VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV
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everyone of them I found one or both of two familiar names: Boris
Chudinov and Yury Vetrov. (Both were KGB agents assigned to
work with writers and artists, and all my acquaintances, sad to say,
were in that category.) Yet I still had the feeling that I was the only
leper, despite the clear indications of an epidemic. The situation was
similar to that described by Chesterton, but the number of KGB
agents was not limited to the seven days of the week. To live in the
Soviet Union means, inevitably, to collaborate with the KGB–
whether as consultant, informer, or provocateur. The kind of luck
this or that person has in so doing is another question.
It seems to me, therefore, that trying to guess how many people
collaborate with the KGB is a waste of time. Obviously, the figure is
not 100,000; and even more obviously, it is not 200,000. The KGB
could not possibly cope with the population of the Soviet Union if it
had so few collaborators. My advice to those people from the CIA,
the State Department, and the White House who are making such
guesses, is that they seek the answer in the latest census of the Soviet
Union: the KGB's collaborators number about 270 million. I was
one of them.
