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The Secret History of the KGB
Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 by J. Michael Waller
Insight reveals shocking details of the inner workings of Moscow's spy services as reported in a top-secret internal KGB history. Here are official admissions that confirm the warnings of Cold War anticommunists.
Last Dec. 20, the annual State Security Workers Day in Russia, internal security chief Vladimir Putin -- now prime minister -- gave a nationally televised address celebrating the 82nd anniversary of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police that preceded the KGB. He warned that Western intelligence services had intensified their activity against Russia, declared that his job was to "prevent foreign services' subversive acts" and praised modern "Chekists" as the heirs to a great legacy. Then he hosted a gala at the Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the former KGB, paying homage to Cheka founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky.
Putin's salute to the Cheka legacy was a carefully crafted image-builder, casting the security and intelligence services in heroic, larger-than-life terms. But in the context of how the secret police and its political godfathers long had viewed the agency, it was more of the same. The KGB spent many decades refining its craft and authority.
Now, for the first time in print, Insight can reveal details of the inner workings of Moscow's intelligence services that not even the ebullient Putin is likely to acknowledge. These revelations come from a top-secret, serial-numbered copy of the KGB's internal history of itself obtained by this magazine.
This secret document was produced by the KGB for its own internal use. It is an eye-opening and riveting account that confirms much of what Western intelligence long has suspected about the KGB and how it has built the Chekist cult in the minds of every officer in a corps feared and hated worldwide.
Dating to the late Soviet period when KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov was putting his personal stamp on the organization, the secret history was produced for the F.E. Dzerzhinsky Red Banner KGB Higher School to train officers and instruct KGB operational units.
Officially called the History of Soviet State Security Organs, the internal document was produced in time for the Cheka's 60th anniversary in 1977. One of its major themes was that the modern state-security apparatus was the lineal descendant of the Bolshevist Cheka and that the ruthless Cheka embodied the highest ideals and aspirations of the modern state-security officer. Former Russian security and intelligence officers tell Insight that new recruits continue to undergo training that emphasizes that spirit.
The official objective was "to educate KGB cadres in revolutionary, combat and Chekist traditions, in a spirit of limitless devotion to matters of the Communist Party of the socialist Motherland, in abiding faith in the creativity of communism, and love for the difficult but noble and honorable Chekist profession." This sort of rhetoric is familiar to those who have fought and studied the KGB, but the text is sensational because it confirms and bolsters the harshest critics of Moscow's secret police -- from Robert Conquest to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. For top Russian leaders such as Putin who view the Cheka as the spirit of their devotion to terror, the secret history of the KGB remains relevant to the continuing controversy about political and economic reform in Russia. And it should remind the West to remain wary.
Insight's copy of the secret textbook was acquired from a KGB office in a former Soviet republic, and this is the first time its contents have been made public outside of KGB circles. Though littered with Marxist-Leninist jargon, the volume is methodical and legalistic in revealing the many structural and functional changes Moscow's secret police have undergone since 1917. Parts are shocking in their cold description of the methods and psychology of an organization that by comparison makes the Nazi Gestapo seem clumsy.
Summary executions. "Liquidation" of entire classes of people. Mass deportations. Concentration camps. According to the KGB secret history, these were innovations not of Heinrich Himmler's SS during Hitler's regime but of Dzerzhinsky and his Cheka early in the Soviet regime. ("For the purposes of general supervision and repression the Gestapo modeled itself closely on the Soviet secret police," historian Edward Crankshaw observed in his 1956 study of the Nazi terror organization. Himmler, according to Crankshaw, "had at his command an extremely able police officer, Heinrich Muller ... a close and devoted student of Soviet methods. Muller was impressed by the efficiency of the internal spy system which had been perfected by the Soviet government, the effect of which, ideally, was to isolate the individual by making it impossible for anybody to trust anybody else. He set to work to reproduce this system in Germany by more economical means.")
What strikes the reader is not just the KGB's acknowledgment and pride that the Cheka invented the modern concentration camp or liquidated millions of Soviet citizens simply because of their social or economic status, but how cavalierly and casually -- usually in passing and never with criticism -- the KGB treated the subject in its training manual.
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