Film gives audience a glimpse of KGB

_ At the unspoken centre of every discus-
sion about the Soviet Union over the past
Many years there has always been a certain

organization, some would say a “ resence,”
ya p

So shrouded in cold war mythology and
coloured by them-and-us perceptions, that
it has frequently been manipulated into the
very symbol of the Soviet system: the
Committee of State Security — Komitet
Gosudarstvennoy Bezopastnosti, or KGB
as It Is universally known. It was never easy
to talk about it in measured or factual tones,
but all that seems to be changing.

_Last week Novosti press agency pre-
viewed its latest telefilm production, The
KGB Today, before a cynical foreign press
corps, followed by the first-ever press con-
ference with KGB officials — and drew all
the predictable responses.

The film itself presents very interesting, if
tame, material, taking the viewer beyond
the front doors of KGB headquarters on
Dzerzhinsky Square to meet and hear from
different sorts of people who work there.
The KGB is depicted — in more-or-less

FROM
MOSCOW

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similar terms to those in which Western
security establishments are portrayed in our
media — as a big, multi-faceted and spe-
cialized police force.

The film admits that the KGB has. a par-
ticularly serious historical problem to deal
with and overcome, particularly its prede-
cessor organizations’ (NK VD and OGPU)
involvement in the crimes of the Stalin era,
but its emphasis is on the KGB’s patriotic
and law-governed work of today.

We see dramatic, actual footage of the
KGB nabbing two American diplomats in
an act of espionage. We observe KGB spe-
cialists extracting bugging devices from the
walls of the Soviet embassy in London.
There are interviews with investigators on
the trail of organized crime, drug traffickers,
smugglers. We see border guards at
work — a task which in the USSR falls to
the KGB. We briefly meet an instructor in
the KGB school, various recruits and oper-
atives. There is even an extraordinary seg-
ment with the widow of former KGB officer
Kim Philby.

All of this is perfectly legitimate stuff,
intended to show that in a dangerous world,
a country needs a tough, professional secur-
ity force. To its credit, the film also points
out that we all have a common stake in
working to make the world less dangerous
through international dialogue, agreements
and co-operation. ;

However, some of the crucial questions
concerning the citizen’s relationship with
the security organs do remain frozen in the
background. In a face-to-face meeting with
three KGB colonels which followed the
screening, Western correspondents dis-
played an uncompromising, bulldog-like
tenacity — of the sort which invariably
deserts them when called-upon to deal with
their own or allied states’ security establish-
ments — in trying to highlight some of
these questions: What about investigations
of private groups and individuals? Tapping
of telephones? Use of informers? The KGB

answers were curt and evasive, and if you

closed your eyes you could easily picture an :

FBI or CSIS official saying: “Of course

there are secret aspects to our work, these

are the demands of security... No one who
is innocent need worry ... We don’t do that
sort of thing... Don’t make allegations you
can’t prove ....”

~

World

At top: A session of the Supreme Soviet which for the first time
this year, approved the appointment of KGB director. At right, a
KGB officer. shows devices found in the Soviet embassy in

Washington, D.C.

Do you suppose any Canadian
government will ever submit a CSIS
director to election by Parliament?

I have no idea how my various main-
stream colleagues will write about their first-
ever official encounter with the KGB, but I
suspect it will be without much serious
reflection and with more than a dollop of
one-sided stereotypes.

Actually, with all we know about Soviet
reality today it seems that the KGB must be
pretty much as Novosti has described it, a
large, multi-departmental, specialized police
force and intelligence-gathering institution.
By all accounts its secret police functions
have been vastly curtailed in recent years: it
has not acted lawlessly since the Stalin
years, and the legal environment which gave
it latitude to engage in selective repressions
against dissidents during the Brezhnev
period has been profoundly altered. Many
of those who were its targets 10-years ago
are members of the Congress of People’s
Deputies today.

Indeed, the film’s director herself notes
that in the dozens of on-the-street interviews
she did with people to gauge their attitudes
towards the KGB, she was amazed to find
the dominant public impression one of
“respect for the KGB for managing to keep
itself clean and stand above the corruption
of the Brezhnev years.” It will be interesting
to see how Soviet audiences receive this
Novosti film, due to be televised shortly.

However, it is only one straw in the wind,
evidence of growing public awareness and
discussion of  security-in-the-context-of-
democracy. A much bigger and more signif-
icant precedent was set last July, when

_ Vladimir Kryuchkov appeared before a full

session of the Supreme Soviet to have his
candidacy for the post of chairman of the
KGB approved, and to answer deputies’
questions concerning the work of the KGB.
The meeting was televised, country-wide,

and a transcript of the proceedings was pub-
lished in the newspaper Sovietskaya Ros-
siya. (Do you suppose any Canadian
government will ever submit a CSIS direc-
tor to election by Parliament, or expose him
to free-for-all questioning — on television
— in the House of Commons? I’m only
asking.)

Kryuchkov won his job, with six votes
cast against him and 26 abstentions. In the
course of a rather able performance —
some of the questions from deputies were
considerably more hard-hitting than those
of my colleagues at the press conference —
he seems to have convinced most that the
KGB today is actually anxious to deal con-
structively with the horrific Stalinist past, to
participate in coming to terms with it, and
to transform itself in whatever ways Soviet
society should democratically decide.

Said Kryuchkov: ‘“‘We believe that fun-
damentally new principles of the ratio
between the state and its security should be
formulated and carried out. It is not the
society and the state which should adapt
themselves to the activities of state security
bodies and services, but, on the contrary,
the KGB bodies and their services that
should undeviatingly proceed from the
interests of the society and state.” He called
upon the Supreme Soviet to enact a law on
state security, and also one on the KGB
itself, to govern all future activity.

The discussion — an inevitable one —
which can now be seen creeping into the
Soviet press, concerns the powers and the
role of secret police in a socialist state. There
is no mystery here: the distinction between

- “police” and “secret police” is, first, that
‘ secret police require no evidence of a crime
‘having been committed or in preparation in

order to launch an investigation; they can, .

and do, use purely political criteria. Second,
secret police need never bring the results of
their investigations into a court of law or
any other public forum; their subjects will
never have a chance to defend themselves,
indeed, may never know they are being
watched.

By these standards it is perfectly clear that
the overwhelming bulk of what the KGB
does is regular — if often specialized —
police work. Some of it, however, is
undoubtedly the other.

What has to sink in, and it is long past
due, is that none of this puts the KGB ina
class by itself. The modern KGB is very
much the product. of the cold war era,
whose distorting effects have been felt
rather symmetrically in East and West.

Canada, for instance, has two, probably
three secret police forces. We have CSIS
which keeps files on at least 300,000 indi-
vidual Canadians, taps phones, opens
mails, pays informers and does all this, with
rare exceptions, completely outside of pub-
lic knowledge and control. Less well-
known, we also have the Communications
Security Establishment (CSE), which eaves-
drops on domestic and international tele-
communications, again with no public
awareness or scrutiny. (These are the only
people in the world who get to read my
telexed dispatches before the Tribune editor
does:) And now the news is that the RCMP
is back in the secret police game with its
newly-created National Security Investiga-
tive Directorate.

So, some of these questions, as they begin
to come into focus in the USSR have uni-
versal implications. There is every reason to
watch closely as Soviets seek to re-define the
sovereignty of the citizen, and his/her rela-
tionship to the state and its institutions. We
might even learn something new.

Pacific Tribune, October 2, 1989 « 9