As the newly constituted Congress of People's Deputies swung into its second week of parliamentary pyrotechnics, a well-muscled representative from Moscow stepped onto the podium. For days, the Palace of Congresses had echoed with a litany of the sins of past regimes. But here was a man, apparently in full possession of his senses, delivering a passionate condemnation of the once unassailable KGB.
Deputy Uri Vlasov, a 1960 Olympics gold-medal weight lifter, blistered the KGB as "that most secret and conspiratorial of all state institutions." Vlasov should know: in 1953 the Committee for State Security hauled off his father, a diplomat,...
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