Word: stukachi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...forced collectivization of farms in the early 1930s after he informed local Communist authorities that his father was sheltering more prosperous peasants. Few Soviets today would be likely to follow young Pavlik's example, but there are more than enough concerned citizens ready to play the role of stukachi, or stool pigeons. An elderly pensioner with time on her hands could consider it a patriotic duty to report any foreign-looking types who visit her apartment building at odd hours. In a society where many people routinely break laws against black-market activities just to get by, everyone is vulnerable...
...work of keeping watch over the Soviet people is done by part-time informers, or stukachi (squealers), as they are contemptuously called. The system of informants is so pervasive that most Soviets take it for granted that a stukach is always near by. At work, a factory laborer may be fired from his job for telling political jokes that an informer has repeated to the head of the personnel department, who is invariably working for the KGB. At home, an apartment dweller knows that his superintendent regularly reports on any unfamiliar visitors he may receive -especially overnight. Pressures on ordinary...
Backing up the stukachi network is a gigantic mail and telephone surveillance operation. A Soviet dissident now in exile once ran a test of the KGB's postal monitoring system by sending 100 letters to a West European town from various mailboxes in the U.S.S.R. Only six got through. Selective surveillance of mail and telephone calls has been made much easier in recent years by computers that enable the KGB to monitor specific targets...
...thought Arthur Hailey's Airport, a bestseller in the Soviet Union, was fascinating. He drinks too much, his government says, and watches hockey on TV, his wife says, when he should be helping her with household tasks. He is impatient with nonconformists but contemptuous of the stukachi, the neighborhood secret police informers. His main questions about the West are about unemployment, and his main personal concern right now is whether his son will get into a university next year, or have to join him at the factory. He almost certainly will not get to read this article...
| 1 |