Organised paranoia

Nikolai Tolstoy

Mr Rositzke has not been very well served by his publishers, who have provided his book with a title and dust- jacket almost indistinguishable from John Barron's book on the same subject pub- lished by Hodder & Stoughton in 1974. As Barron's book was in every way better, the inevitable comparison is bound to be invidious.

John Barron's KGB was criticised fairly enough for its over-dramatic, 'factional' approach, but this weakness apart it is in fact a very well-researched and useful com- pendium, fully referenced, illustrated, and containing a valuable original list of hun- dreds of KGB operatives unmasked in the West. The historian cannot do without Bar- ron's book, but I fear he could discard Mr Rositzke's without compunction.

The KGB contains no references or bibliography, but these seem scarcely necessary since 95 per cent or more of the text will be familiar to any reader of the respectable daily newspapers. It is also writ- ten in a rather odd staccato style, often with a succession of paragraphs one sentence long. Mr Rositzke tells us that he plucked from CIA files the exciting but familiar stories of Sorge, Trepper, 'Lucy' — on to

Philby, Khokhlov and so to the present day (1981). But the accounts are bald and spiritless, and can hardly tell anyone with the remotest previous interest in the subject anything he did not know already.

He is certainly admirably up-to-date, covering the repulsive Blunt and more re- cent shabby exposures, though there is no mention of Chapman Pincher's allegations against the late Sir Leslie Hollis. Less ex- cusable is a failure even to mention the supremely able if evil Jack Kingman, whose part in the destruction of General Mihail- ovich, the subversion of British wartime policy in the Balkans, and the stage- managing of highly-placed fifth columnists in the British establishment has still to be fully investigated.

One does not wish to be hard on Mr Rositzke, whose heart is clearly in the right place and whose book can certainly provide a useful summary for someone with little previous knowledge of the subject. The only really glaring error comes in the sub- title of the book itself: 'The Eyes of Russia'. It is hard to think of a more ab- solute misnomer. The original predecessor of the KGB, the Cheka, was established by the Revolutionary government as early as.7 December 1917 for the purpose of sustain- ing Bolshevik power in Russia. Specifically, its inception arose from a determination to crush a strike launched by a newly-formed civil service union. 'I propose, I demand the organisation of revolutionary violence against the counter-revolutionaries,' urged Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin duly ap- pointed the Cheka's first chairman. A year later the organisation itself admitted to hav- ing already killed more than 6,300 people. As the official Soviet historian explained, 'For the most part, the supreme measure of punishment was applied for the purpose of influencing the counter-revolutionary ele- ment, for the purpose of producing the necessary effect, intimidation.'

From the very beginning, the prime pur- pose of the Cheka and its successors, the OGPU, NKVD and KGB, was to preserve Soviet rule in Russia, and its subsequent es-

pionage, counter-espionage, and terror operations abroad have always been sub- sidiary to the main aim. In the pre-war period virtually all operations abroad were simply extensions of the internal struggle. One has only to recall the kidnappings of Generals Kutepov and Miller, the murders of Reiss, Konovalec, Trotsky and (possibly) Krivitsky. At the end of the war the NKVD and its temporary off-shoot SMERSH went to extraordinary lengths to recover emigre Cossack and White Guard leaders, and since then the killings of Ukrainians Lev Rebet, Stefan Band era and others serve as reminders that the Russian Civil War has not ended.

Of course the KGB is engaged in massive espionage activities of all kinds against the USA, NATO, China and other opponents of the Soviet Union, whose power is as im- mense as that of dissidents at home and emigrants abroad is derisory. But the Soviet psychosis is such that it almost certainly fears Solzhenitsyn more than Reagan. This persistent conviction of the fragility of

Soviet rule doubtless stems from the unan- ticipated overnight collapse of the

Romanov government, with its comparablY large police force, army, etc., and the subsequent seizure of power by a tiny band of unknown conspirators led by obscure

agents residing abroad. Since then, as Djilas understood from his stay in Moscow,

`What my visit to Stalin taught me was that

these men regard themselves as appointed to rule over and against the will of the peo- ple. They acted like a group of conspirators scheming to suppress, squash, circumvent, or hoodwink the inhabitants of some con- quered land, not their own.' Of course it is absurd in normal cir- cumstances to think of any internal over- throw of Soviet power. But to the Soviet leadership there are no normal cir cumstances, and the world remains a verY frightening place indeed. Is Russian resent- ment of Soviet repression and In- competence a comatose but latent force, or is it a continuing white-hot heat of resent- ment? The reole of the KGB is simultaneous-

ly to prevept Russians from expressing hostility to the regime and to anticipate the

degree of such hostility — incompatible tasks — which understandably produces a schizophrenic attitude amongst the elite. It is this Russian narod that the regime fears, the enigmatic 'dark people', of whom

a foreign visitor wrote more than 300 years

ago: 'the Muscovites, no matter how sub- missive and slavish they may be, will

endeavour to recover their liberty when the government becomes insupportable to them.'

Threatening foreign powers represent a secondary menace, and particularly in all age of atomic warfare the regime can co- exist, if necessary, indefinitely with the most hostile neighbours. No foreign coun- try was so solicitously wooed as Nazi Ger- many, after all. What the regime can never . co-exist with is a restless and resurgent Russia. Mr Rositzke's subtitle should perhaps have read 'The Eyes on Russia.