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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 4 (August 2001)

TRIUMPH OF THE KGB

By: Oleg Kalugin, Washington, November 16, 2000
Source: Independent Information Centre "Glasnost"

In March right after Putin was elected President of Russia, the US mass media published my article "Triumph of the KGB".

It contains particularly the following: It was not long ago when the state security system of Russia was embarrassed after numerous reorganisations and public revile. The most experienced officers left it for better jobs. It was re-oriented to fight criminals instead of fighting people like it had been before. But they did not knew how to do that. Police work had always been something not worthy of them. Moreover, they were afraid to fight criminals – it’s possible to offend somebody among the country’s authorities.

What they succeeded in is the maintenance of the myth of foreign intervention in Russia and praise of their own past services for Russia.

And here is an irony of History: they took advantage of emaciation of Yeltsin’s power and beated their former masters. This servant of the party, who seemed demoralised and embarrassed, beated the communists and entered the Kremlin in triumph.

It looks paradoxical, but their victory is better than a victory of the new communists. KGB people were more intelligent, more experienced and less corrupted. They knew the realities of Russian present day life better.

The former President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who used to be an active opponent of Lubyanka’s heroes, failed to recommend to the country any good successor and let the KGB into the Kremlin at the end of his governing.

Primakov, Stepashin and others were the first. Putin completed the process. Now it’s too late to say about it: "KGB: today, tomorrow." This is no longer a department or service. It is a power. It’s a better power than Zyuganov, Ampilov, and Makashev. But we should not hope for the KGB. It is too naive to believe that they will manage to rule the country out of the permanent crisis. There is only one step from chekism to bolshevism. The difference is that the KGB officers have learnt to better cope with the nation by using force than the party bosses.

Let’s remember our history: Who organised the first "state" trade unions in Russia? Colonel Zubatov – an officer of the Tsar’s secret service. Who organised "legal" rock clubs, exhibitions of unacknowledged artists, printed poems of unacknowledged poets? Leningrad’s department of the KGB. Who authorised establishing of the first non-communist party in the USSR – "liberal-democratic"? The KGB of the USSR.

Now they have at their disposal all the country with all its resources. It’s not necessary to sentence political opponents and those who criticize the regime. There’s a special set of illegal actions: economic pressure, blackmailing, using of criminals, public discredit of disagreeable persons with the help of "private" mass media. At the beginning of the Soviet era its leader called for equating the pen with the bayonet. His passionate call became popular in the secret services. The army of volunteer writers in literature and journalism had been putting the blame on dissidents even before they got to Lubyanka’s torture chambers. Goebbels appreciated such people very much, calling them "ideological snipers".

How naive were some of us, believing that our "ideological snipers" managed by the KGB and the Central Committee of the Communist Party no longer existed. Look through the so called "Independent newspaper", "Izvestia" or "Russian newspaper" (I don’t mention "Pravda", "Zavtra", "Savraska" newspapers – they’ve only become more indecent) and you’ll see scribblers like Malevanny, Maslov, Kharlamov who publish materials under the instruction of their KGB teachers.

Other journalists went on further, not being obliged to the KGB anymore. Getting tired of constant promises of the authorities to establish order in the country, they welcome the returning of former KGB officers to the political arena. Alexander Minkin, a popular critic of Lubyanka in the past, was asking, when Primakov was the prime minister: "Who is afraid of the KGB Generals? Who is afraid of these brave, honest, disciplined professionals, patriots of Russia? The KGB General is better than an ICF agent. Americans were not disappointed when ex-director of the CIA George Bush was elected President. What was wrong in that?"

Well, Minkin was right about Americans. Millions of victims murdered in torture chambers were not behind Bush and his predecessors. In the USA there’s no stifling atmosphere of terror and humiliation, distrust of people inherited from previous generations. In Russia, a country without democratic traditions, without civil society, the coming to power of former Soviet chekists is a sign of the looming restoration of an authoritarian regime. This is the authoritarian state which relies upon the secret services or military when it is not able to solve problems, or when it is afraid or does not want to go further on the way to democracy.

Today Putin personifies such a system of power. But Putin was elected by the nation and he is quite popular. So the nation deserves what it has.

Despite the numerous archive materials about bolshevism’s outrage published in the post-Soviet years, its spirit is still in the Russian air. Only the political weakness of former authorities could result in the polemics of the expediency of moving Lenin’s body from the Mausoleum. There were no such polemics in Germany about Hitler’s remains. And the portraits of Himmler are not still in the offices of the German secret service officers. But after all, Hitler and his accomplices only wanted to create a great socialist (national-) Germany and to make German families happy.

Only the nostalgia about the old good Soviet times inspired today’s Kremlin authorities to reanimate Andropov’s heritage and to openly speak about reconstruction of the Dzerzhinsky monument in Lubyanka square. The same concerns the Soviet hymn and guards of honour at the Mausoleum. The symbols coincide with the deeds.

The raids of FSB officers on free thinking personalities have become commonplace in Moscow.

Ecologists are treated as "instruments manipulated by foreign secret services". Citizens who bear a resemblance to people from the Caucasus are being discriminated against and persecuted, and thousands of them are being murdered for suspicion of "international terrorism".

Unlike the KGB of the USSR that did not have to operate anonymously, the Russian chekists operate under the tax police, customs, the accounting chamber, and other bureaucratic department that have lately multiplied.

It is no secret that the KGB, more than any other organization, was infected with totalitarian bolshevist thinking. Chekism is the essence of this thinking. It was born in the secret cells of Lenin’s party, in the atmosphere of intrigues, plots, and personal squabbles that were presented as a political split. It was accompanied by hate for the past and the rich intolerance to other ideas and their bearers.

The "knight of the revolution", Felix Dzerzhinsky, symbolising communist despotism, cultivated worthy successors. His bronze monument is not yet in Lubyanka Square, but his figure and his deeds are in the hearts of many thousands of his citizens – old and young – and in the portraits in the offices of the secret services and in the curriculum of the Cheka schools.

Like ptomaine, the blood-thirsty Lenin formed a sediment in millions of Russians, poisoning and killing their memory and conscience, and the activity of the revolution’s executioner Dzerzhinsky left a scar in the hearts of his successors. No wonder reforms in Russia make no headway. The problem is not only the lack of political will but the lack of moral imperative as well. The country won’t become a member of the civilised world no matter how vast are its mineral resources and nuclear arsenal, until it cleans itself from bolshevism.

It would be naive to say that since the cold war ended, foreign secret services are not interested in Russia any more. But their goals have changed greatly. Nobody is going to attack, weaken or divide Russia. On the contrary, the West is worried about the political instability, uncontrollability, and criminality of Russia that can plunge not only Russia but other countries into the abyss of chaos and war.

Today thieves and fools endanger Russia, but not NATO and spies. Perhaps the former are more widespread now than in Soviet times. But under the conditions of economic failures and demoralisation of the population, their chances to long govern the country are higher than ever before.

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Mr. Kalugin is a former KGB general

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