No Stalin-Style Brutality, KGB Chief Promises

The chief of the KGB acknowledged Saturday that the secret police played a role in the cruelty and repression of the Stalin regime and vowed that such brutality would never happen again.

“We bow our heads in memory of the innocent victims,” Vladimir A. Kryuchkov said on national television. “This is a moral purification for us all and a guarantee that it will never happen again. Never.”

Kryuchkov made the admission in a speech at a Kremlin gathering in advance of Tuesday’s anniversary celebrations marking the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

The speech was another step in the push by Kryuchkov, who became KGB chief a year ago, to partially lift the tight veil of secrecy over the feared secret police.

Dictator Josef Stalin’s cult of personality “distorted the institutions of Soviet power, and law enforcement bodies, including state security organs, were turned into a weapon of Stalin’s arbitrary rule,” Kryuchkov said.

“There is no justification for the mass repression and cruelty often inflicted on behalf of the revolution, the party and the people,” the KGB chief said.

The Stalin period of 1924-1953 now is widely criticized in the Soviet Union for the murder and imprisonment of millions of innocent citizens. The KGB has been among the last to acknowledge its part in the terror, much less on nationwide television during a celebration of the founding of the Soviet state.

A subdued holiday parade is scheduled Saturday for Red Square. But, like last year, it will have less emphasis on a show of military power than it had in previous years.

Signs on billboards for the holiday have been asking what citizens have been doing for perestroika (restructuring) rather than urging them forward to triumphs of socialism.