KGB

...Such a vast and necessarily shadowy subject cannot be treated exhaustively in a single volume, even one of over 450 pages, but Barron has done an excellent job of gathering information on the history of the Soviet secret police, its organizational structure, the methods it utilizes within the Soviet Union itself to maintain the Communist leadership's control over the Soviet people, and most especially its clandestine offensive against the outside world...

...Barron is not completely successful in systematizing the information he has gathered: it remains fragmentary at times, especially when he describes the careers of particular Soviet agents...

...That offensive is conducted on various levels: by working through secret police of "fraternal" Communist countries who can occasionally perform missions more easily than Soviet agents, by disseminating "disinformation" and disorienting foreign opponents, by murdering prominent anti-Communist figures abroad with highly sophisticated devices, by gathering extensive military and political intelligence, by subverting host countries through the use of "diplomatic personnel" who are really KGB agents (the author comments that China presents an "exceedingly difficult target" for Soviet subversion, which is logical since the Chinese have surpassed their Soviet tutors in many aspects of state security...

...Nothing else but that...

...Sometimes the disproportion becomes ludicrous: in 1971 Mexico needed five diplomats to conduct its business in Moscow, but the Soviet Union had sixty accredited to Mexico City...

...In addition to the logistic support of the Reader's Digest's worldwide research facilities, Barron had a knowledge of Russian, some background in intelligence work, and—most importantly—a thorough comprehension of the importance of a secret police system for Communist regimes generally...

...Instead, the West has deluded itself about the Soviet system for nearly sixty years, Barron asks us to see things clearly, and helps us in that task...

...Barron's book itself helps bring the entire subject into the light of day: he tells the world of the KGB's guilt without glossing over its crimes, for, unlike State Department adepts, he is not paralyzed by fear of "embarrassing" the Soviet government...

...In his final chapter Barron offers a number of cogent suggestions for combating the KGB abroad, all of which finally reduce to a variant of the rule "Let us not submit...

...Barron furnishes a thirty-five page list of such individuals as an appendix to his book...

...The KGB is no incidental excrescence on the Soviet body politic: it is central to its being...

...The advocates of silence often advance numerous sophisticated and superficially convincing reasons for maintaining silence on the outrages of the Soviet secret police, but they are all meretricious...

...In the 1780s a Russian aristocrat and intellectual wrote a utopian novel (one of the few in the history of Russian literature) in which he described a model society on a distant island in whichreligion and the observation of religious rites were the responsibility of the police...

...Then too, Barron recommends, Western governments should prosecute any KGB agents they uncover who are not protected by diplomatic immunity, and expel those who are covered by such immunity...

...And Dzerzhinsky was no monster from whom the regime now recoils in horror...

...they should in addition refuse to accept as a "diplomat" any individual already identified as such an agent...

...In The Gulag Archipelago, that remarkable effort at generalization on the domestic system which the KGB maintains within the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn points out in his very first chapter (onthe arrest) that the task of the Soviet security police is made easier by the fact that their victims almost never resist, take evasive action, or even protest...

...On the contrary, an elaborate Moscow subway station is named in his honor, and Nikita Khrushchev during his premiership ordered a monument erected to him outside the Lyubyanka prison...

...Barron quotes Lenin as saying in 1920 that "the scientific concept of [utopian] dictatorship means neither more nor less than unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, nor restrained by any laws or any absolute rules...

...these elements are at the core of the entire Soviet state system...

...Occasional Soviet espionage failures demonstrate that Western counterintelligence can sometimes be defensively brilliant, but a good offensive is hard to block all the time, and the Soviets make frequent gains in this concealed warfare...

...One sometimes has to deal with killers, but one adopts quite a different approach to them than to ordinary men with the customary moral scruples...

...This slight disjointedness does not, however, detract overmuch from the book's interest...

...The main thing, however, as he says, is to comprehend the nature of the KGB and its place in the Soviet system...

...Some of the espionage accounts read like spy stories, which they are, and they supply much of the book's narrative interest...

...The power of the secret police could be whittled .down immediately, he implies, if more victims would cease to submit, as Solzhenitsyn himself and the Soviet dissidents have done...

...There is no earthly reason, he points out, for Western countries to permit the swollen diplomatic representations which the Soviets regularly dispatch abroad: only a few are legitimate diplomats, while the rest are KGB agents there to subvert the host country...

...Nearly a century and a half later a Russian 'middle-class intellectual, Vladimir Lenin by name, actually brought such a social order into being in Russia...

...In early 1969 the president of Reader's Digest accepted a proposal by John Barron, now a senior editor, for a detailed investigation of the KGB, the Soviet state security police, designed for the general Western reader...

...The Soviets, to do them justice, have never really concealed their aims, or even their methods, for the most part...

...Several years and many interviews later Barron's efforts were presented to the world in the form of the present book...

...By refusing to go quietly these dissidents have caused their captors much discomfort...

...The very fact that Barron's book has been published in an age so given to the exposure of the American intelligence system and its putative crimes, is important...

...Any Western country solicitous of its own internal stability can easily and logically limit Soviet diplomatic personnel in its capital to approximately the same number it maintains in Moscow...

...A recent Soviet emigre has wisely counseled all Western statesmen who deal with Soviet leaders to recall constantly that the latter are, literally, killer...

...Adherence to this simple rule in itself would make the KGB's work abroad measurably more difficult...

...Thus the explicit aim of the Soviet state apparatus is the manipulation of the population under its control by force, terror, and fraud...

...For if a government does not rest upon the freely given assent of the governed, it must depend instead upon force and the compulsion and manipulation of assent...

...Dzerzhinsky, Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev were all men who did not hesitate to kill, and the KGB is the formalized instrument of their control...

...They simply submit...

...We who are the victims of the KGB's foreign operations must do the same if we are to shackle its power...

...The Soviet security police was organized very quickly after the October Revolution, and its founder, the Polish intellectual Feliks Dzerzhinsky, spoke frankly of the necessity for "organized terror," at least in the early stages of the regime's history...