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The Once and Future KGB
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19773 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
2,755 Words |
| Author
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Stanislav Levchenko
Stanislav Levchenko is a J.M. Olin Fellow of Boston
University's College of Communications. He is the author of
On the Wrong Side and other books and is a member of the
Jamestown Foundation, which helps defectors from communist
countries resettle in the West. |
According to the Soviet wire agency INTERFAX, last August and September 15 KGB counterintelligence officers from the Perm region (a few hundred miles east of Moscow) busied themselves with gathering the harvest in the nearby collective farm. They were involved in such "hard labor" for a month. Does this mean they have no other work to do?
In an article published last fall in the radical Soviet weekly Ogonyok, retired KGB Lieutenant Colonel Korolev, who had worked for the Moscow regional branch of the Soviet secret police, declared: "The KGB is fatally ill. To all intents and purposes it is already a living corpse."
But is the KGB really fatally ill, or is the Soviet secret police officers' volume of work so small that their bosses use them as uniformed farmers? The answer to both questions is a flat no.
For 73 years the structure of the Soviet system and its stability rested on two main pillars--the KGB and the Soviet army. Now, when the remarkable processes of glasnost and perestroika are leading to the gradual disintegration of the Soviet socialist system, when the chaos inside the USSR sometimes looks like schizophrenic anarchy, the KGB's half a million members become very important to the Soviet leaders. The KGB is now probably the only organization in the USSR that serves as a reliable and effective insurance against the quick victory of capitalism over socialism in the terminally ill Soviet empire.
About three months ago some Soviet newspapers and magazines started to publish articles critical of the KGB. Some writers depict it as a secretive mechanism of oppression, which it really is. Therefore, apparently, the KGB leaders decided that the time had come to prove their importance to the state and the people. For that reason the KGB has been shedding its skin. Its chairman, General Kryuchkov, is personally involved in a massive public relations campaign. Its purpose is to present the infamous secret police as a new organization with integrity and clean hands.
Established in 1989, the KGB's public relations office, headed by General Karabainov, has been arranging interviews for practically every KGB deputy chairman with foreign and Soviet journalists. General Kryuchkov, a short man with a round face and tuft of gray hair on his balding head, regularly chats with foreign journalists and dignitaries. His propaganda theme is simple: He claims that the modern KGB is an entirely different organization. He denounces the "old KGB"
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