Taken together, these lists provide unique information on the “usual suspects” in a Soviet market town of the 1970s. They include men and women, aged from their twenties to nearly ninety. The subjects were drawn from every major social group including farmworkers, factory workers, managers, government officials, and pensioners. One of the few restrictions is that, judged by family names, nearly all were ethnic Lithuanians.
Beyond that, the subjects of kompromat fell into two roughly distinct groups. These make the two columns of Table 5.1. A first group enters the record because they wished to travel abroad and were refused. They tended
| Table 5.1. Who were the “usual suspects”? Two types, Panevézys, 1972 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Denied foreign travel | In or seeking responsible work | |
| Total number | 96 | 86 |
| Personal data: | ||
| Age in 1972, years | 52.2 | 43.5 |
| Education, years | 7.5 | 12.5 |
| Non-Lithuanian ethnicity, percent | 2.1 | 0.0 |
| Female, percent | 65.6 | 15.1 |
| Party or Komsomol member, percent | 4.2 | 14.0 |
| Employment status: | ||
| Employed, percent | 66.7 | *98.8 |
| Supervisor or teacher, percent | 30.2 | **977 |
| Retired, percent | 19.8 | 0.0 |
| “Housewife,” percent | 7.3 | 0.0 |
Key: * One subject’s employed status is missing. ** Two subjects’ employment type is missing.
Source: The information in Tables 5.1 to 5.3 is abstracted from four documents in a file at Hoover/LYA, K-l/3/703. For ease of reference, I label them A, В, C, and D as below. In this table, the first column (“Denied foreign travel”) is based on the subjects named in List C; the second column (“In or seeking responsible work”) combines Lists A, B, and D. Six subjects are named in both columns. The lists are as follows: (A) Folios 90-91 (“List of persons cleared for top secret work and documents with compromising evidence,” 6 names, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 3 December 1972). (B) Folios 92-93 (“List with compromising evidence [on persons] denied access, but they continue to work in the positions indicated,” 10 names, 2 December 1972). (C) Folios 94-109 (“List of persons withdrawn from journeys abroad for 1970 to 1972,” 100 names found in 99 entries, one of which concerns a married couple, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 2 December 1972). (D) Folios 110-122 (“List with compromising evidence on persons with supervisory duties” (zanimaiushchikh rukovodiashchie dolzhnosti), 80 names, of which four also appear in List A above, five in List B, and six in List C, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 3 December 1972).
to be older citizens, in their early fifties on average. Most were still in work, but one in five were pensioners. They were typically less educated and less skilled. The proportion of party members in the group (4 percent) was close to that in the adult population of Lithuania at the time.[245]
The second group comprised all those listed because of their employment status or ambitions. They were younger, with average age in the mid-forties. They were more heavily male, more highly educated, and they had already reached higher-status positions. The proportion of party members (14 percent) was several times higher than in the adult population.
What was it, exactly, that made these people “usual suspects”? The purpose of KGB counterintelligence was forward looking, in the sense of aiming to forestall security threats before they materialized. Given that, one might think that the most useful compromising information would consist of suspicious things that people were reported as saying or doing in the present or quite recently. This was generally not the case. All the subjects were well used to living under authoritarian rule. They all aspired to responsible employment, or to foreign travel, or to both. Regardless of their inner thoughts, they understood the importance of living in outward conformity to the norms of Soviet life. The kompromat listed against their names shows few recent behavioral clues or signals.
To make sense of the mass of personal detail, we break it down into specifics. It turns out that the 176 personal files included 320 separate items of information. Then, each item can be classified in two dimensions. Was it recent, or was it “historical” in the sense of originating in Lithuania’s time of troubles now twenty years or more in the past, that is, up to 1953? And did it stem from some action or confession that the subject undertook by choice, or from circumstances or associations beyond their control?
Table 5.2 distributes the 320 items of kompromat over those two dimensions. In the time dimension, more than two-thirds (227 items) echoed the relatively distant past. In the voluntary/involuntary dimension, two-thirds (218 items) reflected circumstances and associations. In the aggregate, only one item in eight (39 items) reported something the subject chose to do or say in the recent past. This illustrates the low quality of kompromat generally.
| table 5.2. The quality of kompromat, Panevézys, 1972: How much was recent? How much was based on voluntary actions? | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Historic items | Recent items | All items | |
| Involuntary circumstances | |||
| and associations | 164 | 54 | 218 |
| Voluntary choices and | |||
| confessions | 63 | 39 | 102 |
| All items | 227 | 93 | 320 |
Notes: Historic items date from the Stalin era (1953 or before); they include evidence from Lithuania as an independent state before World War II, under one German and two Soviet occupations, and up to the end of the postwar insurgency that coincided roughly with the death of Stalin. Recent items date from subsequent years. While the timing is not completely clear cut, no serious issues arise. Involuntary circumstances include suspicious family background; victimization by forced resettlement during Sovietization, whether as an adult or as a child; and having a family member known to be living abroad. Involuntary associations include all those cases where a close relative fell under suspicion for any reason listed above or below. Voluntary choices include decisions to resist Soviet rule in any way or at any stage, or to commit any other offence against Soviet law, including subsequent criminal penalization where it was applied. Included under voluntary choices are leaving the country under any circumstance, the evasion of resettlement, unauthorized meetings with foreigners, and any attempt to conceal the facts of involuntary circumstances or associations. Voluntary confessions can be religious or personal in nature; personal confessions are suspicious if they imply any kind of estrangement from society or desire to live differently, including marital discord, loneliness, and (in one case) a simple intention to emigrate. Source: See Table 5.1. The figures shown in this table combine the data of all 176 subjects named in the four lists.
245
In 1970 the Communist Party of Lithuania had 116,600 members, or 3.7 percent of the 3,166,000 population. At least one-third of that population was under 18, and so ineligible for party membership. On that basis, I estimate that 5 to 6 percent of all those aged 18 and over were party members. Probably, however, that share was much lower in the older age groups that were seeking permission to travel abroad.