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Still, with a landmass of 8.6 million sq. mi. and a population of 271 million, the Soviet Union would present logistical problems for even the most efficient police organization. The KGB manages to sustain the illusion of being all-powerful largely because Soviet citizens police one another. Schoolchildren are taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, a 13-year-old who was murdered by enraged villagers during the forced collectivization of farms in the early 1930s after he informed local Communist authorities that his father was sheltering more prosperous peasants. Few Soviets today would be likely to follow young Pavlik's example, but there are more than enough concerned citizens ready to play the role of stukachi, or stool pigeons. An elderly pensioner with time on her hands could consider it a patriotic duty to report any foreign-looking types who visit her apartment building at odd hours. In a society where many people routinely break laws against black-market activities just to get by, everyone is vulnerable to denunciation by a neighbor or friend who has his own sins to hide.
During the Andropov era, the overwhelming majority of Soviets have lost their fear of the midnight knock on the door and the random arrest, but the KGB still moves with brutal swiftness to suppress dangerous displays of "nonconformity." One innovation was the creation of a KGB directorate to control political, nationalist and religious dissent. The directorate has achieved results without great social disruption, something that Andropov's conservative comrades on the Politburo clearly value. The democratic movement within the Soviet Union that first surfaced in the 1960s and gained impetus from the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Human Rights has been all but crushed. Punishment for dissent has been selectively tailored for the dissidents: some are expelled, as outspoken Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in 1974; others, like Nobel Peace Prizewinner Andrei Sakharov, are sent into internal exile; still others—like Sergei Batovrin, spokesman for an independent peace group-are shut away in psychiatric hospitals. Finally, there is the Gulag, which, according to human rights activists, holds some 1,000 known political prisoners today, though the count might be three times as large.
The broad range of options available to the KGB is evident in its control of religious groups. Arrests of Russian Orthodox priests are rare because the party holds the mostly docile church hierarchy firmly in its grip. Protestant believers, mainly Baptists, Pentecostalists and Adventists, who refuse to register with the state, are routinely arrested and sent to labor camps. In the Roman Catholic republic of Lithuania, where clergy arrests might rouse nationalist feelings, three priests have been killed since October 1980 under suspicious circumstances; one was apparently pushed into the path of a speeding truck. Thousands of Soviet Jews who have been refused exit visas to Israel are also a target of KGB persecution.
Just how all-pervasive the KGB presence can be was illustrated last November, when a dozen Pentecostalists set out from Chernogorsk, Siberia, to visit relatives living in the basement of the U.S. embassy in Moscow. On their arrival at Yaroslavl station, they were greeted by a KGB agent who claimed to work