Just like a malignant tumor attacking a living organism, the
ChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB-FSB, as those organs were known at different times of Soviet
and Russian history, will perish along with their host. But it’s a small
consolation for the relatively small number of normal people who still remain
in Russia – as well as for the rest of the world which may be impacted by the
demise of its largest country and second most powerful nuclear power.
The Bolsheviks believed in Marx’s theory of historical
development. In the 18th century, the Age of Reason laid foundations for
scientific analysis, and Marx applied the newly developed methods to the study
of history as though it was one of the natural sciences. He came up with a
number of supposedly “objective laws” by which social, economic and political
development of mankind is occurring. Like all scientific theories, his laws of
history were supposed to explain the past and predict the future. According to
him, the natural future of mankind was going to be communist society.
By today’s standards of scientific research Marx’s analysis was
rubbish. His were not testable theories – at least not at the level of
knowledge we now possess – and historical data he was working with was
extremely subjective and vague. To conclude based on this kind of data that
social development was at an end and that its ultimate goal – the establishment
of communism – was within reach was preposterous. However, in the 19th century,
such methods were universally accepted, and Charles Darwin, for one, came up with
his theory of evolution pretty much by the same mental process. The only
difference was that his conclusions were later supported by practical
experiments, at least as far as simpler organism were concerned. There are
still no tests to check Marx’s “objective laws” of history, and by the look of
it they’re plain wrong.
Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks believed that communism will
replace capitalism just as a century and a half before capitalism had replaced
the feudal system. Since it was going to be a natural change, there was no real
need to prepare for economic or social aspects of communism. All they needed to
do was to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie, confiscate their factories
and make them the property of the people – and the communist economy and
society will spontaneously emerge. Just as capitalism was a more economically
efficient than feudalism, communism would be infinitely more productive than
capitalism.
So they focused on making the revolution – which they did
successfully in November 1917. They also needed to hold on to power and to
purge the “parasitic classes” of the old regime who stood in the way of the
bright communist future. For this purpose they created their first political
police entity, the Emergency Committee – or the dreaded ChK.
It turned out, however, that communism didn’t quite dawn
naturally once Lenin and his buddies set up shop in the Kremlin. World
Revolution failed to materialize and in Russia early experiments with communism
quickly led to a bona fide famine. Peasants refused to surrender grain without
pay, out of the goodness of their heart, and workers in the cities were too
hungry to work.
Since marxism-leninism could not have been at fault, it was
clear that the reason for communism’s economic failure was the presence of
wreckers, saboteurs, spies, capitalist agents and class enemies. The political
police began shearing layer after layer of social classes in Russia, purging
the country to its proletarian core. Since it didn’t help, the repressive
apparatus eventually got into the economic sphere directly, becoming the
supplier of slave labor for Stalin’s white elephant canal digging and dam
building projects, as well for the extraction of natural resources in Siberia
and the Far North.
The organs of state security thus became a malignant tumor on
the body of the country. They ran a huge slave empire and were used to keep the
communist party in power. In fact, Stalin turned them into a tool for personal
control over the party, intimidating everyone and eliminating his enemies, real
and imagined.
After Stalin’s death, the NKVD economic empire was dismantled
while the security organs were put under close party supervision. Soviet
leaders liked the repressive function performed by the KGB, as the agency was
now called, because it helped them maintain power. They just didn’t want
themselves to be periodically fed down its insatiable maw.
However, since the communist economy remained shambolic – and
in the absence slave labor it began to deteriorate alarmingly – the KGB started
to edge back into the economy. Yury Andropov, the long-time head of the
political police, became the country’s supreme leader in 1982, and by the time
he died only a few months later he managed to introduce a bunch of draconian
measure to boost workplace discipline.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to spell the
end of the KGB as well. The statue of ChK founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was toppled
at the Lubyanka Square and former spooks went to work as security guards for
the new oligarchs, or swelled the ranks of organized crime.
Under Putin, not only the organs were miraculously
reconstituted but, for the first time ever, they actually gained full control
over the country. There was suddenly no need to pay lip service to the
communist ideology and there was no one watching over their shoulders.
The only problem is that this organization is incapable of
building or creating. It was set up for the sole purpose of safeguarding
communist party rule and exterminating other human beings. Once they were in
control, they stole trillions of dollars worth of public money and mismanaged
the economy. Then, when the country’s economy started to deteriorate, they felt
they needed to mobilize the population with some kind of an ideology. What they
came up with is extremely unoriginal: a toxic brew of the worst feature of
Imperial Russia – nationalism, imperialism and the greedy, ignorant Orthodox
Church – combined with populist slogans of the Soviet era.
For all their supposed analytical skills and knowledge of the
West, Putin and company managed to alienate the entire civilized world and to
become a pariah state. What they didn’t understand was that after a century of
misguided experimentations and deliberate destruction, today’s Russia is an
economic dwarf, completely dependent on the global financial and commercial
system. The new ideology – and actions that guided it – have been terribly
destructive.
In fact, the tumor metaphor is very apt. Like a neglected
malignancy, the organs of state security have first sucked the vitality of the
Russian economy and then, having metastasized into the brain, blinded the
country to the very real economic peril it has found itself in.
