Many NKVD/MGB/KGB officers mentioned in this book considered science a prestigious job for their children. Sons and daughters of Mairanovsky, Boyarsky, Khvat, Kruzhkov, Solovov, and Sudoplatov became scientists at Moscow University and research institutes within the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences. Like children of Nazi functionaries in Germany, all of them believe that their fathers were only following orders from above.
INFORMERS
In our country every worker is on the staff of the NKVD.
Some of the Soviet scientists, usually devoted Communist Party members, had few qualms about working with the OGPU/NKVD/MGB/KGB. Analysis of the secret KGB textbook History of the Soviet Security Service shows that the work of the Soviet secret services would not be possible without secret agents.273 Thus, a Special Letter of the Secret Operational Directorate of the OGPU from July 20, 1928, plainly said that a “qualified fight” against “anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries” should be based on a well-organized network of informers and secret agents.274 In the late 1920s, OGPU deputy head Yagoda boasted:
We can turn anyone into a secret informer [seksot in Russian]… Who does want to die of hunger? If the OGPU starts to work on a person with the goal to force him to be an informant, his resistance is useless. Eventually, he will be in our hands: we will force to kick him out from his job and he will not be accepted anywhere else without a secret approval of our organization [organy]. Especially if the person has a family, a wife, and children, he is forced to capitulate soon.275
Basically, there were three types of secret agents and informers: special agents (spetsagenty), special informers (spetsosvedomiteli), and informers (osvedomiteli, or seksoty).276 Special agents were professionals or semiprofessionals who temporarily or permanently served at the NKVD/MGB/KGB. Special informants were recruited to the secret service for special assignments only. However, informants were the most numerous group and were recruited for collecting information about alleged anti-Soviet activity within all of Soviet society. All these secret collaborators signed special agreements with the OGPU-KGB, were given pseudonyms for their reports, and kept secret their contacts with the security service. In the late 1950s–1970s, the KGB additionally introduced the category of “trusted persons” (doverennye litsa).277 These individuals made their connections with the KGB widely known but kept secret the type of information they provided to the KGB. Their work with the KGB was based on their enthusiasm; they did not sign agreements with the KGB and had no special KGB alias.
As Sudoplatov wrote in his memoirs, the whole Soviet system was based on information received from the security service:
Security offices and administrative agencies provide the leadership with a monthly report on developments in the country. This report includes a summary of internal difficulties and failures of performance at various institutions and enterprises, based on informers’ reports. Under Stalin’s rule it was almost impossible to meet an informer during the daytime; we met our sources almost every evening.278
Of course, everyone in the Soviet Union knew that someone among his or her friends and colleagues was a secret informer (if he or she was not an informer him- or herself). Even now I still have an unpleasant feeling about my close friends in Moscow who might have been informers. I also witnessed a more open form of connection between informers and the KGB “friends” (this was the name used for KGB personal supervisors of informers).
It was at the end of 1984. I went to the KGB Reception Room (the corner of the Furkasov Lane and Malaya Lubyanka in downtown Moscow) because of my problems with the KGB. After I opened the first door, I saw a huge mailbox to my left. Here any Soviet citizen could deposit an anonymous letter to the KGB, supposedly without being noticed. But that was not so: There was a TV camera pointed at the entrance door. The second door led into a big hall, the right part of which was full of small open booths with telephones. I watched several people sneaking into the booths. I heard the high voice of a woman in the nearest booth. She was complaining about her colleague at work who had been allowed to go for a trip abroad. The woman said that the colleague should not go for the trip because she was a speculator and an anti-Soviet element.
I knew exactly what would happen to that unfortunate woman the informer was reporting on. This was still in the time when every trip abroad by a Soviet citizen was approved or disapproved by both the Party and KGB officials. I received such disapproval in 1975. The director of the institute where I worked at the time gathered at his office members of the Soviet delegation to a scientific international conference in Yugoslavia. I was important to the delegation because I spoke English, and the others did not. We had already gone through all necessary Party and other commissions, which had checked us for loyalty, and we had tickets for the trip in our hands. During the meeting, suddenly a phone rang on the director’s desk. The director picked up the receiver and listened without saying a word. His face became pale. He put the receiver down and told me: “The organs (i.e., KGB) are against your trip.”
In the KGB hall, there was a small flight of stairs in front of me leading to the next floor. A short sergeant in KGB uniform, who stood near the stairway, was staring at me suspiciously. He asked me to show him my passport. After he had inspected my passport, he told me that the Reception Room was upstairs. I followed his instructions, went upstairs, and joined a line of approximately ten men and women; men predominated.
I will never forget these people. Most of them were silent and looked very tense. One man, definitely a native of Uzbekistan in a traditional Uzbek hat, loudly boasted how he would hand over the anti-Soviet “saboteur” fellows from his kolkhoz in Central Asia to the KGB. Some men were trembling. I had never before seen adults shivering from fear. While waiting in the line, one more detail struck me. A group of twelve- to fourteen-year-old kids led by two KGB officers walked in front of our line. Each of them held a notebook. They definitely felt very comfortable in this notorious building. They were “young followers of Felix Dzerzhinsky” and the future KGB recruits.
When my turn came, I was ordered to enter a room with several file cabinets. A big muscled woman in plainclothes asked for my name and then for some time searched the files. After she found what she was looking for, she asked me what I wanted. I told her my story: Because of KGB intervention, I had lost my job at the Academy of Sciences and could not find another one. I had sent a letter to the KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, in which I had asked about the reasons for the KGB actions against me. I had never received an answer, which was a violation of Soviet rules: Officials were obligated to answer the inquiries from citizens within one or two months. She sent me to another room, where a guy who looked like a professional wrestler was waiting for me. He went through the documents in the file the woman had provided him with and said that the KGB had nothing to do with my problems and that I should immediately leave their headquarters. So I did, looking for the last time at people coming into the big hall with telephones on the first floor. The KGB (now FSB) Reception Room is still open all hours of the day and night.