Criminal Efficiency Experts
HOPKINS, MARK
Criminal Efficiency Experts The Russian Secret Police By Ronald Hingley Simon & Schuster. 313 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Mark Hopkins Soviet and East European specialist; author, "Mass Media in the...
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...And the Soviet citizenry remains apprehensive of KGB crackdowns on any kind of dissident conduct...
...Indeed, Beria's excesses scared the men who followed Stalin...
...Without the secret police apparatus, the Soviet system as it exists today could not survive...
...And Brezhnev has been equally prudent, while deliberately portraying the kgb as a friend and protector of the people...
...From the days of the Tsarist empire to the Brezhnev era the names and acronyms have changed—the Third Section, Okh-rana, Checka, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and now KGB—but the basic system has remained the same...
...A recent study done for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress estimated that the KGB employs between 500,000 and 1 million agents...
...In domestic matters, as everyone knows, the secret police played a major role under Stalin...
...The dilemma for the Soviet leadership is obvious enough...
...It is still pervasive, as we can tell from the scale of its surveillance operations, bugging, entrapments and the like...
...But the difference between them, Hingley suggests, is one of quantity rather than quality...
...They provided the force for collectivization, for eliminating Stalin's real and imagined enemies, and for maintaining his personal dictatorship...
...That Hingley refused to write a popularized, updated spy thriller is on the whole a mark of his scholarship...
...On the other hand, the secret police apparently have yet to regain the influence and authority they once enjoyed...
...The literature on the Tsarist and early Soviet police is far richer, augmented by the testimony of defectors and former prison camp inmates, and verified by other sources outside the USSR...
...The Checka was just as merciless under Lenin, and it was he and his secret police chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who set the pattern...
...It is by no means moribund, as evidenced by its participation in the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, its relentless supression of protesters, and its continuing harassment of Solzhenitsyn...
...in number of victims, the Soviet police easily rank with the Gestapo and ss...
...Nonetheless, he should have examined more closely the power that the secret police have wielded over Russia's domestic and international policies...
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...The Chronicle of Current Events and other Soviet underground documents have revealed more about secret kgb trials, mass arrests, psychiatric wards employed as prisons, and other forms of repression practiced during—and since—Khrushchev's regime than does The Russian Secret Police...
...Despite the legal reforms and the contraction of the labor camp network that Khrushchev introduced, he still needed his kgb...
...author, "Mass Media in the Soviet Union" ALTHOUGH the West tends to think of the Soviet secret police as Stalin's own creation, Ronald Hing-ley's historical study shows that it was not such an original development after all...
...According to Hingley, it is impossible to determine precisely where the kgb stands in the pecking order of power today...
...After Stalin died and the ambitious Lavrenti Beria and his lieutenants were shot, the then mvd was trimmed back, yet the police held their own...
...Khrushchev was watchful of the police, even though he made one of his kgb chiefs, Aleksandr Shelepin, a full member of the Presidium...
...Although he notes in passing specific instances where they intervened in foreign affairs, particularly during Khrushchev's later years, he fails to cover their espionage, intelligence and political operations abroad...
...Since the available data becomes sketchier and less reliable as events move closer to the present, Hingley is justified in including only the documented highlights about the kgb...
...Each successive security organization has practiced essentially the same forms of surveillance, maintained informer networks, used prison camps and torture chambers?and distinguished itself from its predecessors chiefly through increased efficiency...
...Hingley points out, however, that Stalin does not deserve all the blame for the reigns of terror...
...While Hingley has collected some of this material, his account thins out after the death of Stalin...
...In modern times these organizations have been far more brutal and murderous than they were under the Tsars...
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...At the same time, there is always the danger, never forgotten since Stalin's purges, that the police might someday turn against the politicians themselves...
...Moreover, the secret police continue to operate in the marrow of Soviet Communism as they did in the Russian Empire...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 17
