Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

GETTING TO KNOW YOU 27
socio-political past used for blackmailing during the recruitment of
individual informants, surveillance truly was an equal opportunity system. In
its report on intelligence-operational work in January and March 1949, the
Second Department of the Lithuanian MGB counted 463 agents and 2,208
informants, of whom 16 agents and 49 informants were new recruits. Some
were recruited based on their useful contacts. Agent “Maksim,” a prominent
56-year-old Jewish gynecologist whose list of friends and patients included
former members of the Lithuanian interwar social and economic elite who
were now identified as agents of foreign intelligence services, was recruited for
these very reasons. Agent “Bal´chunas,” a 57-year-old Lithuanian peasant who
had served in the interwar Lithuanian and wartime German police forces, was
recruited because of the information he could provide on individuals who
were in contact with the U.S. embassy in Moscow and others who resided
outside the Soviet Union. Agent “Algis,” a 24-year-old worker, was trained by
the German police in Dresden during the war and took part in battles against
the Red Army before he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. Such a record
earned people a 25-year sentence, but the familiarity of “Algis” with scores of
people with similar backgrounds was more important to the MGB.
Maria Poškus lived up to her code name “Tsiganka” (Gypsy). Having
moved to Germany during the war, where she married a Lithuanian who had
served in the Wehrmacht, Poškus moved between Hamburg and England before
she returned to Lithuania. She kept corresponding with her husband, who
stayed in the British occupation zone in Germany, and was contemplating reuniting
with him when she was recruited on account of her alleged useful contacts
with the British intelligence. Agent “Tamara” was born in Philadelphia
in 1925. After her father’s death in 1934, the family returned to Lithuania. By
1949, “Tamara” was still in limbo, possessing neither Soviet nor U.S. citizenship
despite qualifying for both. She did manage, however, to enroll in the
anti-Soviet underground. Arrested in early 1949, she was not sentenced but
rather was recruited as an agent on account of her past romantic relations with
a leader of a nationalist guerrilla force, familiarity with other leaders of the underground,
and potential intelligence regarding the U.S. embassy in Moscow. 75
While the Soviets may be faulted for coming up short in building a genuinely
egalitarian society, at least on one front the regime constructed and nurtured an
unmistakable socialist trait: every citizen—regardless of political past, ethnicity,
religion, age, or gender—was an eligible informant. 76
75 LYA f. K-1, ap. 2, b. 12, ll. 2–8, 11–13, 83–86.
76 Unsurprisingly, this pattern was identical to the East German Stasi. See Barbara Miller,
The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 2004), 35–85.