ABSTRACT
At the XXII Party Congress in October 1961, Aleksandr Shelepin, chair of the Committee for State Security (the KGB), summed up the recent reforms of the KGB. Shelepin asserted that as a result of the reforms, the KGB’s work was now based on ‘complete trust in the Soviet person’, and that ‘Now chekists can look into the eyes of the party, into the eyes of the Soviet people, with a clear conscience’.1 This speech exemplified the mixed messages sent by the Khrushchev regime about the newly created Soviet security organs. On the one hand, the fact that Shelepin saw fit to justify the security apparatus and to proclaim a ‘clear conscience’ marked a dramatic departure from Stalinist attitudes towards the Soviet security apparatus. Yet read from another angle, the speech can also be seen to mark the effective rehabilitation of the security apparatus in the wake of its unprecedented stigmatization during the Thaw. While purporting to acknowledge and condemn the crimes of the secret police, Shelepin’s speech sent a signal that the period in which it had been acceptable to discuss the Great Terror and to criticize the secret police had come to an end; the subject was now effectively closed. Shelepin’s speech, with its inherent ambiguity, typifies the equivocation,
prevarication and ongoing uncertainty of the Soviet leadership during this period over the role and position of the new KGB, which was created in March 1954. The Khrushchev era was a time of flux as far as the Soviet security apparatus was concerned, complicated in particular by the continuing resonances of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech condemning the secret police’s role in Stalin’s Great Terror. In the institutional memory of the Russian security apparatus, the evaluation
of this period is unequivocally negative. In the related literature, the Khrushchev era figures strongly as a time of humiliation and catastrophe for the security apparatus. A recent article in Spetsnaz Rossii describes the ‘moral traumas’ that ‘thousands of worthy officers’ suffered as a result of Shelepin’s 1956 reclassification of KGB officer ranks.2 It is indeed the case that a strong stigma adhered to the security organs during the early Khrushchev era, such that the term ‘chekist’ – previously a label denoting purity and untouchability – effectively became a ‘dirty word’ as far as the party leadership was concerned. Two anecdotes from the memoir literature serve to illustrate this point.
