Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

GETTING TO KNOW YOU 41
were institutionalized in the postwar era. Throughout the first half of 1945, the
NKVD plenipotentiaries at the front—some of whom presided over the 1940–
41 cleansing operation in eastern Poland and the Baltic states—were engaged
in a private competition as to who would carry out and report to Moscow the
largest number of arrests and executions. 116 With Stalin breathing down his
neck during the postwar collectivization and anti-nationalist campaigns (“I
warn you that if you persist in taking such an unstate-like and un-Bolshevik
path in the future, this business may end badly”), 117 Khrushchev bluntly
altered lower estimates of anti-Soviet guerrillas fatalities to significantly larger
numbers, publicly lamented the “liberalism displayed by the NKVD and
NKGB in 1941,” and the current “nonsensical, very, very low number of
[rebel] families deported,” exhorted his subordinates to “conduct deportation
to Siberia in daylight,” and instructed them to “arrest even the least important
ones. Some must be tried, others can be hanged, the rest deported. For one
of ours, we will take a hundred of them,” and “You haven’t used enough
violence! When you seize a village where they killed two women, you must
destroy the entire village.” 118 Collateral ruled the day.
In all likelihood, this was not a modus operandi that would entice
mimicking by other intelligence services. It would be a mistake, however, to
evaluate the surveillance system on a professional basis alone. True, opting for
collective targeting ran counter to the professional ethos to which the security
services aspired, and it further embittered large segments of society and
violated the official stand of individually based justice following the “Great
Break.” But in the Stalinist pressure cooker and quota system, indiscriminate
targeting was not simply the only method of choice. It was also highly
effective in subjugating a restless society—a dividend that outweighed all
other deficiencies. Imprecision was a reflection of both the system and its
ever-suspicious leader, who blocked all attempts at reform and an affordable
price tag. Shifting course to a more accurate gathering of information and
individual targeting was conditioned both by the death of the dictator and by
successors with a different regard for their society.
Conclusion
The fall of 1956 may have marked a low point for the security services, but
the KGB did not betray a sense of despair or resignation. Nor did it resort
to its old methods. With the help of Komsomol activists, interrogations, and
116 Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel´ KGB: Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 39–40.
117 RGASPI f. 17, op. 167, d. 72, l. 126.
118 Tomilina, Nikita Khrushchev, 1:86–87, 90, 118; William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man
and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 195–96.