The Secret History of the KGB

The secret history cites a September 1918 decree calling mass terror "a direct necessity." Bolshevik party leaders granted the Cheka emergency powers to isolate entire classes of people, called "class enemies," and round them up in "concentration camps." The book makes casual reference to the systematic campaign to steal private property under the guise of fighting "speculation" and recounts an example of two brothers who had hidden stock certificates and a supply of textiles. They and their stockbroker "were shot on 31 May 1918."

The narrative constitutes the KGB's admission that excesses were not aberrations of the Stalin period as commonly portrayed but were calculated, systematic campaigns of mass terror and extermination ordered by Lenin himself and sanctioned by the entire Communist Party leadership. It repeatedly and without a hint of criticism uses terms such as "liquidation" of opponents and "merciless" campaigns against them.

Even the Stalin era is whitewashed -- the sole exception being the crippling effects his paranoia had on the state-security machinery itself. The foreword calls the Stalin years "the period of peaceful socialist construction"; the chapter covering the time of the Great Purge (the term is not used) is the "Victory of Socialism." With a reorganization in 1934, the security apparatus was reoriented toward fighting "external enemies," and it created a special section to deport individuals, force them into internal exile where they could be isolated and watched or send them to "corrective labor camps" -- the KGB's euphemism for the old Soviet acronym GULAG made famous by Solzhenitsyn.

The history portrays the Chekists as heroes fighting Nazi subversion inside the Soviet Union, with plenty of examples of breaking up Nazi spy rings and sabotage networks inside German companies (some with familiar names such as Siemens and Rheinmetall) working with the Soviet defense industry. It manages to avoid noting that the Soviets and the Nazis secretly were collaborating on joint military projects at the time.

The secret history is especially useful for its postmortem on the scope of damage Stalin inflicted even on the sophisticated political-police machinery honed by Dzerzhinsky. Stalin's series of secret-police chiefs Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenty Beria, according to the history, were "criminals" who "inflicted irreparable harm on Chekist cadres," destroying a generation of highly trained officers who emerged from the conspiratorial world of the Bolshevik underground and wreaking wholesale destruction of carefully built internal-informant networks.

How the KGB emerged after the late 1950s is recounted in great detail, as the services were completely revamped and given their now-familiar name. The undercover-agent apparatus was improved to make it "smaller in size but higher in quality." Planning for the running of agents, and the methods of running them at home and abroad were improved. We learn the KGB's version of the 1961 discovery and arrest of Col. Oleg Penkovskiy, a GRU, or military-intelligence, officer who defected to the West while in place and was one of the United States' most important spies abroad. Penkovskiy, according to the history, aroused suspicion during a KGB operation against a Canadian trade adviser and during overt monitoring of the wife of an intelligence officer at the British Embassy in Moscow. The KGB secretly arrested him in 1962 and he later was shot.