Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

38 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
regions and forced the authorities to impose a stricter passport regime in
trouble spots and to relocate a large number of returnees for work in the
USSR’s eastern provinces. Frustrated, the KGB sharply rebuked the party
for “counterproductive and inadequate” cuts of personnel in the western
provinces that only exacerbated the crisis. 104
The KGB’s own record in 1956 was, however, far from impressive. The
unrest that followed the eruptions in Poland and Hungary exposed a crucial
failure in digesting and processing information. Despite having identified Baltic
students as a potential problem already in the spring of 1956, it was students
who initiated and led mass, well-organized anti-Soviet demonstrations.
Komsomol, party, and police surveys portrayed a cohort that by and large was
isolated from Soviet life (some of whose members could not even name the
first secretary of the Communist Party), deeply anti-Russian, avid followers of
foreign radio broadcasts, and inspired by past sovereignty and the present-day
West. 105 Despite the intensified monitoring of institutions that would shortly
turn into major trouble spots, the KGB seemed to miss them. Five months
before the eruptions, the agency curtailed initiatives by regional officers to
recruit agents among rank-and-file students in certain academies and ruled
out the need to establish agentura in all educational institutions. 106 Come
fall, Estonian students challenged a pillar of the totalitarian order when they
invited peers in other institutions to form an independent union, established
regular contact with Finnish students, demanded the exclusion of Russian
language and Marxism from the school curriculum, expressed vocal support
for the Hungarian rebels, and vowed to follow their example should similar
circumstances arise. 107 Workers’ participation in the demonstrations was an
especially sore point. Heavy industry figured prominently among the KGB’s
surveillance priorities. Throughout 1955, the 14 KGB agents recruited from
more than 2,500 employees in a large plant for the repair and modernization
104 On the KGB warnings in Lithuania, see LYA f. 1771, ap. 190, b. 11, ll. 24–25, 41; in
western Ukraine, TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 24, spr. 4297, ark. 4, 8–9, and Litopys UPA: Nova
seriia, 7 (Kyiv and Toronto, 2001–3): 536–44; in western Belarus, NARB f. 4, op. 62, d.
427, ll. 255–59, 265–66; in Moldova, GARF f. 9479, op. 1, d. 925, ll. 53–53 ob., and Pasat,
Trudnye stranitsy, 721–23, 726–29, 736–38. On the unrest that nationalist returnees caused in
the borderlands, see Amir Weiner, “The Empires Pay a Visit,” Journal of Modern History 78, 2
(2006): 347–56. On the imposition of a stricter passport regime in L´viv in the fall of 1956,
see DAMVSU Kiev f. 3, op. 1, spr. 184, ark. 15–18, 46. On redirection of returnees to work
in eastern regions, see TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 24, spr. 4297, ark. 32–41. For the KGB criticism
of the cuts in personnel and the ensuing complications, see TsDAHOU 1/24/4297/44, 46–48.
105 RGASPI f. M-1, op. 46, d. 192, ll. 6–8, 10, 19–20, 179; LYA f. 4421, ap. 12, b. 57, ll.
27a–42.
106 ERAF SM f. 131, n. 347, s. 1, l. 45.
107 ERAF f. 1, n. 211, s. 5, ll. 108–11; RGASPI f. M-1, op. 46, d. 192, ll. 147–49.