Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Andropov is the first KGB head since Beria to sit on the Politburo. He is a party man, not an agency professional. His most notable previous post: Soviet Ambassador in Budapest, where he helped put down the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Among Andropov's most important functions is to keep the KGB under firm party control so that the secret police can never again wield the power it possessed under Stalin, when it arrested, tortured and killed thousands of loyal party officials...
...highly publicized KGB responsibility is to rid the country of dissenters. Of the 2 million people currently imprisoned in the Soviet penal system, about 10,000 are so-called prisoners of conscience, who have been jailed for their religious, intellectual or political beliefs. In the past year the KGB has employed increasingly sophisticated methods to discredit dissidents; Jewish activists have been charged with speculation and other economic crimes in order to whip up local anti-Semitic feelings...
...Ukraine, 36 human rights activists have been convicted since 1976 on charges ranging from hooliganism to sexual offenses. In Kiev, both Jewish and Ukrainian activists have been severely beaten by KGB agents. In one celebrated case last year, witnesses say they saw two men force a popular Ukrainian nationalist composer, Volodymyr Ivasiuk, 31, into a KGB car. Three weeks later his body was found hanging from a tree; his eyes had been gouged out. Such acts of brutality-still rare but apparently on the increase-are strictly illegal. The KGB, however, remains capable of acting as a law unto itself...
Should a worker feel he is not being properly compensated, he can complain to an official of his union called a profsoyuz. Unions are almost like state agencies; indeed the former chief of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin, was the official head of the U.S.S.R. trade union movement for many years. "The goals of management and the profsoyuz are the same here," says Kazimir Kaspirovich, deputy chairman of the professional union at the factory. "We have no major disagreements with management...
...schizophrenia remains latent and can blossom 20 or 30 years later-often in the form of political dissidence. Exiled Writer Vladimir Bukovsky, now at Cambridge University, notes: "This means nobody knows whether he is schizophrenic or not unless Professor Snezhnevsky diagnoses it." That theory has proved convenient to the KGB, particularly since Soviet law allows for compulsory commitment by the courts when the accused has been classified as mentally ill. Indeed, the proceeding may be held without the dissident because he is considered too sick to attend. Thus, as Reich says, "dissenting views are pronounced the sick products of sick...