The Soviet Union's State Committee for Security, the notorious KGB intelligence and internal-security service, remains the self-described "sword and shield" of the Soviet Communist Party. It is playing a major role in controlling the current thaw in rigid totalitarian control over Soviet society that has emerged as part of the economic and social-reform programs launched in 1985 by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Under Gorbachev, internal controls over selected elements of society, such as the state-controlled press and the intelligentsia, have been loosened. A number of imprisoned ideological opponents, many of whom were well known outside the Soviet Union, have been released from prison camps or internal exile. And emigration levels, strictly controlled by the government, have risen modestly in an apparent effort to appease critics of Moscow's human rights policies.
Yet no systemic changes in the ruling bureaucracy, either in the Communist Party or the Soviet government, appear to have been made. The KGB, in particular, has remained one of the few institutions that has not become an announced target of reform.
A lack of evidence supporting the existence of any positive or fundamental changes in the Soviet system under Gorbachev has led critics of the Soviet Union to view the current period as a temporary sidetrack from the path to the Soviets' proclaimed revolutionary ideal of establishing a world socialist order.
Despite President Reagan's recently stated opinion that Gorbachev is a less messianic communist than his predecessors, the Soviet leadership remains undaunted in its quest for global revolution. In fact, Moscow's rulers seek a more efficient, attractive, and thus more exportable brand of Soviet-style socialism than the one they've been peddling for the past 70 years.
For many Western analysts, the KGB is regarded as a bastion of opposition to Gorbachev's reform programs, known as perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost, a corollary program involving a new level of openness. Yet, it is still not clear whether the KGB and its leaders are anti-glasnost. In the past, efforts to portray this powerful and highly influential component of the party-state apparatus as "conservative" have been used as a propaganda ploy to depict the Soviet leadership as a small group, divided along Western political lines. In fact, it is more unified.
Playing the lead
The closed nature of Soviet society and the secrecy integral to the KGB make it difficult to say with certainty or precision what role the internal security services are playing as part of perestroika and glasnost. Statements by current Soviet leaders, published accounts in the Western and Soviet press, and an examination of similar, short-lived periods in Soviet history when relaxations of communist dictatorship occurred, reveal the KGB's role as the stage manager--within the Leninist tradition of ideological flexibility, of reform programs designed to strengthen and perpetuate Soviet power and prestige.
At the top of the KGB is Chairman Victor Chebrikov. He is a member of the ruling Politburo, the entity that sits at the apex of the Communist Party hierarchy and
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