KGB: Death and Rebirth. - book reviews

National Review, August 1, 1994 by Arnold Beichman

By Martin Ebon (Praeger, 227 pp., $24.95)

THIS BOOK's title tells all. Mr. Ebon, a longtime student of the KGB and its forerunners, scoffs at the idea that the onetime Soviet secret police is dead: "The KGB by any other name will be the KGB." President Yeltsin fired four hundred KGB generals after the attempted coup of August 19, 1991. He then passed a law subordinating to himself the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the new name for the KGB. A fat lot of good it will do him, says Mr. Ebon. The most formidable problem facing policy-makers, whether President Clinton or President Yeltsin, is how as consumers of intelligence they can avoid becoming prisoners of the intelligence purveyors. Stalin solved that problem by executing his secret-police chiefs. Mikhail Gorbachev couldn't solve it, nor has Mr. Yeltsin. Mr. Ebon's volume is a highly detailed story of the seemingly irrepressible role the KGB still plays not only in the Russian Federation but in the onetime Soviet republics, each of which wants its own KGB. In a democratizing Russia, the secret police may not have the power it once had but it still has plenty.