Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

42 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
intelligence, its investigators reconstructed the events and quickly apprehended
the leading instigators of the riots. The agency chose not to prosecute several
students who had been caught a few days earlier writing pro-Hungarian
graffiti and limited itself to “prophylactic” measures since the students were
of “our social origins”—that is, workers. Instead, it recommended that they
be expelled from the university and drafted into the army as a deterrence
to other potential offenders. The response to the mass outbreaks three days
later was equally restrained. Except for four individuals who were arrested
and sentenced, the rest of the 85 detainees were questioned, warned, and
released. 119 Restraint spelled confidence, and for a reason. By that time, the
KGB was already in full transition to a new era.
With a new leadership that displayed confidence in local cadres and
the population, as well as in the ability of the system to absorb shocks—the
very features absent from Stalin’s world—reforms were underway. Further
compilation and use of the special card index was ruled unnecessary, and
sometime later it was stored in a remote location in Siberia. 120 The security
forces moved to enforce widespread communal policing on the restless western
frontier via public trials, street patrols, and an active constituency of war
veterans that yielded more information on its population than ever before.
With the armed opposition crushed, the embryonic dissident movement
offered nothing the security services could not handle. This, however, was
only half of the story. With mass terror out, the regime faced two major
challenges of its own making. Mass terror was the only viable tool to keep
in check the growing and unbridgeable gap between the utopian claims and
the dreary reality of socialism in power. The question now arose: how long
could the Stalinist formula of vast operational knowledge and little social
understanding be sustained, especially with incomprehensible and restless
youth, a rising middle class, and increasing exposure to a wealthier outside
world via tourism, radio and television broadcasts, and cultural exchanges—
in short, the very things that the Soviet Union struggled to either fathom or
contain.
A final word concerns the relations between the Soviet surveillance
system and the Soviet enterprise as a whole, a perspective that highlights
that system’s relatively impressive record in infiltrating alien constituencies,
especially when compared with the intelligence services of other polities.
Imposing their rule on foreign populations, European empires, such as the
British and the French, developed vast systems of study and control with
119 LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 509, ll. 178, 245.
120 Kopylova, ‘‘V poiskakh ‘spetskartotetki GAU NKVD SSSR,’ ’’ 31– 37.