and shipped to Moscow on suspicion of being an American intelli-
gence agent. For the next two years, he was interrogated in
Lubyankaprison. In July 1947 the head of the Lubyanka hospital re-
ported to Viktor Abakumovthat Wallenberg had died of a heart at-
tack. He was cremated without an autopsy, and the Swedish govern-
ment was not informed of his fate. He had been murdered by poison,
apparently at Abakumov’s orders.
Wallenberg’s death has never been satisfactorily documented for
his family or supporters. The Swedish government and international
human rights organizations tried for decades to ascertain his fate, and
many believed until the fall of the Soviet Union that he was held in a
gulag. However, recent memoirs by KGBofficers establish that he
was poisoned—a tragic fate for a great hero.WAR SCARES.On several occasions, the Soviet authorities used the
security services to whip up war scares for international and domes-
tic political reasons. In 1927 Joseph Stalin spoke of the imminent
danger of war with Japan and Great Britain. Stalin used this fear to
give the security police far greater power in arresting dissidentsand
deportingsuch figures as Leon Trotsky. In 1952 Stalin again used
the threat of war with the West to create a domestic hysteria about
spies and terrorists. He aimed this campaign domestically at Jews,
who were called “rootless cosmopolitanites.” The Soviet people were
bombarded with accounts of the Doctors’ Plot, alleging that Jewish
doctors were poisoning Russians and spying for America and Israel.
Stalin almost certainly would have parlayed this threat into a massive
purge of the political leadership had he lived.
Yuri Andropov approved a war scare in 1982–1984. The themes
of the campaign were the threat of an American nuclear strike and the
need for greater discipline and vigilance at home. Several leading
dissidents were arrested, and conditions for political prisoners wors-
ened. Soviet propaganda portrayed the West as led by a “mad” Pres-
ident Ronald Reagan. The war scare infected the KGB’s foreign in-
telligence component: under the RYaNprogram, KGB and GRU
rezidenturaswere ordered to look for (and find) proof of an Ameri-
can plan for nuclear war. Unlike previous war scares, this had the po-
tential of accidentally igniting a nuclear war. The Soviet leadership
abandoned this war scare following Andropov’s death in early 1984.WAR SCARES• 28306-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 283