Sword and serpent
RUSSIA TI B()R SZAMUELY
The huge office block which forms one side of Dzerzhinsky (formerly Lubyanskaya) Square in Moscow is known to all simply as the Lubyanka. For forty-nine years it has housed the headquarters of the Soviet political police, an organisation so uniquely and deservedly infamous that it has had to change its name no fewer than seven times: Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, MVD and KGB.
The Lubyanka itself is a great rabbit warren of a building—or rather, of several buildings added one to the other over the years to lodge this most rapidly expanding sector of Soviet life—a veritable maze of corridors, staircases, passageways, lifts, all brilliantly lit up and echoing with the loud warning clicking sounds made by the guards as they approach some corner with their prisoner. Inside the court- yard, cut off from the outside world, is the prison—the Inner Prison of the KGB—five storeys above ground and two or three below. It is rather different from most prisons, with large windows, screened by metal shields, and beautiful parquet floors, all relics of by- gone days : before the revolution the prison had been an hotel, and the original pseudo- Gothic building of the Lubyanka itself was the main office of Russia's biggest insurance company.
To put it mildly, in the Soviet Union the secret policeman's lot is not a happy one. The appointment of a new head of the KGB this week provides an appropriate occasion to re- view the fate of his eleven predecessors. One (Dzerzhinsky) died of natural causes, another (Menzhinsky) was poisoned, five (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Merkulov and Abakumov) were executed, two (Ignatyev and Serov) disappeared into some secret policemen's limbo. The latest, Semichastny, has now taken the first step along the road to oblivion, and only Shelepin, the last but one, is still in a position bf power, as member of the Politburo and Secretary of the Central Committee.
Such a brief resumd does not even begin to do justice to the full murkiness of these stealthy comings and goings. For instance, to this day nothing has ever been said officially about the fate of Nikolai Yezhov, the ghastliest of the lot. The case of Lavrenty Beria is even more extraordinary. Officially, of course, he was executed after a proper trial, conducted behind closed doors six months after his arrest in June 1963. Yet three years later Mr Khrush- chev told a group of visiting Italian Com- munists an entirely different story: the mem- bers of the party Presidium (as it was then called), having been forewarned of Beria's nefarious plots, and knowing did they would all be frisked for concealed weapons before entering the conference room (except for Beria), had prudently secreted Marshal Mos- kalenko, armed with a tommy-gun, in an adjoining room for the show-down (the first principle of Russian political life being: he who manages to smuggle a gun into the Polit- buro meeting rules the roost). Beria, a mistrust- ful character at the best of times, soon sensed that there was something wrong and reached for his gun—whereupon Khrushchev pressed a button, in dashed Marshal Moskalenko and shot the fiend dead.
By the end of this story the Italians must have looked a bit green about the gills, so Khrushchev proposed a break for lunch. And then, meeting them again a few hours later, he made them listen to a complete tape- recording of the Beria trial, with Beria's own voice reading out a full confession of his crimes. The dazed Italians had to be helped out of the room.
Nowadays they seem to order these things in a somewhat more civilised fashion—but the atmosphere of mystery is as impenetrable as ever. What, one asks, are the reasons for Semichastny's removal? They may be con- nected with the obscure manoeuvring for power that goes on constantly in the Kremlin. If Khrushchev's successors are now fighting among themselves Semichastny would probably be on Shelepin's side. But then again, it may all be due to specific issues of internal security.
Semichastny's six-year tenure of office spanned a number of significant developments, broadly indicating an increase in popular dis- affection on the one hand, and a tendency to tighten up discipline and strengthen repression on the other: the wide spread of illegal sub- versive literature; unrest among students and young intellectuals; the shooting down of workers' demonstrations in Novooherkassk and Temir-Tau; the Brooke case; the Sinyaysky- Daniel trial and the arrest of a number of young writers; the Penkovsky affair; the fall of Khrushchev, in which the KGB must have played an important part; Svetlana Stalina's defection; the new draconian laws against literature 'discrediting' the Soviet state and against illegal demonstrations; and the recent failures of Soviet espionage in Europe. Pre- sumably the new man is expected to do some- thing about all this, and moreover to do it effectively.
The emblem of the Soviet security police is a shield bearing a writhing serpent—the ever-present bogey of counter-revolution—im- paled upon the 'avenging sword of the Revolu- tion,' representing the Cheka in its various reincarnations. Today the avenging sword has been entrusted to Yuri Vladimirovich Andro- pov. Little is known about him in the West. Fifty-three years old; educated at university and party school; 1940-53: on Komsomol and party work, mainly in the north-western territory of Karelia; 1953-57: in the diplomatic ser- vice; 1957: appointed head of one of the foreign departments of the Central Com- mittee; latterly a Secretary of the cc. Not much to go on here.
Some Western journalists describe Andropov as 'scholarly-looking.' This description, it should be made clear, is based solely on the fact that he wears rimless glasses—just like Beria, who in his day was also called 'scholarly-looking' on the strength of this (very unfairly, though, another distinguished and rimless-spectacled member of the fraternity, the late H. Himmler, never received this intellectual accolade). The only previous oMasion when Andropov achieved world pa hence was in 1956, as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary during the revolution. As the Russians' man on the spot his was a key position. He played his part to perfection and to his masters' utmost satisfac- tion; a few months later he received his reward in the form of a Central Committee depart- ment—a spectacular and unprecedented pro- motion. All in all, the kind of man most likely to reach the top in Russia. How long he will stay there is anybody's guess.
So much for the sword-bearer. The big question is: who is going to be cast as the serpent in the perpetual police-state charade? It is a question of more than passing interest for the citizens of the USSR as they prepare to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary, first of the Soviet regime itself, and then, several weeks later, of its paramount support, the Cheka-
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