#16
Moscow News
January 1-7, 2003
Secret Police Opening Up?
By Sergei Sossinsky

Having frequently written about Christmas and New Year's in rural Russia, this time I decided to devote the last issue of the year to a subject remote from the festive spirit. I was prompted to tackle this sensitive issue by a recent interview in Kostromskiye vedomosti. The person interviewed was none other than Kostroma Region FSB chief General Vladimir Smirnov. For those readers who remain in blissful ignorance, the FSB is what they now call the KGB; in other words, the secret police.

I lived for over 30 years under the Soviet KGB. Since my family and I had returned from the West and had many foreign and emigre friends, the KGB established close surveillance over us, including wiretapping and agents sitting under our windows when we had visitors "from the West". There has always been a myth about the amazing competence of the Soviet secret police. This is so much rubbish. The KGB was incredibly incompetent, albeit all-powerful. I have often wondered how much money they must have spent surveilling me and my family with absolutely no results, since we, our friends and relatives were not spies. The wages of agents and informers, expensive wiretapping equipment from the West, analysis of data obtained and God knows what else.

Yet there was always something bordering on the comic about KGB activities, although for many contacts with this organization led to tragic outcomes. I had a friend, or rather I thought he was my friend, but actually he was a KGB informer, whose name was Vladimir Lakeyev (Russian for "lackey"). Once, when I was out of town on my father's birthday, Lakeyev arrived at my father's house without an invitation and kindly offered to play the role of... lackey! He ushered people in and announced their names. Thus, he obtained a complete list of the guests. As I was then studying the Czarist secret police, I knew that this was a favorite method of exposing subversive groups, since it was assumed that only the closest friends came to one's birthday party. So the KGB continued using methods invented a hundred years before. What sophisticated and brilliant methods, too! Alas, it was all useless. Meanwhile, dissident writers' manuscripts were being successfully smuggled to the West and published abroad.

Since the collapse of the Soviet regime, Russian governments have repeatedly renamed the KGB, but this does not help. Change has been slow in coming to the security services. Indeed, even the interview in Kostromskiye vedomisti was published on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the setting up of the Cheka on December 20, 1917. The Extraordinary Commission has turned out to be the least extraordinary thing in the Soviet Union and has even outlasted the Soviet regime.

In fact, at the turn of the 1990s, in this column I put forward the hypothesis that perestroika was the brainchild of the KGB. In the last decade, this idea has been supported by extensive evidence.

The only thing that the KGB did not want to happen was the appearance of a free press, but here things kind of got out of control, although the FSB, I am sure, has not given up yet.

For the FSB, continuity remains the order of the day. General Smirnov insisted in the interview that he was not an FSB officer but a Chekist. Which, logically speaking, means that he shares the blame for all of that organization's crimes in the previous 85 years. Suffice it to say that no other security organization in the world has even aproached the scale of murders committed by the Soviet services.

There are three frightening things about the FSB today, and all of them have come down to us from Soviet times. The first is the total secrecy in which the FSB's activities (or inaction) are shrouded. The second is the FSB's all-pervasive nature. General Smirnov mentioned that his activities range from monitoring sewage systems to recovering stolen gold. But the most frightening of all is the mentality of the "Chekists" that lives on in the organization. In the interview General Smirnov prohibited the journalists from publishing the names of any of his subordinates and bragged that they would never be able to find out the license numbers of the cars used by his officers for operations. It turned out, however, that one of the cars owned by the Kostroma FSB had the number 007 on its plates.

Of course, the journalists were unable to publish any data concerning personnel numbers etc. However, they did sneak in a reference to the fact that the central office had a staff of less than 300. According to my own sources, there are at least 1,500 FSB officers in Kostroma Region, and most of them don't know what to do. In fact, one of its chief fields of operations used to be infiltration of student groups. I would guess that this focus is due to a superficial study of the revolutionary movement in Czarist Russia, which was mostly linked to student radicalism.

Naturally, General Smirnov was pleased with the performance of his FSB branch last year. He referred to several cases the FSB had allegedly investigated, but his words were hardly convincing, since nothing had been heard about these cases from other sources.

As to mentality, it was clearly demonstrated in the General's following words regarding Chekists: "It is a special comradeship of people knowing about each other that they have devoted their best years to protecting the Motherland's security. And it was for that reason that these years were in fact the best." And finally, he said: "Once a Chekist always a Chekist; Chekists cannot be former or corrupt."

Another thing that worried me was that both of General Smirnov's daughters had gone into law. This kind of nepotism is typical of the sphere of law in Russia, while this is the last area where nepotism can be tolerated.

I must say that the photograph of General Smirnov published in the newspaper did not leave me with that warm and fuzzy feeling inside, but then, why should an FSB officer look friendly? Hopefully, I won't need to baptize children with him, as Russians say.

I don't want to end this piece on a pessimistic note, though. It cannot be denied that an interview of a high-ranking FSB regional officer has been published. It is not very much, but it represents immense progress compared to Soviet times, when even mentioning the KGB was regarded as treason.

BACK TO THE TOP    #238 CONTENTS