Customer Reviews

The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia-Past, Present, and Future

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Reviewed by NIGEL CLIVE in International Relations, Volume XIII, No 2, August 1996 -

Yevgenia Albats, a journalist on Moscow News and Isvestia, has written a convincing analysis of the almost unbroken continuity of the political police from Lenin's Cheka to the present-day Chekists, as she rightly calls them, who ostensibly serve the president, but whose loyalty is in fact confined to their own leaders. Her courage as an intrepid critic of the KGB is shown in her many interviews with both the victims and torturers and with several former KGB leading figures, notably Oleg Kalugin who told her: `There is no area of our lives, from religion to sports, where the Committee does not pursue some interest of its own'. Citizens' private lives have always been the KGB's main target. Penetration of the Orthodox Church started with the Cheka and continued without a break for the next seventy years. There was similar penetration of Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Seventh day Adventists. The formal structure of the `State within a State' has only been the tip of the iceberg. `Reliable' people, secret helpers, directors of scientific research institutes and deans of academic institutions make up the countless number of shadow workers. Albats has tracked down and interrogated such notorious executioners as Alexander Khvat and exposed such specialists in torture as Professor Vladimir Boyarsky, the NKVD's investigator turned professor in the field of mining science and technology.
During the perestroika years, people who were closely connected with the KGB advanced to the highest offices in the country and the KGB increased its power in the Army. By 1985, the KGB had successfully grafted itself on to the party-state apparat. So when the KGB, the communist party and the military industrial complex cooked up the plan for perestroika, the KGB was in a prime position to run the show and man the engine for reform. Albats shows how Gorbachev suited the group within the oligarchy who were capable of seeing how close the Soviet Union was to economic collapse. That meant he suited the KGB as well. This was how perestroika opened the way for the KGB to advance toward the heart of power. In the chapter headed `Realities of the Glasnost Era', she reveals how the KGB `with the same methods, the same hands, the same brains and the same mentality' did not transform itself under the facade of perestroika. Top secret memoranda from the KGB's Kryuchkov to Gorbachev in March 1989 show, for instance, how aid was given to the opposition parties in the Sri Lankan election. There is also documentation illustrating the better known fact that the KGB had infiltrated the Popular Fronts that were leading national liberation movements. In the spring of 1991, when Yeltsin was running for president, KGB directors sent their officers a coded telegram ordering them to vote against Yeltsin. The KGB also had a source close to Gorbachev. Indeed the tragic paradox of perestroika was that the democrats removed the communist party from the political arena before they were ready to step in and take over. Unwittingly, they had disrupted the balance of power in favour of the KGB, thereby allowing it in December 1990 to declare publicly through its chairman Kryuchkov that the real power in the country was vested in the political police. In April 1991, Gorbachev was warned that a coup d'état was being prepared from the right, but he took no notice.
From the start of the August 1991 coup, Albats kept a detailed diary. She was a member of the subsequent State Commission to Investigate the Activity of the KGB during the coup, which found that the KGB plotters had underestimated the mistrust they evoked in the public and especially within their own institutions. A few months later she was expelled for insubordination, because she called for the KGB's end and for a statement of the irreconcilability of true democracy with a political police. The key finding of the Commission has, however, shown that the second echelon of power had stood aside. The shadow cabinets of the KGB, the military industrial complex, the Army, the Party and the provincial authorities had not supported the coup. Thereafter, there was widespread destruction of KGB documents and since August 1991 the KGB has changed its name several times without changing its basic functions. When Bakatin took over the post-coup KGB, his orders were not obeyed and he was soon replaced by Ivanenko to head the newly named Federal Security Agency. In December 1991, Yeltsin imposed his friend the Interior Minister Barannikov who stopped the dismantling of the KGB, but who soon gave way to academician Primakov whose `transformation' of the KGB turned out to be mostly cosmetic. Original functions have been retained under new names, indicating that Yeltsin could not imagine a government structure in which the KGB was absent. By the autumn of 1992, the KGB was regaining its strength. The military industrial complex, which was one of the moving forces behind the August 1991 coup, had hardly been touched by personnel changes. Furthermore, the KGB is the only institution from the previous regime to have preserved horizontal ties with the now autonomous republics of the former Soviet Union. It also has agents in parliament and the executive branch, and once again has a monopoly of information. In Albat's interview in early February 1994 with Nikolai Golushko, the head of the federal Counterintelligence Service, it had become clear that the KGB in its new incarnation had lost virtually none of its former functions. It still bugs whatever government lines it chooses and still monitors every area that affects state interests. There is no public oversight and its budget is kept secret. At the end of February 1994, Golushko was forced to step down after he refused to obey Yeltsin's request that he bar the parliament from granting amnesty to the coup plotters and rebels. His successor Sergei Stepashin did not seem to Albats to reduce the KGB's remarkable capacity for regeneration and revival.
NIGEL CLIVE

This book is an excellent expose of the terrors and tortures of the Russian KGB. One marvels at their tenacity, brutality, and animal-like ruthlessness in hunting down their prey. Prey that included innocent and harmless religious groups, student groups, and just about anyone who disagreed with the Communist Ideology. America could learn much from the terrible living history of Russia. Americans have adopted similar tactics in dealing with those who disagree with the politically correct movements of our day. These are scary times we live in, and Russia should be a lesson to us all.

The State Within a State is an extremeley interesting book with a credible thesis (the KGB never really went away). I have problems with the author's obvious hatred of the Russian Revolution and Stalin and the way she claims there is an unbroken chain of horror going all the way back to 1917. Obviously things are better today- hence her book! She says 66.7 million people died under "Chekist" rule since the Russian Revolution-and then cites the Guiness Book of Records as her source!? No one could ever prove such a figure, I think its one of things thats repeated 'til it becomes fact. I also find the author's lack of knowledge about our own CIA kind of disheartening. This fine organization has spread as much death and terror in the Third World (Indonesia, Guatemala,Chile, Argentina, Brazil etc. etc. ) as the KGB ever did anywhere, yet she seems to make them out to be benevolent compared to the KGB (which if you read this book are responsible for everything wrong with the world today). After reading this book I still don't understand why she thinks the KGB or its incarnations are as bad today as they were at the height of the Terror in 1937. Its not really explained in the book. I still am not convinced that the KGB was the NKVD, and definitely convinced that either was the SS. Research I have done casually has never come up with hard, convincing figures for a Nazi style genocide in the USSR, and this anecdotal, unconvincing book didn't change my historical views.