Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

On December 8 Kryuchkov summoned two key aides to his fourth-floor office in the Lubyanka, one floor up from the office previously occupied by Andropov. Citing a request from Gorbachev, he instructed them to prepare a memorandum on measures to “stabilize” the situation in the country, along with the draft declaration on a state of emergency that could be submitted to the Supreme Soviet. 5Three days later the KGB chairman went on television to claim that “destructive elements,” funded and supported from abroad, were attempting to “shatter our society and government and destroy Soviet rule.” Such paranoid talk had not been heard in public from a Kremlin leader since the onset of perestroika.

If there were any doubts about Kryuchkov’s conviction that a strong-arm solution was necessary, they were dispelled at the winter session of the Congress of People’s Deputies. On December 22, two days after Shevardnadze had warned of “dictatorship,” the KGB chairman appeared before the congress to demand “decisive measures” to put an end to ethnic violence. The thrust of his speech was that Soviet leaders had to be ready to spill a little blood in order to save the country from an even worse fate. “Esteemed comrade deputies! Is not blood already being shed? Do we not learn almost every day, when we switch on our television sets and open our newspapers, of new human fatalities, of the deaths of innocent people, including women and children? I do not wish to frighten anyone, but the Committee for State Security is convinced that if the situation in our country continues to develop along the present lines, we will not be able to escape sociopolitical shocks that are even more serious and more grave.”

Aware that Communist Party power could not be restored through legal, democratic methods, Kryuchkov was setting out the argument for using force. His speech ran counter to Gorbachev’s repeated insistence that all problems be resolved through “exclusively political means” but was fully consistent with traditional Communist dogma. Before 1985 Soviet leaders had no compunction about using violence in order to defend “the revolution.” “Bloodshed is inevitable,” Defense Minister Ustinov had argued during a Politburo debate about the Polish crisis in April 1981. “If we fear it, then we will give up position after position. All the gains of socialism could be put at risk.” 6

As Lenin liked to say, “A revolution is only worth something if it knows how to defend itself.”

SINCE THE EARLY DAYS of the revolution Soviet power had rested on the Communist Party, the Red Army, and the security organs. Of these three pillars, only the “organs” had remained relatively unscathed after five tumultuous years of perestroika.

The party had been forced to give up its monopoly of political power, guaranteed under Article VI of the Soviet Constitution. Dispirited by the revelations of Stalinist atrocities, rank-and-file Communists were deserting the party. The once-monolithic ruling elite had lost its cohesiveness, following the defection of reformers like Yeltsin. The army too was a shadow of its former self. Its morale had been shaken by the debacle of Afghanistan, massive draft evasion, and a series of ethnic wars around the periphery of the Soviet Union. Decimated by budget cuts, it was now an army in retreat, more concerned with finding housing for officers thrown out of Poland and East Germany than fending off military threats from outside.

By contrast, the KGB had managed to survive, more or less intact, as the “shield and sword” of the Soviet state. The “organs” had made token gestures to glasnost, such as appointing a press officer and providing information about the fate of the victims of Stalin’s terror. The infamous Fifth Directorate, charged by Andropov with crushing the dissident movement, had been renamed the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitution. The public relations campaign to show a kinder, gentler face of the secret police reached its apogee earlier in 1990 with the appointment of a “Miss KGB.” Little had changed, however, in the way the committee went about its business. Its responsibilities ranged from watching over Soviet borders to guarding the Politburo, from hunting down economic “saboteurs” to chasing foreign spies, from handling government communications to spreading disinformation. The KGB continued to keep tabs on suspected dissidents and use illegal wiretaps. It was later revealed that its vast network of informers included the prime minister of Lithuania and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The budget and manpower of the KGB remained at preperestroika levels. To this day nobody knows precisely how many people worked for the “organs.” According to Kryuchkov’s successor, Vadim Bakatin, the KGB had 480,000 full-time employees in September 1991, a figure challenged by some independent experts as being too low. 7The KGB payroll included some 12,000 foreign intelligence workers, 90,000 agents in provincial cities, 220,000 border guards, and several divisions of spetsnaz troops. These “special assignment” troops included the Alpha Group that had stormed the presidential palace in Kabul in December 1979. During the fall of 1990 Kryuchkov persuaded Gorbachev to transfer to the KGB several regular army units, including the Vitebsk Paratroopers Division, and two motorized rifle divisions. 8

Like his predecessors, Kryuchkov placed great importance on the revolutionary traditions of the KGB, inherited from Lenin’s Cheka and Stalin’s NKVD. A four-story monument to the founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, stood outside the Lubyanka. The spirit of “Iron Feliks” seemed to permeate the entire organization. KGB officers referred to themselves proudly as Chekists, graduated from the Dzerzhinsky Academy, and venerated the memory of the father of the Red Terror. Although some junior officers were infected by the democratic spirit of perestroika, ideological vigilance remained the order of the day at the senior levels of the KGB. When Bakatin was given the task of dismantling the KGB in the wake of the failed coup of August 1991, he was amazed by the low quality of the committee’s analytical work and the general lack of professionalism. The obsession with ideology was even apparent in the nuclear bomb shelter that had been prepared for the commander in chief, where the only books on the shelves were the complete works of Lenin.

“It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic,” Bakatin commented. “The Communist core of the KGB had decided that this was what the head of state really needed at such a critical moment.” 9

The dangers of relying on such a powerful organization with such a blinkered view of the world were apparent to many of Gorbachev’s liberal advisers. But he brushed their fears aside. He had every confidence in the loyalty of the KGB. 10He frequently boasted about how well informed he was about everything that was happening in the Soviet Union. Far from considering the KGB a potential threat to perestroika, he regarded it as an essential ally. At a time of general political upheaval the “organs” were a pillar of political stability, a counterweight to the forces arrayed behind Yeltsin. Like other Kremlin leaders, particularly those who had spent most of their careers in the provinces, Gorbachev had great respect for the supposed omniscience of the KGB. The thick red dossiers, with their “eyes only” reports for the general secretary, were part of the mystique of Kremlin power.

Gorbachev knew that Kryuchkov and the representatives of the “power structures” were trying to push him into declaring a state of emergency. He struck a kind of Faustian bargain with “the organs.” He would use them to defeat Yeltsin and then shake himself free. As he later explained, he was trying to “outmaneuver” both the conservatives and the democrats.