Terror From Within: Brotherhood and Betrayal in the Soviet Political Police

"Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spent 16 years working for the state's security organs," stated Cynthia Hooper, Assistant Professor, Department of History, College of the Holy Cross, and Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar, Kennan Institute. As president, he filled posts with fellow KGB alumni, who came to occupy 60 to 70 percent of the most powerful regional and national bureaucratic positions. Putin continues to enjoy overwhelming popularity among Russians despite his unapologetic attitude about his time with the KGB. In fact, according to Hooper, the characteristics Russians ascribe most often to Putin—smart, strong, disciplined, patriotic, reticent, and incorruptible—are the exact qualities that Soviet propaganda makers attempted to associate with the KGB throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This prompted Hooper, at a recent Kennan Institute lecture, to consider whether the Soviet political police—in its various incarnations over the years—possessed a particular institutional culture, and if so, whether it was one that might, in some way, be informing Putin's worldview and style of governance today.

Hooper began her assessment with the NKVD—the KGB's predecessor—during the Great Terror, citing records and documents of secret police operations in Nizhnii Novgorod which she had the unique opportunity to access. This period, she argued, offers an exceptional window to NKVD operations because it was a time not only of unprecedented violence perpetrated by the organization, but also of extraordinary disagreement inside the organization about its own perceived shortcomings in carrying out operations. Comparing the NKVD of the Soviet Union to its contemporary in Nazi Germany, the Gestapo, Hooper illuminated some of the distinctive values and practices of the NKVD.

One difference she observed had to do with the way in which each organization dealt with their respective societies at large. In the Soviet Union, the activities of the NKVD during the Terror were fueled by an enormous amount of citizen participation through surveillance and denunciation. In Germany, Hooper noted, citizens submitted denunciations as well, but the Gestapo was highly selective about which complaints it followed up on, thus directing suppression to chosen targets. Unlike the NKVD, she explained, the Gestapo did not allow popular denunciation to destabilize established hierarchies within German society unless the issue involved race.

Hooper also identified a disparity between the NKVD and the Gestapo related to the experience of cadre loyalty. Both state security organs exhibited semblances of "members only" solidarity, but for the NKVD, Hooper clarified, the Great Terror actually disrupted cadre loyalty and generated deep uncertainty as police considered whether brotherhood or a willingness to report one's closest friends was more befitting for a good Communist. This interruption never occurred in the Gestapo. Finally, the NKVD also diverged from the Gestapo in that its members began to generate internal critiques of their own practices. Deeply concerned about its own efficiency, the NKVD constantly and obsessively reviewed its processes behind the scenes.

In the aftermath of the Great Terror, under the direction of Lavrenti Beria, a number of changes occurred in the NKVD which Hooper believes brought about a level of police cohesion that did not exist previously. She named one such change to be Beria's re-emphasis of the importance of institutional hierarchy and the value of obedience to superior officers. Beria also affirmed the importance of cadre loyalty and effectively shut the agency off from scrutiny by the public as well as other government organizations. Discussions of police wrongdoing were kept within the NKVD, even to the point of censoring newspapers.

Hooper also noted the importance of Beria having made the NKVD into an elite and exclusive organization, with better established boundaries between its members and Soviet society at large. Beria stopped the NKVD's dependence on spontaneous denunciations, voluntary assistance, and citizen tips. While it is true that the NKVD still used elaborate informant networks, such networks were professionalized as informers remained under direct supervision of handlers and were given specific assignments.

To Hooper, this experience of both continuity and change within secret police culture reveals important considerations regarding how KGB values might be impacting post-Soviet Russia today. "Putin's KGB of the 1980s saw itself as very different from the NKVD of the 1930s," she explained, "and expressed revulsion and frustration for the kind of repression that was characteristic of the Great Terror years. As later KGB agents viewed the Terror period as one of arbitrary, destabilizing, and wasteful violence, they favored exercising power in less obvious, more behind the scenes ways, and promoted the skillful, tactical use of violence in carefully delimited, covert operations directed toward specific ends, Hooper noted.

Additionally, while the agency that emerged from the Great Terror period still maintained a tough, masculine ethos, Hooper contended that it also transformed into a very modern, forward-looking institution, "favoring a kind of modernity which most of its members associated more with economic and technological development, and, over time, less with the Communist party." The Terror, she argued, marked the beginning of a real and enduring break between police and party values. In fact, one of the things Hooper found most surprising about the KGB was the fluidity and ease with which it transitioned into the free market world, in either licit or illicit ways. "The attachment to economic development and suspicion of any ideology beyond that of a strong state is something that has certainly shaped Putin's worldview," she claimed.

Finally, after the NKVD of the Terror years experienced the tumultuous process of simultaneously inflicting, experiencing, and critiquing its own practices of repression, leaders formed a policy of secrecy in order to avoid such destabilizing situations in the future. This policy of secrecy allowed internal assessments to take place, but no one outside of the organization ever became privy to its problems. Such a system, Hooper concluded, has helped to underpin the notion of transparency or openness as something useless—or even harmful—to the state, still widespread among both government officials and the general public in Russia today.

Written by Sarah Dixon Klump