Gloom boxes: Gorby's Pugo Stick
Kaza, Juris
GORBY'S PUGO STICK he appointment of Boris Pugo, chief of the KGB in Latvia in the early 1980s, as the Soviet Union's minister of interior is, as Latvians say, a majiens ar mietu—a gesture with a...
...Some fear it points to a crackdown on the Baltic and on democratic movements in the Soviet Union...
...The media were tipped off after army officials visited the personnel offices of companies employing "draft-dodgers," such as Riga's public transportation authority and the large Gailezers Hospital...
...The screws are going to be tightened, and we even believe that the central governing board of the LPF may cease to function...
...In Latvia, some 4,500 alternative servicemen and 270 deserters went into hiding after warnings were broadcast on local radio and television...
...They will let us keep the Supreme Council [Latvia's parliament], but there will be a governor who can veto anything...
...This was never brought up at my trial, but the KGB investigators shouted at me that for this, in other times, I would have been put against a wall and shot...
...I think it will be with a semblance of democracy...
...Pugo did not pay lip service to Gorbachev's policies, but actually seems to have tried to implement them," Radio Free Europe analyst Dzintra Bungs wrote in a recent profile, but she describes Pugo's actions against dissidents under Yuri Andropov's regime as "merciless...
...In the summer of 1988, Pugo was heard speaking accented but passable Latvian on television...
...But "there could be trouble...
...Pugo is a Russian-born ethnic Latvian...
...s first secretary of the Latvian Communist party between 1984 and 1988, Pugo purged over a hundred party officials, some for alleged corruption and others for bureaucratic redundancy...
...were tried and sentenced in 1983, one of the worst years of repression in Latvia since the death of Stalin...
...He replaced [former USSR Interior Minister Vadim] Bakatin because Bakatin was too liberal...
...I personally believe that direct presidential rule will be imposed...
...We've instructed our local chapters to try and work autonomously then, to organize disobedience and resistance...
...It is certainly better to commit atrocities with a Latvian...
...Eichmann, too, didn't do anything on his own...
...A few days later, Soviet soldiers and uniformed and plain-clothes police started an unsuccessful roundup of "draft evaders"—Latvian and Lithuanian youths doing alternative service under local law...
...To the extent we had any contact, I saw him as a contradictory personality," he says...
...Pugo personally signed my arrest order," Rozkalns recalls...
...Gdlyan's investigation, which started in Uzbekistan, was uncovering more and more leads to the Politburo...
...Pugo's record is that of a bad cop...
...After working behind the scenes of Latvia's first mass demonstrations in the summer of 1987, Rozkalns, finding his family threatened, emigrated to Germany in the fall...
...They discovered that the packing documents accompanying the then-plentiful shipments of fruit and vegetables to Riga had been consistently forged...
...According to Eduard Berklays, formerly a high official in the Latvian Communist party, "The Soviets have always done their dirty work with non-Russians...
...Pugo is a KGB man," said a spokesman for the Latvian Popular Front (LPF), a large pro-independence movement which holds the majority in Latvia's parliament...
...And I was questioned extensively about Tomsons, my contacts with the vegetable warehouses, and so on...
...He was trying, on one hand, to preserve the existing regime, but he understood that forces for change were ripening, and these could not be stopped with a club, but had to be understood...
...And he followed orders...
...The purge of Berk-lays and many of his fellow "nationalists" was supervised by Arvids Pelse, who was a second father to Boris Pugo after Karlis Pugo died in the 1950s...
...As city electricians, Tomsons and Rozkalns had "perfect papers," which allowed them to enter almost any premises in Riga containing major electrical equipment...
...For Berklays, who has repudiated Communism and is now a leader of the Latvian National Independence Movement, Pugo's appointment is a signal that a strike against the Baltic independence struggles is imminent...
...The question is whether it will be done with or without a semblance of democracy...
...Shipments would be "upgraded" one or two notches on the quality and price scale and sold, but then accounted for according to their real papers, with the gang skimming the excess...
...ugo's reign with the KGB is still 1 fresh in the minds of his victims, among them Janis Rozkalns, a religious and political activist imprisoned from 1983 to 1987...
...the Baits and democratic movements elsewhere in the Soviet Union have no choice but to prepare for the worst...
...I see the positive direction in him, rather than what his present position may mean," Hanbergs says...
...I hope Pugo acts as a restraining influence on him...
...Although he was formally convicted of "spreading religious ideas" and leading the National Independence Movement, Rozkalns believes that his real crime was helping uncover a major scam in Riga's fruit and vegetable markets protected by Pugo and the KGB...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991...
...Back-up leaderships, underground alternatives, and foreign representatives have been selected for the Baltic governments and popular movements in the event that Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are cut off from the outside world...
...Nothing good can be expected of the Cheka...
...He was witnessing an earlier stage of the incredible corruption of the food distribution system that is blamed by some for present-day near-famine food shortages...
...It was unbelievable when he came to us at the Press House and it went so far that we could sit down at a roundtable discussion with him...
...Gromov is a man with lots of experience in making war against civilians...
...This number represents more than half the originally intended 1990 call-up, but Anita Stankevica, a spokesman for the anti-draft Latvian Women's League, said the draft boards in Latvia had cut their official quotas to make the low turnout seem less of a disaster...
...Some of the architects of the Gulag were Latvians swept along with the Russian Revolution and carried to their deaths in the purges of 1937, the year of Pugo's birth...
...The raids are the first signal that Pugo, hand in hand with army leadership, is cracking down...
...He was also unconventional in driving his own car, being seen in the public places, at ordinary shops and the like...
...Yet Eriks Hanbergs, a writer and editor at Neatkariga Cina ("The Independent Struggle"), a newspaper formed after the split of the Latvian Communist party last year, prefers to see Pugo as a pragmatist...
...His basic profession is that of a Chekist," says Berklays, who in 1959 was thrown out of a "national Communist" Latvian government by Moscow...
...As First Secretary, he intuitively tried to break the mold...
...The Latvian Communist party and KGB redoubled their efforts to suppress the matter when it became obvious that it had leaked to the Western press and human-rights organizations...
...At least six other activists Juris Kaza is an American journalist based in Stockholm...
...Pelse, an ardent Russifier and orthodox Marxist who banned Latvia's traditional midsummer revelry on the grounds it was "pagan," earned the nickname Dzeltena Nave, "The Yellow Death...
...My guess is that we went up against a gang of pure, unadulterated thieves protected by Pugo...
...Janis Trapans, another RFE analyst and former head of the Latvian Service, by Juris Kaza adds somberly: "When he had to destroy the relatively small opposition, he did it in a week...
...Latvia's democratic movements are ready—they have repeatedly stated that all efforts to impose presidential rule or martial law will be forcefully resisted...
...Pugo's father, Karlis, was one of the few survivors of a time when survival resulted, as one analyst puts it, "only from chance or treachery...
...The new official Latvian newspaper Diena ("The Day") recently mentioned that Pugo, in his most recent job as head of the Communist party control commission, was given the task of "justifying" the termination of a major corruption investigation launched by Armenian prosecutor Telman Gdlyan...
...The journalist also credits Pugo with tolerating the venting of radical views at a June 1988 plenum of Latvia's "creative associations"—writers, actors, artists, architects, filmmakers, and the like—at which political commentator Mavriks Vulfsons made the then-outrageous remark that Latvia could be considered an occupied country...
...Newly appointed Deputy Interior Minister Boris] Gromov gives me the shivers...
...GORBY'S PUGO STICK he appointment of Boris Pugo, chief of the KGB in Latvia in the early 1980s, as the Soviet Union's minister of interior is, as Latvians say, a majiens ar mietu—a gesture with a big stick...
...In the early 1980s, Rozkalns helped Peteris Tomsons, a fellow worker in the Riga Electrical Grid and a Communist party member assigned to an anti-corruption auditing unit, to disseminate information abroad about a widespread skimming operation that was netting tens of thousands of rubles daily for its bosses...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
