172
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
has frequently been suggested that the burning of the police
files immediately after the February Revolution of 1917 was engi–
neered by revolutionaries who were afraid they would be exposed as
double agents. Stalin, it would appear, had especially good reason to
entertain such apprehensions .
In the Stalin era, the chief activity of the secret police was
creative. Subversive plots and secret organizations were created
after
the arrest of their "members," who had known nothing of their
existence. They were created in the course of interrogations within
prison walls. This was absurdist theatre, rather like that of Beckett
or Ionesco, that was completely divorced from reality. There was
one director with a huge cast of actors, all of whom played the same
role: an enemy of the people .
As for the present day, one may well assume not only that there
are provocateurs among the dissidents, but that their number is
greater than has so far seemed to be the case. After all , exposing
KGB agents is exclusively the job of that same KGB, when it decides
to switch the role of "our man" from that of provocateur to that of a
witness in court or of a newspaper propagandist. That is what hap–
pened, for instance, to Sanya Lipavsky. A Jewish "refusenik," a
dissident, and the roommate of Anatoly Shcharansky, Lipavsky
exposed Shcharansky in court and in the Soviet press. But the one–
shot role of exposer is less useful than the permanent role of spy and
provocateur, and this permits the assumption that there are more
unexposed KGB agents among the dissidents than exposed ones.
Thus there is a solid basis for the KGB-phobia one finds among the
dissidents.
One day a
gebist
by the name of Boris Pavlovich Chudinov
brought me a poor photocopy of a manuscript put together by an
"unofficial" group of poets that was politically suspect to the KGB.
He asked me, "Could you look this over and give us a reader's
report? We need one that is competently written. (You needn't be
afraid - this is a strictly literary matter.) And you, after all , are a
literary critic."
I believed what he said about their needing a strictly literary
reader's report. I also believed that , knowing my tastes and my
tendency to be hypercritical, they had rightly assumed that the
report would probably be negative. And that was just what they
needed so that, in addition to bringing political charges against the
poets in question, they could point to their literary incompetence.
