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Is the KGB Dead?
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19985 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
3,043 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. |
To begin with, two pieces of news. First, the Supreme Soviet of Russia recently announced that two respected democrats--members of the Russian Parliament, Rev. Gieb Yakunin and Lev Ponomarev--may face criminal prosecution. Their crime? Making public the names of some KGB informers, primarily among the metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both Yakunin and Ponomarev headed the commission investigating last year's coup attempt and found in the KGB archives absolutely shocking documents on KGB criminal activities against their own people. They decided to share some of the documents with the Russian public. An interesting detail: Reportedly, both are close to President Yeltsin.
The second piece of news: On May 23, Sergey Belozertsev, a member of Parliament, was attacked in a Moscow street and hit on the head with some hard object and had to be taken to a hospital in serious condition. He happens to be a prominent democrat who had been consistently demanding that the KGB open its archives.
Who could be behind those two dramas? One can only guess, but most likely it is former KGB officers (now members of Parliament) and former hard-line party functionaries. Another significant detail: Two-thirds of the members of the current Russian Parliament are former communists (who hate democratic reforms) and former KGB generals and their informers.
It is not a coincidence that the aforementioned incidents happened just two or three weeks before the historic visit of the Russian president to the United States. The atmosphere in Moscow's political circles was tense, and Yeltsin's opponents were trying to undermine his image abroad.
Given the above, it would be logical to analyze what is happening with the formerly largest oppressive agency in the world (second only to China's). Is it still capable of conducting operations on its own, or has it turned to protecting the interests of the Russian people?
It is well known that after last year's attempted coup, former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov was imprisoned along with other conspirators. What is less well known, and what the investigation found out, is that until the resignation of Gorbachev, the international charmer, as president of the USSR, the KGB had been functioning as if there were no "openness" or "restructuring." President Yeltsin was never sympathetic to the secret police, because it was a menace to his reforms and because it had repeatedly threatened him in the mid-1980s (when
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