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as Othello was powerless when he came up against Iago's machina–
tions, so the ordinary Soviet citizen is powerless vis-a-vis the Com–
mittee of State Security. Inter alia, that technique involves a weapon
that the KGB uses frequently and skillfully, and which is plainly
underestimated by outside observers: the so-called gendarme folk–
lore. By this is meant rumors about the KGB that are spread by the
KGB itself.
The most widespread rumors, and those that most poison one's
life, are rumors about ties with the KGB on the part of one's
friends - or even on the part of people that one doesn't know. I did
not have a single friend who was not rumored to have KGB connec–
tions. More accurately, I did have one acquaintance whom no one
suspected of having such shameful ties, until finally his very spotless–
ness began to appear suspect and he was labelled an informer on
that basis alone. There is quite simply no one who has been
exempted from such rumors-not Solzhenitsyn, not Sinyavsky, not
Sakharov. And Solzhenitsyn himself, in his memoirs, points the
finger at Valery Chalidze, who was chairman of the Moscow
Human Rights Committee and is now editor of the Russian dissi–
dent publication,
A Chronicle
oj
Human Rights in the USSR.
Finally,
there is a joke about Brezhnev's whispering to Kosygin: "Watch out
for Andropov [chairman of the KGBj- they say he's a snitch!"
I confess that I don't know which there is more of in the USSR,
KGB-phobia or real activity by the KGB. But is that question really
important? Is it important by which means we are terrorized - by
reality or by our imaginations? In the final analysis, our imagina–
tion, too, is a product of reality. "Their hypnosis is our terror," wrote
author Fazil Iskander in this connection. What difference does it
make whether your phone is bugged, or whether it just seems to you
to be bugged? In either case, you can't say what you're thinking.
And can you even think what you are
really
thinking?
The same thing applies to "stoolie-phobia."
It
creates an atmos–
phere of fear, regardless of whether the person in question is an
authentic snitch or a seeming one - merely a figment of your imagi–
nation. By means of spreading rumors, the KGB does more than
take on an additional dimension that it had not previously possessed
in reality: it anticipates the future, providing a picture of that total
power that it is in the process of attaining.
Fears have one most regrettable attribute: they may be
realized.
