The Secret History of the KGB

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 | by J. Michael Waller

The secret 400-page official history also should put an end to academic debate about whether the Soviet secret services set up the political police systems in communist regimes around the world (the secret report says it all started with the Mongolian People's Republic in the 1920s), creating the internal-security organs exploiting the international brigades in 1930s Spain and aiding "national liberation movements" in the Third World. The KGB takes credit, again in passing, for all of them.

The history fails to recognize that the Russian people and others under Soviet control might have viewed the Bolsheviks as oppressors -- emphasizing throughout the text that opposition to the regime was the result of foreign plots. "The governments of the imperialist states -- England, France and the USA -- and their intelligence services were the guiding force in the organization of subversive activity against the Soviet state" in its early years, according to the secret history. Never mind that the United States had no meaningful foreign intelligence service in the early Soviet period.

Even so, the historical record of the former Soviet Union is placed in clearer context. What triggered the formation of the secret police, the document says, was not an armed insurrection or series of terrorist attacks against Bolshevik rule but a nonviolent strike by government workers. The Cheka's founding decree was a direct response to what the history calls "counterrevolutionary speeches" by "upper-level bureaucrats." Thus, on Dec. 20, 1917, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, known by its Russian initials VChK, or Cheka, was created by decree and given its first task: "pursuit and liquidation" of the opposition.

"The struggle with these elements," according to a Communist Party Central Committee diktat quoted in the secret history, "must be conducted most decisively, energetically and mercilessly, stopping at nothing. Judicial institutions of the Soviet republic cannot remedy this problem. The necessity of a special organ of merciless execution has been recognized by our entire party, from top to bottom. Our party has entrusted this task to the VChK."

By 1918, the Cheka's full name was expanded along with its functions; it now was known as the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle Against Counter-Revolution, Speculation, and Crimes in the Government Bureaucracy. This process continued through a series of name changes.

Even after 60 years, the successor KGB was fixated on the need to murder citizens who led nonviolent resistance to the Bolshevik successor regimes and to infiltrate and disrupt every possible avenue of non-Bolshevik expression. This was necessary, according to the history, "to defend the Soviet state from attacks of the internal and external counterrevolutions."

The Cheka had opponents "shot at the scene of their crimes." Its methods, according to one of its early communiques, called for "merciless destruction" of the government's critics and foes. The secret police quickly spread through Russia's regions, then within the rail- and water-transport systems and inside the Red Army itself. The KGB text decries attempts by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, a minority party in the early Soviet government, to limit the Cheka's powers, have it operate through decentralized structures and subordinate itself to civil control. Soon afterward, according to the history, the entire Cheka was purged of non-Communists, and criticisms of Cheka excesses, even if true, were banned from the party-controlled press.