Pavlovsky testified against dissident Igrunov in the KGB, but he forgave him

– Can you say that you knew Gleb Pavlovsky longer and better than others?

I have known him since 1971. Actually, I brought him into politics, into the dissident movement. Gleb and I have been intellectual partners and interlocutors for several decades.

Our disputes had a profound effect on the formation of both of us. We looked in different directions, like Siamese twins fused at the back. Recently, we had little contact with him, but still we were constantly present in each other’s lives.

Did I know him well? Probably because it is unlikely that he was as frank with anyone else. But that was in the rather distant past. Since he became a Kremlin political strategist, he himself has changed, and our contacts were no longer so close. From the middle of the 2000s, for sure. I can’t say if I knew him better than others, but longer than anyone, for sure.

Did you meet when he was still a student?

– He was a student, he came to my studio in Odessa with his comrades – they then had a small commune. He didn’t like what I was saying because he was then a fan of Che Guevara, the “new left”. And I was a liberal, a marketer. Sparks immediately flared between us. But gradually, day after day, month after month, year after year, his position changed. We got closer and then we parted again.

Was he a leftist then? Was he a revolutionary? Communist?

He was the New Left. Of course, a communist, but this communism was special. It was not the communism of the CPSU, but something opposed to it. It was a communist rebellion against the surrounding reality.

Yes, he was a revolutionary. He, along with his comrades, even learned Spanish in order to start a revolution somewhere out there in Latin America. I think he never lost his sympathy for Che Guevara, but his views during perestroika and especially after the collapse of the USSR changed a lot. He himself has changed. It was a constant, intense evolution of views.

– Was it a sincere evolution, or was there a desire to somehow adapt, fit into the surrounding reality?

– Gleb is not a petty careerist. This is a man with great ambitions. He wanted to change the world. He had big plans for this.

Yes, he wanted to fit into power structures in order to change the world through them. He pondered how to fit in there to influence history. Because it is almost impossible to influence history, to do something great, while remaining at a marginal level. Therefore, he was looking for the possibility of cooperation with the authorities. When such an opportunity presented itself in 1995, he immediately seized it and used it 100%.

– Political technologies are manipulations of people, their destinies. Did he consider himself entitled to influence the lives of a huge number of people, to change it?

– He considered himself entitled to influence the fate of the country and really manipulated people, including me. This was one of the reasons why we clashed with him and were not comrades doing the same thing. But he felt in himself the power to bend this world under him. He lived for decades with this idea.

– Documents have been published in Ukraine, from which it follows that Pavlovsky played a key role in your troubles with the KGB. How did you react to this?

– Life so happened that my troubles with the KGB came through Gleb. But to say that he is the culprit of this, I can not.

Yes, he testified against me. But sooner or later they would have been given by Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov. I worked hard, someone had to testify. It so happened that he gave.

He himself was shocked by what had happened, he came to me and told me everything. We agreed with him how he would continue to behave, and he behaved that way. Although at the same time he risked that he could also be imprisoned. But he withstood the line of conduct that we agreed with him.

I have no complaints against him on this issue. I can’t blame him for not being ready to face the KGB.

True, later, in the case of the Poiski magazine, he also behaved not in the best way. But then he was already thinking about how to fit into the system. He absolutely did not want to die under a driftwood in his Troitsko-Pechorsk, where he was in exile. Moreover, he did not want to spend half his life in the camp. He was looking for an opportunity to stay free and work. This unwillingness to perish for nothing, the desire to remain on the crest of history, greatly influenced his position.

– Could it be possible that it was then simply used by certain structures?

– I rule it out. Nobody used Gleb. He was an independent strong figure.

What were your disagreements?

“They were identified from the very beginning. Already in the spring of 1972, it became clear how different we were. He then thought about coups, that a close-knit handful of adventurers could change everything in the state. I was against such actions. I believed that change could only come about gradually, by educating society.

In terms of views, we were close in many respects, and I think that I significantly influenced Gleb’s worldview, but I could not influence his ideas about what actions should be taken. He was a man of action, a man of will, striving to transform the world, and he remained so until the end of his life.

He was a big fan of science fiction in his youth, and he was struck by Isaac Asimov’s cycle of novels The Academy, whose title is also translated as The Foundation. In it, the great mathematician plans and predicts the development of the Universe and influences the vector of its development. He wanted to be the kind of person who influences the vector of development of the country and the world. To do this, he chose the method of political technologies.

Read the material “Dissident-sovereign: the star and death of Gleb Pavlovsky”