Professor Yefremov's KGB Files (Part II)

The absence of the modern division of power in the USSR resulted in the empowering of the Prosecutor’s Office with unprecedented supervisory functions, enormous and unchecked powers. Among the objectives of the Prosecutor’s Office was to ensure compliance of the governmental bodies with the Constitution and laws. The prosecutor used to be the sole guarantor of the proper implementation of laws during pre-trial inquiry and investigation. He exercised the power of active interference to rectify the consequences of the unlawful actions of investigation bodies. He was issuing warrants of arrest, surveillance and other actions significantly restraining the constitutional rights of the citizens.

The Prosecutor’s Office was empowered to oversee cases initiated by the state security services (KGB), and every criminal case had its twin file in the Prosecutor’s Office, where updated information from the case was filed. The case had this designation in the Russian archives: ЦГАРФ . ф . Р -8131. Оп . 36 Д . 5653 (according to the Russian historian N. V. Boyko who presented his information in 1997, at the First International Yefremov Symposium).

The contents of the dossier provided no clear answers and raised even more questions. The cause of death was not determined, and Yefremov might not have been the person her appeared to be, that is what the files stated, and because of the above, a criminal case was opened, and an investigation ensued in January of 1973. No mention of the November search of the deceased author’s apartment was found in the file (although the Prosecutor’s Office authorized it, as the journalists learned later). The criminal case was officially closed in March of 1974, and the Prosecutor’s Office was informed. Fifteen people were questioned about Yefremov’s identity, and it was determined that he died from natural causes. But the KGB investigation went on.

Many years later, Izmailov was able to meet with the investigator, who told him there was no underlying denunciation against Yefremov. Habibulin, the original investigator, was very reluctant to talk about the case even in the waning days of the USSR. In 1989 the journalist was able to get an official response from the Moscow KGB office that the search of Yefremov’s apartment was due to suspicion that the author died a violent death. But the search had caused such suspicions not to be confirmed…

Allan Yefremov was certain in 1997 that there was a denunciation (donos in Russian) to the KGB against his father, had definite suspicions as to who might have done it, but would not talk about them without definite proof.

BRITISH AGENT HYPOTHESIS

The rumors that spread through Moscow in 1972, after the search, had it that Yefremov was actually a British agent who “substituted” the writer during the Mongolian expeditions. Some rumors had it that the KGB installed recording device in the author’s home, and recorded his death…According to the former office of the KGB’s Second Department (Counterintelligence), V. Korolyov, who published his article in 1991 (Stolitsa Magazine), their Moscow office had few activities to occupy the time. To justify their murky existence, Lt.-General Alidin decided to make Yefremov into a British agent. Viktor I. Alidin was head of the Moscow and regional KGB from 1971 to 1986, a very unusual career stretch. And for eight years after Yefremov’s death Alidin had kept the case open…Petrov and Edelman, who have researched thousands of KGB files, found very unusual inconsistencies in the Yefremov’s files obtained from the Prosecutor’s Office.

But besides the inconsistencies stated above, the idea that the British intelligence would spend money and efforts for sending a spy to the USSR under a guise of a paleontologist is somewhat outlandish. The period of early 1970s was the time of the glorification of the KGB, and its operatives, Soviet “knights”, depicted as dedicated and modest heroes out to disrupt evil foreign espionage nests that had penetrated the Socialist Fatherland. While Alidin remained silent about the Yefremov affair in his memoirs, Petrov and Edelman cited general Oleg Kalugin’s (a famous KGB defector living in the U.S.) mention of the Moscow KGB’s account of a Soviet author’s relative who escaped to the West, while a British spy took his place to ideologically destroy the Soviet society; apparently Alidin had pestered the Kremlin with this “case” for years. The Soviet author was not mentioned by name.

Why was the case against the Yefremov initiated by the KGB? The British espionage accusation is not in the files pertaining to the case. Accusation of “anti-Soviet” activities is nowhere in the files (unlike in most other KGB cases); unless more files are missing from the special division. The Prosecutor’s Office division that handled Yefremov’s files would not even deal with major espionage cases. But with his death, had Yefremov been suspected of being a spy, the case would have been closed. Yet it was not…What remains is the mysterious verification of identity, the accusation that Yefremov was not who he pretended to be. The investigative journalists came to a conclusion that for some unknown reasons, the KGB needed a formal cover-up to initiate a criminal case against the Russian writer. Inconsistencies did not bother the KGB operatives. When the need to continue the case was gone, they stopped the case.

To be continued

Paul Stonehill
Author of the Soviet UFO Files (1998), and co-author of Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon (published: 2006 in English, 2007 in German, and 2009 in Portuguese)