Vladimir Solovyov
KNOWING THE KGB
1. The Wages of Fear
Although by a miracle I managed to escape both from the
harsh measures of the Committee of State Security and from close
collaboration with it - those two things being the Scylla and
Charybdis of "Soviet man" - the KGB still torments my imagina–
tion.
In
the last , or dissident, phase of my career in the Soviet
Union, my case was neither typical nor interesting. Like other
dissidents , I waged my struggle with the aid of the
New York Times ,
the Voice of America, and the BBC ; in other words, with exotic,
imported weapons unavailable to the ordinary Soviet citizen, be he
blue-collar worker, doctor, artist, engineer, or writer. I myself was in
that same underprivileged position before I became a dissident. And
today, when I compare the two, I venture to say that that typical
position demands much more courage, resourcefulness, and skill
than the dissident stance, although unlike the latter, it is not under
the klieg lights of the world press. Having been in both positions, I
would even say that the move from the typical to the atypical
one-the changeover from a day-to-day, unnoticed, exhausting, and
fatally predetermined struggle with the KGB to an open, public,
knockdown, drag-out fight with it - is usually a result of the fact that
the person in question has proven unable to bear up under the
earlier, routine kind of struggle. But he delays his defeat with this
shifting of the fight to a ring in full view of the public where the rules
are different, where even the opponent is not quite the same as
before, and where the latter must - for a certain time at least - abide
by the rules imposed on him. To draw an analogy with another
sport, the ordinary Soviet citizen, in his contest with the KGB,
might be compared to a long-distance runner, while the dissident is a
sprinter. The difference is one between a line of conduct steadily
adhered to , on the one hand , and bursts of heroism on the other.
In
Translated from the Russia n by Guy Daniels.
