Changing Role of the Once-Feared KGB Draws Chuckles at Congress

It may be just the latest symptom of crisis in Soviet society, but it was the chairman of the KGB who drew the biggest laugh of the day from Communist Party leaders on Tuesday as he gave a dire survey of the forces menacing the country from within and without.

Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, chairman of the Soviet state security agency, noted that with crime, ethnic strife and political extremism on the rise, people are asking, “Where’s the KGB looking?” He provoked guffaws from delegates to the 28th Communist Party Congress when he supplied the answer: “In general, we’re looking where we should.”

Once the Soviet state’s mechanism for hounding or brutally muzzling dissidents like human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov, the KGB is now fighting organized crime and protecting the “constitutional order” in line with the liberalization of society under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Some of the woeful consequences of the relaxed Kremlin controls, like the existence of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing ethnic violence, make reports from KGB operatives across the country sometimes read like dispatches from a war front, Kryuchkov, a member of the party’s ruling Politburo, said.

He noted that Afghanistan’s leadership has launched a campaign of “national reconciliation” to end civil war there.

“We need to speak today about national reconciliation in our country,” the nation’s top secret police officer told the congress.

Kryuchkov said it would be wrong to see “the hand of special services” of foreign countries in all the Soviet Union’s domestic ills, and he stressed the need for heightened vigilance despite the dramatic improvement in ties with the United States and other Western countries.

“Unfortunately, the positive changes in international relations gave rise to the view among some Soviet people reflecting the other extreme, namely, a full or partial loss of the sense of danger, the underestimating of the threat to the political power of the Soviet people.”

In the past three or four years alone, dozens of citizens working as spies for foreign powers have been unmasked, he said.

Kryuchkov said a new law has been drafted that for the first time would clearly define the functions of the KGB, which has nicknamed itself “the sword and shield of the party.” Some progressives want the KGB banned from domestic activity as a discredited tool for Communist control over individual citizens.