Chekism
Chekism (
The term can refer to the system of rule itself, and to the underlying ideology that promotes and popularizes political police violence and arbitrariness against real and imagined enemies of the state.The name is derived from Cheka, the colloquial name of the first in the succession of Soviet secret police agencies.[a] Employees of Soviet and Russian state security organs have been called Chekists.
Soviet Union
Chekism is described as a product of the set of beliefs, practices, and assumptions in the security police introduced and developed for more than a decade by Felix Dzerzhinsky.[4] The systems he had put in place led to the strengthening of the concept that legitimized and romanticized political terror.[4]
The term Chekism was first defined in a 1950 Russian emigre journal by Soviet defector and Kremlinologist Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, who described the Soviet secret police (here referred to by its older name NKVD) as the backbone of Stalin's dictatorship:
It is not true that power and authority in the Soviet Union are shared between the
Politburo of the Party's Central Committee is an omnipotent superpower ... The Politburo, although bright, is still only a shadow of the real superpower that stands behind the chair of every Politburo member. The Politburo members themselves know it for sure, the Party vaguely guesses it, and the people are apathetic to "high politics". People are taught not to think. One absolute power thinks, acts and dictates for everyone. The name of this force — the NKVD / MVD / MGB ... The Stalinist regime is held together not by the organization of Soviets, Party ideals, the Politburo, or Stalin’s personality, but by the organization and technical skill of the Soviet political police, in which Stalin himself plays the role of the first policeman ... To say the NKVD is the state secret police conveys very little ... To say that the NKVD is a "state within a state" belittles the NKVD, for the mere formulation allows for the presence of two forces: the normal government and that of the supernormal NKVD; while there is only one actual force — universal Chekism. Chekism of the State, Chekism of the Party, Chekism of the collective, Chekism of the individual. Chekism in ideology, Chekism in practice. Chekism from top to bottom. Chekism from the all-powerful Stalin to an insignificant informant.[5]
The last
The system of suppression established after the
class struggle, a kind of "Bolshevik Jacobinism", absolutized the importance of the state as an instrument of power and gave a special place in it to punitive instruments. A network of Cheka organs entangled the entire structure of civil and military institutions of the vast country. By carrying out arrests, investigations, sentences, executions, and mass shootings of "hostages"with the sanction of the Party at its own discretion, the Cheka elevated terror and lawlessness to the category of state policy.From that time of revolutionary arbitrariness originated the particular ideology of "Chekism", which has been polished and licked clean by subsequent generations of Communist Party ideologists and publicists parasitising on "criminal-patriotic" romance. This ideology turned out to be more resilient than the structures that gave birth to it ...
An enemy is always needed. Without one, the meaninglessness of the system becomes clear. That is why "Chekism" is a constant search for an "enemy" according to the conveniently invented formula: "whoever is not with us is against us." Chekism was a constant, unrestricted search for and violence against anyone who did not fit into the rigid scheme of the ideology of the
Bolshevik Party. It is the complete merger of the ideology of the secret services not with the law, but with the ideology of the ruling party.[6]
Contemporary Russia
According to former Russian
The KGB or FSB members usually remain in the "
Some observers note that the current Russian state security organization
In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within a state. Now former KGB officers are running the state. They have custody of the country’s 6,000 nuclear weapons, entrusted to the KGB in the 1950s, and they now also manage the strategic oil industry renationalized by Putin. The KGB successor, rechristened FSB, still has the right to electronically monitor the population, control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. Putin’s Russia has one FSB-ist for every 297 citizens.[14]
However, the number of FSB staff is a
A
Attitudes toward Chekism in contemporary Russia
Chekists perceive themselves as a
The head of the Russian Drug Enforcement Administration Viktor Cherkesov said that all Russian siloviks must act as a united front: "We [Chekists] must stay together. We did not rush to power, we did not wish to appropriate the role of the ruling class. But the history commanded so that the weight of sustaining the Russian statehood fell to the large extent on our shoulders... There were no alternatives".[23] Cherkesov also emphasized the importance of Chekism as a "hook" that keeps the entire country from falling apart: "Falling into the abyss the post-Soviet society caught the Chekist hook. And hanged on it.”[24]
Political scientist Yevgenia Albats found such attitudes deplorable: "Throughout the country, without investigation or trial, the Chekists [of an earlier generation] raged. They tortured old men and raped schoolgirls and killed parents before the eyes of their children. They impaled people, beat them with an iron glove, put wet leather 'crowns' on their heads, buried them alive, locked them in cells where the floor was covered with corpses. Amazing, isn't it that today's agents do not blanch to call themselves Chekists, and proudly claim Dzerzhinsky's legacy?"[25]
See also
- Silovik
- Mafia state
- State capture
- Counterintelligence state
- Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies
- Mitrokhin Archive (smuggled records of the KGB)
- Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti(a post-Soviet successor organization to the KGB)
- Agents provocateurs
- Agent of influence
Notes
References
- ^ The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State, Anderson, Julie (2006), International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, 19:2, 237–288.
- ^ The HUMINT Offensive from Putin's Chekist State Anderson, Julie (2007), International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, 20:2, 258–316
- ISBN 978-1-60911-166-3.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-19-965566-3.
- ^ Posev, No. 41/228, 8 October 1950, pp. 13–14, cited in A. Avtorkhanov, Technologiya Vlasti (Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, 1975) p. 773.
- ^ V. Bakatin, Izbavleniye ot KGB (Moscow, 1992) p. 25—27.
- ^ a b The KGB Rises Again in Russia – by R.C. Paddock – Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2000
- ^ a b c In Russia, A Secretive Force Widens – by P. Finn – The Washington Post, 2006
- ^ Interview with Olga Kryshtanovskaya (Russian) "Siloviks in power: fears or reality?" by Evgenia Albats, Echo of Moscow, 4 February 2006
- ^ A Chill in the Moscow Air, by Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova, Newsweek, February 6, 2006
- ^ Slaves of KGB. 20th Century. The religion of betrayal (Рабы ГБ. XX век. Религия предательства) Archived 2007-05-13 at the Wayback Machine, by Yuri Shchekochikhin Moscow, 1999.
- ^ Archives explosion by Maksim Artemiev, grani.ru, December 22, 2006
- ISBN 0-374-52738-5.
- FreeRepublic.com. Retrieved 2 October 2019.
- ^ FSB will get new members, the capital will get new land, by Igor Plugataryov and Viktor Myasnikov, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 2006, (in Russian)
- ^ Russian Armed Forces Archived 2007-10-14 at the Wayback Machine, official site (in English)
- ^ The Law on State Secrets, 1997 (in Russian) Archived 2007-10-24 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ The Law on the Federal Security Service, 2003 (in Russian) Archived September 5, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
- St. Petersburg Times
- ^ Andrei Illarionov: Approaching Zimbabwe (Russian) Partial English translation Archived July 5, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ ISBN 0-7425-4903-8.
- ^ Russia under Putin. The making of a neo-KGB state., The Economist, August 23, 2007
- ^ Viktor Cherkesov: KGB is in Fashion? Archived September 1, 2005, at the Wayback Machine, Komsomolskaya Pravda, December 28, 2004 (in Russian)
- ^ Cherkesov, Viktor. One can't admit the warriors to become traders Archived 2011-02-11 at the Wayback Machine Kommersant #184 (3760), October 9, 2007. (in Russian)English translation Archived October 25, 2007, at the Wayback Machine and Comments Archived October 17, 2007, at the Wayback Machine by Grigory Pasko
- ISBN 0-374-52738-5, page 95.
Further reading
- Russia: Death and resurrection of the KGB By J. Michael Waller, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization
- A Rogue Intelligence State? Why Europe and America Cannot Ignore Russia By Reuel Marc Gerecht
- Putin's Russia, by Anna Politkovskaya