KGB’s True Confessions Spark Emigrants’ Anger : Russia: Spy agency admits it killed former dissident. Accusations fly as documents are opened.

The KGB never really meant to kill Dr. Alexander S. Trushnovich, it claims, only to kidnap him. But he struggled with his KGB captors and choked to death, a rag stuffed into his mouth. His body was spirited back from Germany to the Soviet Union and secretly buried.

By admitting to that much, the KGB--now in the transformed guise of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service--opened itself up this week to a new volley of accusations even as it tried to lay to rest one of the unsolved mysteries of the Soviet past.

Russian security agencies had already begun to release files on the persecution of dissidents at home, but now they must also absorb the fury, accumulated over decades, of Russian emigrant groups who could never feel safe from the long arm of the KGB whether they lived in Europe or America.

“The KGB ran a whole series of attacks, murders, kidnapings and poisonings against us,” said Yekaterina Breitbart, director of the emigrant journal Posev. “This case involves a whole organization and what it really was.”

When he was killed in 1954, Trushnovich led one of the oldest anti-Communist organizations, the Popular Labor Alliance, known by its Russian acronym NTS. Founded in the 1930s by emigrants who had fled Soviet Bolshevism, the group launched its own propaganda war against the Communist regime, even going so far as to smuggle pamphlets in by balloon and subvert young Soviet sailors in foreign ports.

In the war of words and underground maneuvers that continued for decades between the NTS and the KGB, Trushnovich was one of the most prominent victims.

“And for 35 years,” said Mikhail Gorbanevsky, a journalist and member of a new public committee on cases such as Trushnovich’s, “the Russian public and the democratic forces in Russia knew nothing about the fate of Alexander S. Trushnovich.”

Now, after months of requests from the Trushnovich family and their friends, Russian intelligence sources have released to Trushnovich’s son, Yaroslav, three documents on his father’s death and a small item from his personal effects--his address book.

That, the angry son said at a news conference this week, is not enough. He wants the full documentation on who ordered his father’s kidnaping and whose fault it was that it turned fatal. Russian intelligence officers have thus far refused, sticking to their usual position that they can reveal nothing about their agents abroad and how they worked.

“This story is terrible,” Yaroslav Trushnovich said. “But if we don’t know our own history, then our truck drivers will start hanging portraits of Stalin in their cabs again and saying that at least under him, there was order.”

There were other, similar cases involving NTS members, including kidnapings that successfully landed emigrants back in the gulag, the system of Soviet labor camps, plus at least one other murder and suspicious explosions in key buildings, Gorbanevsky said.

But the case of Trushnovich, like that of Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic Swedish diplomat who disappeared into Soviet hands at the end of World War II after saving trainloads of Jews from Nazi death camps, carries special emotional weight for many.

“The Trushnovich affair is a mysterious and tragic page in the history of Russia,” Gorbanevsky wrote in the May issue of Posev. The journal’s cover carried a photograph of Trushnovich, a balding, dark-eyed man with heavy brows lowered in thought.

An ethnic Slovene, Trushnovich lived through the Russian Revolution and the repressions that followed, escaping from the Soviet Union in 1934 and beginning anti-Communist activism soon afterward. He settled in Berlin and was active in distributing aid to Soviet refugees.

He was 61 when he was kidnaped from a German’s apartment in the British sector of West Berlin in 1954. Neighbors reported seeing an unconscious man, apparently Trushnovich, being carried downstairs on another man’s shoulders.

Soon afterward, Communist sources claimed that Trushnovich had left for the East voluntarily and broken all ties with the NTS. A formal declaration in which Trushnovich purportedly renounced his anti-communism even appeared in a German newspaper, but he was never seen or heard via broadcast media.

Gorbanevsky believes that the KGB had hoped to “zombie-ize” Trushnovich to use him for a broad propaganda campaign but that his death foiled their plans.