Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

34 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
The unreliability of a large portion of the gathered information was
augmented by the questionable reliability of those who solicited and
processed it. By the late Stalinist era, this turned into a thorny issue
and triggered a drive for improved professional standards. Following unionwide
MGB decrees on 10 January and 10 April 1952, regional branches of
the organization were subjected to drastic cuts in personnel and recruitment
procedures were thoroughly reorganized. The key categories of “agent” and
“informant” were replaced by “agent” and “special agent,” respectively,
and could be recruited only by heads of departments. Rank-and-file
operatives who had hitherto played a major role in recruitment were limited
to the preparation of material on the new recruits. 93
Within two months, the Lithuanian branch was reduced by 65.6
percent, from 27,711 agents, informants, and residents to 9,517 people. The
agency’s own analysis pointed to serious deficiencies. Some 1,054 agents and
informants were dismissed on grounds of double-dealing, misinformation,
and violation of secrecy. The rest simply appeared to be useless and redundant.
Like so many other Soviet institutions, the security forces were plagued by the
urge to keep up appearances and fulfill quotas. Some agents were employed
regardless of having been exposed by fellow kolkhozniks who complained
that “[the agents] did not fulfill their work norms because they were busy
with secret cooperation with the MGB organs.” Others who were unqualified
or had criminal records were kept in the surveillance network since “there
was no surveillance in the kolkhoz where they worked and they are needed in
any case.” Scores of informants who at least on paper looked like promising
prospects for valuable information on the old intelligentsia and national
minorities were kept on the rosters despite offering no information and
avoiding meetings with their handlers over several years. In some cases, they
refused flat out to work for the organization or threatened suicide if they were
not left alone. Hence, for example, after four futile years the MGB had to
release the private physician of Antanas Smetona, the interwar Lithuanian
president, who was also a driving force behind the French-Lithuanian Society.
The person, identified as informant “Iusupov” flatly refused to offer any
information from the moment of his recruitment in 1948.
The MGB concluded that the purge marked a significant improvement
in its work. Having been saddled with too many agents and informants and
93 Chebrikov, Istoriia, 460–61. Notably, the police agencies pursued these reforms
simultaneously to its (futile) flirtation with reforms of the Gulag as a whole, turning it into
an economically more effective enterprise. See Aleksei Tikhonov, “The End of the Gulag,”
in The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, ed. Paul Gregory (Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press, 2003), 67–73.