Shrinks helped Soviet Govt win friends and influence leaders

In an exclusive interview to prestigious daily newspaper Izvestia, Kochenov has admitted, for the first time, that Soviet special security services, mainly on the order from Foreign Ministry, engaged in creating psychological images of many famous world leaders, including Indira Gandhi.

“There were many leaders whom we studied. One of them, late Indira Gandhi, who was a complicated person,” says Kochenov.

According to Kochenov, days before important foreign leaders paid visit to Moscow, or Soviet leaders went abroad, special security services called top Soviet psychologists at their “special room” to work out concrete psychological image of a particular leader and give recommendations as to how Soviet leaders should talk to extract maximum results.

The study was necessary for recommendations to CPSU leaders, because it was not only important what the leaders talked, but how they talked, i.e. their intonations, expressions, gestures, glances, in short, the whole complex of so-called paralinguisms, which enabled us to create an accurate psychological portrait, underlines Kochenov.

After studying a whole complex of video-tapes, audio-cassettes and photographs, says Kochenov, provided by the security services, we recommended CPSU leaders as to whether they should look straight in their interlocutor’s eyes or whether they should talk in long or short sentences. Kochenov stops short of saying in his interview, he recommended Brezhnev to see eye to eye with Indira Gandhi and avoid equivocal long or short sentences.

Yeltsin is expected to visit Delhi, for his summit with Inder Kumar Gujral, in January. Maybe, Russian special security service have already called psychologists to study the “materials” to create a psychological portrait of Gujral so as to give a set of recommendations to the Russian President to “manipulate” him.