World War I derailed Zubatov's plan. It changed not only the rules of the game but the game itself. Once again, history overwhelmed the careful design of the enlightened intelligence elite. No amount of social engineering could contain Russia's chaotic transformation. When news of the February 1917 Revolution reached the retired Zubatov in his Petersburg home, he committed suicide.

The Higher Police under Bolshevism

THE NEW ERA posed the strongest challenge yet to the very survival of the upper-nobility elite notion of the Higher Police. How could their self-conception as the best and the brightest, the servants of Russia according to the druzhina ideal, the social engineers and master manipulators, endure under Bolshevik rule? Of course, many creatures of the old Okhrana did survive and prosper under the new regime. Many former agents--Stalin being most probably one of them--were now to be found in leadership positions in the Soviet Communist Party and the state apparatus. In addition, members of the "Black Hundreds" flocked into the Bolshevik Party; the anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-liberal outlook of proto-fascist mass movements easily accommodated itself to Bolshevik ideology while the Bolsheviks welcomed the aroused masses into their ranks. As a result, the newly established Bolshevik secret police, the "Extraordinary Commission" (Cheka), was comprised of a mixed and motley crew.

It was clear that the functions ascribed by Lenin to the new Cheka had less to do with social engineering than with social deconstruction by means of the extermination of non-approved social categories. The Cheka's incentive structure emphasized murder, torture, brutality and atrocities of all stripes, not sociological investigation. The Higher Police thus yielded to another current, which has also recurred throughout Russian history: the sheer violence exerted by the state against all, the war by government against society. Just as Ivan the Terrible's personal guard, the oprichniki, had visited unspeakable brutality upon nobles and the general populace during the 16th century, Lenin's oprichniki slaughtered millions of Russians with little regard for higher-police methods. "Cruelty is the Russians' principal trait", Maxim Gorky once wrote.

Still, even in this most brutal chapter of the history of the Russian secret services, there is evidence of the less coercive, social-engineering approach to the intelligence function. Interestingly, the founder of the first Bolshevik security organization after Lenin's putsch of October-November 1917 was not, as is often assumed, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Savonarola of mass-murder--it was rather Lenin's old friend and confidante, V. I. Bonch-Bruyevich, a professional anthropologist.⁷ Although a shroud of secrecy still surrounds the inner workings of Soviet intelligence in its initial period (from 1917 through 1939), there was a full-fledged social science research department inside the NKVD, at least in the 1930s. Staffed by sociologists, economists, anthropologists and others, it was tasked to study and report independently--independently of both party and NKVD hierarchies--on the state of affairs in the Soviet Union, including the morale of the population. A very unusual freedom of thought reportedly prev ailed within the unit. ⁸

A more critical development in the historical continuity of the Russian intelligence services took place in the 1940s. Dzerzhinsky and his ferocious successors, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who organized the purges of the 1930s that resulted in the death of millions, were primarily concerned with terror as the principal means of government. This changed when Stalin appointed his fellow Georgian, Lavrentii Beria, to head the NKVD in 1939.

Beria was no boy scout, to be sure, but neither was he the monster of Cold War lore. Indeed, his once execrable reputation has been thoroughly revised in Russia in recent times. The traditional portrayal of a bloodthirsty psychopath and monstrous sex maniac has been replaced by a "new Beria." The new narrative relies in large part on the memoir of Beria written by his son, missile engineer Sergo Beria. It is an extraordinary book whose center stage is the inner recesses of Soviet power under Stalin.⁹ The version of the elder Beria displayed there portrays a Georgian who is not a Communist, a senior party leader who loathes Communist ideology and a planner who places efficiency and rationality above all other values.

In truth, too, Beria did rescue many top Soviet scientists and technologists from Stalin's crass repression. These included the nuclear scientist Igor Kurchatov, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, and many others who were often employed in the jail-laboratories--the "luxury" gulag for scientists, the famed sharaga. During World War II, Stalin entrusted Beria with leading the Soviet crash program to develop nuclear weapons. Beria delivered. He rallied the scientific and technological intelligentsia in part by effectively protecting it. Further, he created within his Ministry of the Interior (MVD) a string of research institutes. The mission of these think tanks was to elaborate full sets of policies, both domestic and international. As was later claimed, Beria wanted supreme power, and to that end he prepared alternative policies. A foreign policy proposing a neutralized Germany as the first step to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States is one of the best-known planks in Beria's program.

"Enlightened" and pragmatic though he was, Beria lost out in the power struggles that followed Stalin's death, and was executed by the Politburo. In all likelihood, Beria, who terrified all the other Soviet leaders, fell victim to a coalition of the frightened. Nikita Khrushchev, who ended up as the head of the coalition that eliminated Beria, reduced the size of the organs"--the secret police in Soviet parlance--lest they threaten again to take over the system as a whole. But the ideas, plans, and programs that had been associated with Beria kept resurfacing in the Soviet Union for thirty years and more after his death: the debate over economic decentralization identified with economists Yevsei Liberman and Vadim Trapeznikov; the Kosygin policy of giving more power to enterprise directors; and the liberation of political prisoners (Beria had halved the number of concentration camp inmates, zeks, in the late 1940s). Beria proteges kept on rising, too; Dimitri Ustinov as defense minister was but one example.

The rise of KGB head Yuri Andropov under Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, heralded a new era in the history of the Higher Police. Early in his reign, Andropov summoned Sergo Beria to his office and, according to the latter, told him: "Sergo, I've studied your father's file, the materials and the policy: they're good and I'm going to implement them." It was Andropov who turned to the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences, to the prestigious research institutes associated with it, and thus to some of the country's brightest minds: Tatiyana Zaslavskaya of the Institute of Sociology in Novosibirsk, Abel Aganbegyan and his Institute for the Study of Industrial Organization, Leonid Abalkin and the Institute of Economics.¹⁰ He asked them, often personally, to devise new policies and new strategies to save the Soviet system. In effect, Andropov asked these scientists (who were generally not members of the KGB themselves) to do the think-tanking for the new course he was plotting--perestroika. The top- down transformation envisioned by Andropov was perhaps the apex of Russian hubris in matters of social engineering; not only was the country going to be turned upside down and its economy thoroughly restructured by a self-appointed leadership, but the country was not even going to be told about the plan.

Only Andropov's unexpected death and the premature elevation of a leader who commanded little following and loyalty forced the matter into the open. Mikhail Gorbachev appended glasnost to perestroika as a substitute means to gain the authority Andropov could have wielded through the intelligence and security apparatus. The rest is, as they say, history.

The Post-Communist Higher Police

THE SOVIET Union crashed as soon as the regime center's coercive resolve failed it. The Communist Party, which revealed itself as nothing but a coalition of rent-seekers leveraging power for its members' own ends, crashed too. The once almighty State Planning Commission, Gosplan--that monument to artificial, arbitrary mismanagement--vanished. Deprived of their right to claim a permanent blood transfusion from the economy, the armed forces faltered. What survived amid all this wreckage, despite the shrinking of its perimeter and the escape and removal of whole areas of national life from its brief, was the intelligence service. Overcoming a brief initial period of shock and disarray from the old regime's collapse, the intelligence elite has by all indications steadily regrouped throughout the 1990s, both within government and the newly-formed private sector.

By 1998, the intelligence elite emerged openly into positions of authority; especially in the presidential apparatus. To mention but a few examples, Sergey Ivanov, Putin's Minister of Defense, spent 18 years in the KGB-FSB. Oleg Chernov (Deputy Secretary of the Security Council), Aleksandr Manzhosin (First Deputy Head of the President's Directorate for Foreign Policy), Igor Sechin (Putin's chief secretary and deputy chief of the Kremlin administration) and Viktor Ivanov (deputy head of the Kremlin administration in charge of personnel) are all long-time senior veterans of the KGB. In their view, the current circumstance is the fulfillment of their historical destiny. Listen to how it is explained by one of these proud contemporary upholders of the "true" Russia. Nikolai Leonov, a former deputy head of the KGB's First Main Directorate (foreign intelligence), was for years the controller of all KGB terror and subversion networks in the Americas. In a recent interview he was asked why so many former and current KGB operatives have assumed positions of power in Russia today. Leonov replied: