PAUL HOLLANDER
If there has to be repentance Ifor KGB activitiesJ, then let everyone
repent. You should repent for what you've done to the Indians ... If
you repent, we will too. My atti tude toward Stalin is clear: I condemn
the repressions. I condemn the totali tarian forms of rule that Stalin
developed ... He became the head of the Soviet state when there was
only a plow, and left it when the state had an atomic bomb ...
Believe me in twenty or thirty years Stalin will be referred to as a kind
of genius.
53
Earlier in the conversation Kryuchkov also averred that he had "noth–
ing to do with the struggle against dissent," which led his interlocutor to
conclude that he "seemed perfectly capable of lying with a serene sense of
self-possession and righteousness," another apparent qualification for the
position he had filled.
The third type of the specialists emerges from more recent references
to the personnel of the KGB, portrayed as well-educated, often suave
careerists who found satisfactory employment and mobility opportunities
in this organization. Sometimes an adventurous disposition contributed to
the attractions of such employment, as in the case of former GeneralOleg
Kalugin who also claimed patriotic motives in joining the intelligence
gathering branch of the KGB.
It is the fourth group - seemingly composed of individuals who
gravitate toward the organizations of violence and coercion, and their
repugnant activities - that has attracted the least social scientific interest.
Victor Serge, an old Soviet revolutionary observed during the first years of
the October Revolution the contrast between such individuals and the
Dzerzhinsky types:
The Party endeavoured
to
head it Ithe Cheka, that is, the first embod–
iment of the KGB] with incorruptible men like ... Dzerzhinsky, a
sincere idealist, ruthless but chivalrous, wi th the emaciated profile of
an Inquisitor ... But the Party had few men of this stamp and many
Chekas: these gradually came to select their personnel by virtue of
their psychological inclinations. The only temperaments that devoted
themselves willingly and tenaciously to this task of 'internal defense'
were those characterized by suspicion, embitterment, harshness and
sadism. Long-standing social inferiority-complexes and memories of
humiliations and suffering in the Tsars' jails rendered them
intractable, and since professional degeneration has rapid effects, the
Chekas inevitably consisted of perverted men tending to see conspir–
acy everywhere and to live in the midst of perpetual conspiracy
themselves.
