publications, most often the works of I.A. Kurganov on the ways in which Russian nationalism is a threat to the stability of the Moscow state, the Caucasian Review which contains still important articles on the North Caucasus nationalities, and Genocide in the USSR.

            Just how ahead of the curve Institute reporting often was is well illustrated by the last of these publications. Genocide reported on the way Stalinists disposed of Crimean Tatars they had missed at the time of the mass deportation in 1944 by taking them out into the Black Sea and bludgeoning them to death before throwing their bodies into the water.

            That story was dismissed by many in the West as improbable given that in view of some Western scholars “even the Stalinists” wouldn’t have gone that far – until what Genocide reported in the mid-1950s was confirmed by Russian scholars at the Moscow Institute of Ethnography in the early 1990s.