Will Anyone Miss the KGB? : Goodby to surveillance, domestic infiltration, repression?

The Soviet Union’s State Security Committee--the KGB--which with its predecessors constituted what one historian has called “the most powerful, privileged and irresponsible section of society”--is about to be dissolved.

The historic decision by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the leaders of 10 republics to break up the vast secret police apparatus could well inaugurate a new era in human rights. From the Bolshevik coup d’etat in 1917 until almost the present moment, virtually every citizen of the Soviet Union has had to assume that his actions, movements and even thoughts could at any time come under the scrutiny of the omnipresent domestic spying agency. To bring the KGB’s internal surveillance and political monitoring activities to a full stop would represent an unprecedented opportunity to enlarge personal freedoms.

This does not mean that the Soviet Union or whatever confederal arrangement replaces it will be without security organs. The government will continue to provide intelligence and counterespionage. What it will no longer do, it says, is spy on its own people.

Repressive regimes the world over rely on domestic spying on an enormous scale as a primary instrument of political control because such regimes, lacking popular legitimacy, instinctively fear and distrust those they rule. Now Russia and many of the other republics of the Soviet Union have started on the hard road to representative popular government. This does not necessarily assure a bright future for democracy, whose durability in the harsh climate of spreading economic malaise and sharp ethnic conflicts has yet to be proven. But certainly democratic government will have a far better chance of succeeding once the odious mechanism of sweeping domestic spying, used for so long to sustain totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, finally is dismantled.