He betrayed his friends and lived to regret it One of the Soviet dissident movement's most complex and tragic figures has died

At an Israeli hospital on September 3, economist and Soviet dissident Viktor Krasin died. Forty-four years earlier, in 1973, he and his comrade Pyotr Yakir publicly repented their “anti-Soviet activities” and provided the KGB with testimony against their friends and colleagues. Krasin spent the next four decades forgotten in exile, living mostly in the United States. At Meduza’s request, historian Sergey Bondarenko recalls the life of one of the most complex and tragic figures of the USSR’s dissident movement.

Who was Viktor Krasin?

What will people remember about Krasin? He was one of the Soviet Union’s dissident heroes in the 1960s and 70s, and a member of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR. He’s also the “traitor” who testified against almost 200 people when he was investigated in the so-called “Yakir-Krasin Affair” in the early 1970s.

Krasin’s father was executed during the Great Terror in 1937. Krasin himself was first arrested 12 years later, in 1949, for belonging to an informal Marxist circle at Moscow State University. After he was freed and rehabilitated in the mid-1950s, Krasin returned to Moscow, where he was again a member of several informal political circles by the 1960s. He copied and distributed samizdat (self-published illegal literature) and signed various protest letters.

By the late 1960s, Krasin had become one of the country’s main dissidents: he worked on “A Chronicle of Current Events,” one of the USSR’s longest-running samizdat periodicals; and in May 1969, he participated in the founding of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights, the USSR’s first independent civil group.

After another stint in prison, Krasin returned to Moscow in the early 1970s, but he was arrested again in September 1972 together with another top dissident figure, Pyotr Yakir. This event was a tragedy for Soviet dissidents, though many expected it. Nevertheless, the government’s decision to target “two old Stalinist prisoners,” as Krasin described Yakir and himself, was a serious blow to the movement.

Why did Krasin testify against his comrades?

By the time they were arrested in 1972, both Krasin and Yakir had considerable experience as political prisoners in the USSR’s camps. The son of executed Red Army commander Iona Yakir, Pyotr spent his entire childhood in Soviet camps. This didn’t help them in the new investigation, however. According to Krasin, he and his friend were people who “tried to rebel, but remained forever afraid of the state security system’s punitive powers.”

Fellow members of the dissident movement say Krasin’s emotional breakdown about two months after being arrested was consistent with his apparent “delusions of grandeur.” Krasin himself later wrote that he was tired and searched within himself for an excuse to surrender, and all he needed was someone else’s push. Presenting himself as the “leader” of the Soviet human rights movement, Krasin expected the KGB to acknowledge his achievements, and agents did in fact interrogate him as the movement’s “main hero,” promising to shoot him if he refused to cooperate (an exceptional punishment for an exceptional individual), and Krasin embraced a role as the savior of his doomed accomplices (“testify against them, and we won’t touch them”).

Yakir agreed to testify once he got immunity for his pregnant daughter, and Krasin bargained for the safety of his wife, Nadezhda Yemelkina (who was also an active member of the dissident movement). The testimony by the two men launched a chain reaction of arrests and raids that rocked the lives of many Soviet dissidents in the early 1970s. On top of all that, Krasin and Yakir then spoke at a press conference, publicly renouncing their friends and their human rights activism. In the eyes of many sympathizers, this act discredited the movement itself. The moral trauma of the betrayal even impacted activists who weren’t arrested as a result of the testimonies by Krasin and Yakir. One of Yakir’s closest friends, Ilya Gabai, threw himself from a high-story window.

The Soviet authorities used the “Yakir-Krasin Affair” to stage a public show trial that would demonstrate the total failure of the “anti-Soviet underground.” The political persecution of suspects in this case ended shortly after the “official part” of the investigation, trial, and press conference. Krasin and his wife were granted permission to emigrate to the U.S., and Yakir remained in the USSR, where he died in 1982, after intentionally drinking himself into an early grave.

What became of Krasin after he emigrated?

As an emigre, Krasin worked for Radio Svoboda, took jobs as a publicist, and spent the next 40-plus years trying to understand what had happened to him in the first four decades of his life, before he left the USSR. In 1983, in New York, he published a book called “Trial,” where he described his case, the reasons he “broke,” and the need to repent. This public acknowledgement of his guilt, however, wasn’t enough to win him much forgiveness. He continued to live in isolation, without almost any connection to his old comrades and friends. Many years later, in 2012, he released another book in London, titled “The Duel: Notes of an Anti-Communist,” where he retold his entire life story, describing his childhood, the arrest and execution of his father, and his own arrest in the Stalinist era — all the way up to the crucial events of the early 1970s.

Many have written about Viktor Krasin, whose story is now something of an archetype. Krasin has become the collective image of everything bad about the human rights movement. Critics polemicized with him and continued to insult him. Krasin himself felt the need to discuss what had happened, which is why he wrote his book “Trial” as a series of dialogues with his wife. But “Trial” wasn’t a polemic with Krasin’s accusers: the book’s two voices worked together. While one of the voices condemns him, the other voice doesn’t demand forgiveness or leniency. And this was the book’s strength: Krasin, as it were, laid out the whole story from the perspective of his former comrades, drawing together his own lynch mob. “They forced me to commit unworthy acts, but I did them myself,” he wrote. It was his fight, his mistake, his surrender, and his repentance.

In his books, Viktor Krasin remained an extremely lonely hero — a hero and an outsider who never lost the desire and passion to be “special” and defeat the system in battle. Even in the 1970s, however, Krasin’s view and approaches were already a bit archaic. By this time, most dissidents didn’t try to “compete” against the KGB or “challenge” its agents. When brought in for questioning, you kept silent and got your prison sentence or exile. Krasin, on the contrary, tried to bargain, scheme, and play games with investigators, insisting on his ability to win. But it was Solzhenitsyn and Bukovsky who “won,” though even their victories stipulated being deported from the USSR.

When winning is impossible, all you need to do is lose beautifully, wrote mathematician Vladimir Albrecht, another Soviet human rights activist, around the same time as Krasin’s trial. Krasin unwillingly became the symbol of the movement’s most terrible and humiliating defeat, and was robbed not just of his friends, but also of the memory of all his previous (and subsequent) worthy acts. Krasin was mostly forgotten during his lifetime, and the few who did remember him generally remembered only the bad things.

In an interview with Andrey Loshak for the film “The Anatomy of Process,” Krasin says he heard the crows of roosters, while walking the prison yard, the day before his press conference in 1973. “It was a hallucination, of course,” he said, explaining that roosters wouldn’t have been anywhere near Lefortovo Prison. If this was one of his “delusions of grandeur,” they’d clearly matured and become more artistic, with Krasin imagining himself as Peter betraying Christ. Peter’s story, after all, is the story of rebirth — the story of a man who gets a second chance. But Krasin never got one.