ABSTRACT
At first the Committee for State Security (KGB) was alone in being protected from radical personnel changes. Before the Twenty-seventh Party Congress only the Moscow city and district KGB chief V. I. Alidin was pensioned off, at the age of seventy-five. The deputy KGB chairmen S. N. Antonov and G. F. Grigorenko were replaced by N. Iermakov and I. Markelov. V. Ponomariov was named a new KGB deputy chairman. In July 1986 the deputy KGB chief of Voroshilovgrad, A. Dichenko, had imprisoned the journalist B. V. Berkhin, who had been investigating perversions of justice in the Ukraine. The KGB opposes a glasnost and repluralization of society that it sees as going too far, with its new informal groups, meetings, and demonstrations. In fact, the KGB has increasingly come under fire from public criticism. The KGB must appear a useful weapon in the struggle against corruption and the excesses of bureaucracy.
