15
THE KGB AND THE POLITICAL OPPOSITION
We can now turn our attention to one of the key law-enforcement agencies – the secret police – and the way it dealt with political opponents. As yet, we possess no authoritative history of the KGB and its archives are, at time of writing, still closed to researchers. We shall therefore have to make do with some of the information that has emerged.
In its various pre-Khrushchevite incarnations – Cheka, GPU, NKVD – the secret police had a chequered history that has been recounted by historians. From the creation of the Cheka (Chrezvychainaia Kommissiia) in 1917, its agents have always been officially referred to as ‘chekists’ (chekisty) – and still are in post-Soviet Russia. This unfailing attachment to a prestigious title, which is explained by the role of these agents in the revolutionary period, possibly served the tacit purpose of distancing the agency from the Stalinist period. Chekists fought for a great cause, risked their lives and died for it, whereas under Stalin NKVD operatives (nkvdisty) tortured and killed masses of innocent people. They too risked their lives, but not heroically: they might be eliminated by their patron to blot out the traces of the criminal deeds he himself ordered them to commit.
It is worth recalling that when, in 1934, the GPU was supposedly absorbed by the NKVD (Commissariat for Internal Affairs), it was in fact the reverse that occurred. The NKVD was taken over by the leadership of the GPU, which was kept intact inside the commissariat as the GUGB (General Directorate of State Security). In that way, the complex of political security and intelligence services, domestic and international, could at a moment’s notice become an independent agency (of the MGB or KGB variety), or return to being a component of the NKVD-MVD. It should also be remembered that under Stalin the latter was headed by the chief of the security services, and that the ‘part’ was therefore in control of the ‘whole’. Why such frequent, successive restructurings were required is a question for experts. For us, the key point is that the secret police and intelligence services remained substantially intact, even if the great purges took a heavy toll on them and numerous changes post-Stalin created agitation – sometimes chaos – in their ranks.
At one stage, the MVD – a bureaucratic ‘superpower’ – ruled over the Gulag, the whole intelligence complex and substantial military special forces, as well as border guards. In addition, it had all the usual functions of an interior ministry – public order, public records, local government supervision. After Stalin’s death its power was seriously curtailed, and in 1962 it was abolished as a Union ministry. On 10 February 1954 the MGB (Ministry of State Security) once again became independent of the MVD – this time for good. It was placed under the authority of General Serov, previously MVD deputy minister, and several MVD functions were transferred to it. Serov was moved from this position on 8 December 1958, having been appointed head of military counter-intelligence (GRU) and deputy chief of staff of the armed forces. The MGB, which in the interim had become the KGB (K for Komitet), was entrusted to A. N. Shelepin, who had started his career in the Komsomol, before heading the Central Committee department responsible for supervising republican party organizations. On Khrushchev’s instructions, Shelepin simplified the KGB’s sprawling organizational structure and proceeded to substantial staff reductions. These changes have been seen by some historians as ‘cardinal’ and are summed up in Khrushchev’s anti-militaristic phrase: ‘tearing off their pompous epaulettes and trouser stripes’ (it sounds more pithy in Russian: raspogonim, razlampasim). This was why neither Shelepin nor the new Interior Minister Dudorov was entitled to the military titles and uniforms so highly coveted by some leading figures.
Things fell slowly into place in the KGB’s Moscow headquarters on the Lubianka. The secret police found its bearings once again, though not without some significant changes in its modus operandi (which fell far short of what liberal-minded citizens, jurists and intellectuals wanted to see). The KGB’s internal structure remained unchanged from 1958 until the mid-1960s. At the same time, however, changes affecting the character of the regime – the growing importance of laws and legal codes, the considerable role of the legal professions, the diminished effectiveness of coercive measures in an increasingly urban society – were bound to have an impact on it. It is true that in this treacherous sphere there were ‘natural’ limits to change – notably because the same was true of the regime as a whole – and it is important not to forget them. Even so, the changes that did occur were substantial.
To begin with, curtailing the powers of Stalin’s secret police was carried out in stages, but amounted to a thorough cleansing operation. Disbanding such extra-judicial bodies as the special conferences, the kangaroo courts operated directly by the political police, or the sinister local ‘troikas’, marked a decisive step, which was followed by obliging the KGB to hand over the results of its investigations to the regular courts. This move eliminated some of the most shocking potential for arbitrariness, which the security services had been instructed to exploit to the full. The abolition of the Gulag as an industrial labour pool for the secret police, and the latter’s consequent disappearance as an economic actor, was another crucial turning point. The ongoing campaign against the venality and brutality of the police, whether secret or in uniform, tended in the same direction. In Part One we indicated how, as early as the 1920s, the GPU had bridled at supervision by public prosecutors – derided as ‘legalistic hair-splitting’ by the chekists, who preferred to have a free hand to pursue the regime’s enemies. The prosecutors had lost out at the time, and many of them later perished. Now, the restoration of supervision of KGB investigations by prosecutors was in train, though it was not without its ups and downs.
Among the significant measures taken under Khrushchev to rein in the Stalinist monstrosity and change the climate in the secret services was the introduction of new people to lead them, selected from the party apparatus. In his autobiography,[1] Mikoyan, who in reality was second in importance in the regime after Khrushchev, approved of this move, but criticized him for the appointment of General Serov, who had been NKVD head in the Ukraine from 2 September 1939 until 25 July 1941, at the time when Khrushchev was Central Committee first secretary there. The new ruler in the Kremlin trusted Serov in a way no one else did – at least if we are to believe Mikoyan, who claims that Khrushchev was easily manipulated by skilful sycophants. When finally forced to remove Serov by irrefutable arguments (they actually derived from opponents of Khrushchev), he still appointed him to an honorific position.
The MGB had been reconstructed in 1954 as an agency (the KGB) with jurisdiction over the whole USSR, and it absorbed a growing number of functions that had previously fallen to the MVD – border guards, among others. Unlike the MVD, however, it no longer ran an enormous prison system (that remained with the MVD) and operated only a smaller number of prisons for suspects under investigation. It is possible that it also possessed a larger camp or colony, but I have come across no clear evidence for this. On the other hand, the KGB constituted a formidable machine, concentrating intelligence, counter-intelligence and communications and transport security under one roof, and equipped with massive technical resources for surveillance, a typical detective service (‘external surveillance’ in its jargon), a whole host of other departments and subdepartments, and a large staff – not to mention stukachi, unpaid informers, recruited in any sector the KGB deemed sensitive. Such concentration of power was characteristic of the deeply ingrained Soviet belief in the virtues of centralization. It is yet more obvious if we round off this sketch by adding that the KGB was responsible for the security of Soviet leaders and, to a large extent, for what they knew (or what the KGB wanted them to know) about the USSR and the rest of the world. Hence the KGB was an administrative giant – but different from its predecessor under Stalin.