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Some Western analysts speculate that Andropov's election as party chief reflects the gradual gravitation of political power in Communist countries toward the military and security sectors. Andropov's first round of appointments certainly suggests that he wants to use KGB men and methods to run the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB agent in Iran who defected to the British last June, insists that Andropov has been and remains a loyal party man. As Kuzichkin told TIME: "In the West people talk about the KGB as if it were an independent body. It is an instrument in the hands of the Soviet Communist Party. Whatever the KGB does inside the country or overseas, it does on the order of the Central Committee." In its emblematic role as the party's sword and shield, the KGB is perhaps the ultimate guarantor of Communist rule. It is the contemporary expression of the traditional Russian obsession with seeking out real and potential enemies of the state.
Ironically, Andropov may owe his rise to the bungling of one of the nation's most notorious secret police chiefs, Lavrenti Beria. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the tiny Georgian with the trademark pincenez tried to bully his way to power by incorporating the Ministry of the Interior into his vast security empire. That incautious move roused a vengeance-minded Politburo to action. Beria was arrested and executed. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in a famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, vowed that the state security forces would be subservient to the principles of "revolutionary socialist legality." The KGB would be run by political appointees answerable to the party leadership, men like Andropov.
A former Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov was chosen by Brezhnev in 1967 to continue the gradual "politicization" of the KGB. He took over a security service still demoralized after several reorganizations. Andropov set about winning friends among the power groups hostile to the secret police. The military, for example, has been a traditional KGB rival. Security police ruthlessly purged the military high command on Stalin's orders in 1937, and uniformed KGB agents still riddle the armed services at all levels, a power unto themselves. It was a measure of Andropov's political skill that he managed to form an alliance with Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, a crucial maneuver in his rise to the top. Says French Sovietologist Hélène Carrère d'Encausse: "Andropov came to the KGB with a double mission: first, to rebuild an efficient police apparatus, and second, to transform it into a modern, effective instrument of the party. He succeeded on both counts." What the security operation lost in brute force it more than made up in political power under Andropov. In 1973, he was granted full membership on the Politburo, the Central Committee's ruling inner circle.
The KGB's new-found status has been enhanced by a public relations campaign designed to help traumatized Soviets forget the horrors of the Stalinist period, during which an