Review – “Chekisms” A KGB Anthology by Vasiliy Mitrokhin

Ever eager to learn criminological lessons from the Russian Revolution I’ve been looking for interesting material on the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. As part of understanding the events of the Russian Revolution we need to be able to examine the bodies used to prevent or deal with criminal activities and whether these were the best methods.

The volume under review covers not only the Cheka but also the OGPU and KGB. It consists on Mitrokhin’s own notes and manuscripts that Mitrokhin had smuggled out of the USSR when he left in 1992. The material is quite revealing, discussing the formation and several early cases of the Cheka, but also dealing with the repression against Trotskyists and others in later years.

Of course my interest lies with early years of the Soviet regime, but Mitrokhin’s material here is mostly his own notes which are full of his own opinions. And these opinions are similar to the ‘original sin’ of Bolshevism idea where Lenin and Stalin are equated, but in this case they are viewed as just more tyrants in a long line of them. Thus Mitrokhin tries to portray Lenin as changing his mind over the need for repressive force after the revolution, even though in his works, including State and Revolution, Lenin points to the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat to repress what remains of the capitalism system.

The big problem I have with this approach is that to truly understand the development of the Cheka, one needs to examine very closely the conditions it was created and developed in and what opposition it was attempting to overcome. Let us not forget that a civil war raged in Russia and that there were assignation attempts on Bolshevik leaders during this period. A detailed study of this period would allow us to come to an opinion as to the necessity of such an organisation preceding from material facts and not just pure moral sentiments. Whilst this book includes some material that could be useful for doing that, it fails at that task itself.

Review – Comrade Criminal by Stephen Handelman (1994)

This is a useful book written by a western journalist who was based in Russia in the years either side of the collapse of Stalinism. The books main focus is on the spiralling crime that engulfed Russia and the rest of the CIS with the restoration of capitalism.

Handelman begins by tracing two main criminal groups in the Soviet Union. Firstly there were the bureaucrats who engaged in corruption and were subject to regular purges by other bureaucrats eager to maintain their positions. Secondly there was the Vor, the Theives Guild in effect the Russian Mafia to be, who at this time were concentrated in more small scale crime.

But it is the collapse of Stalinism that led to the creation of the ‘Comrade Criminals’ that the book is named after. He uses this to describe the former party and state bureaucrats who used their connections to plunder Russia’s resources and then maintain their position. He also describes how the Vor expanded their influence into smuggling all sorts of items, from people, to stolen raw materials and ancient artefacts. Indeed as Handelman goes on to note there becomes a convergence of the two as time goes on.

Handelman also discusses how investigations into organised crime are both commenced and curtailed as part of the battle between rival bureaucrats. He discusses how this frustration feeded into support for the political right for more draconian measures to tackle crime. Of course, the political right were led by just another set of ex-bureaucrats too, which Handleman picks up on when he discusses how the organised criminals saw themselves as the defenders of law and order.

One thread that runs though Handelman’s book, however, is that capitalist restoration was ‘derailed’ from the course it was supposed to take. If only the West had stepped in or the economic ‘entrepreneurs’ had seen the danger from the former state bureaucrats, he laments. Of course, despite the economic problems of the Soviet Union, it needed a section of the bureaucracy to lead it back to capitalism which had a stake in that capitalist future – hence China’s slow authoritarian march to capitalism and why sections of the Cuban bureaucracy are struggling in that direction given the existence of exiles who wish to stake their claim to such positions. Although his exposition of recent times in the Soviet Union is quite good, historically it is appalling equating Stalin with Lenin for example. It is to these mystic roots that he equates many of the problems, which I think is the fundamental weakness of this book which provides a lot of information about organised crime in the present.