The KGB: Eyes of the Kremlin

The new KGB: how Andropov's agents watch the home front and the world

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million Roman Catholics.

Given the KGB's awesome power and a well-earned reputation for ruthlessness and brutality, it had long been assumed that the men who rule the Soviet Union would never allow a secret-police chief to hold the nation's highest post. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, 68, surmounted that obstacle last November, when he was chosen by the Communist Party's Central Committee to succeed Brezhnev. Andropov was relieved of his job as KGB chief six months earlier and moved to the party Secretariat, but the bureaucratic fig leaf deceived no one.

During his first three months in office, the neatly tailored and coolly authoritative Andropov has worked hard to shake the worldwide stereotype of the KGB heavy in the ill-fitting suit. In a rumor campaign that began before Brezhnev's death, Andropov was portrayed in the West as a sensitive liberal with a fondness for Scotch whisky and the Glenn Miller sound. Now, after most of the disinformation and half-truths have been sifted out, Andropov remains an unknown quantity. What is clear is that his rise to power has coincided with the gradual evolution of the Soviet Union as a modern police state in which the physical terror of the Stalin era has been largely replaced with subtler forms of control. The KGB has developed into an increasingly sophisticated instrument for advancing national interests around the world. As head of the KGB, Andropov had much to do with those changes. Now that he holds the top party job, he has given every indication that he wants to keep things that way.

Issuing a series of nuclear arms proposals designed to appeal to a foreign audience, Andropov has effectively revived the Soviet propaganda offensive against the deployment of new NATO missiles in Europe. So skillful has Andropov's performance been that General Edward Rowny, the U.S. negotiator at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva, has jested that the West is being subjected to "trial by Yuri."

While seeming to be a man of peace abroad, Andropov has virtually declared war at home on sloth, corruption and any signs of nonconformity. In an effort to instill greater discipline in the malingering Soviet work force, police have been ordered to make sweeps of public places, rounding up drunkards, vagrants and workers who ought to be on the job. Last week Andropov went to Moscow's Sergo Ordzhonikidze machine-tool factory, where he held a shop-floor version of a town meeting, and bluntly told the employees that "without discipline we cannot advance quickly."

Intellectuals are also beginning to feel new pressures. In a wave of mass meetings, artists and writers have been warned of ideological "deviations" and reminded that their art must "help the party." Some have been singled out for more specialized treatment. Iconoclastic Historian Roy Medvedev has been officially told to "cease hostile activities" against the Soviet system. Nonconformist Writer Georgi Vladimov was threatened with criminal prosecution by KGB agents (see box).

Most of Andropov's major appointments to date seem designed to consolidate KGB power further. He elevated onetime Azerbaijan KGB Chief Geidar Aliyev, 59, to the key post of Deputy Premier. He sent Vitali Fedorchuk, 64, who replaced Andropov as KGB chief last year, over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which

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