Feeling a bit lethargic over the last couple days from fasting (hunger does not incline one to prodigious output), I took a little break from writing and focused instead on reading. After finishing up a book on Captain Richard Burton, a famous linguist, spy and adventurer who worked for the British Empire in the 19th century, I found an odd little paperback titled I Was an NKVD Agent (Anatoli Granovsky), and read it in a night.
Although I can’t corroborate the man’s story, it was a fascinating book published in the early 60s, about 15 years after Granovsky defected to Sweden. In it, Granovsky tells the story of his life as a child and young man in the most oppressive and chaotic era of Soviet history — the great purge of the 30s and WWII.
After his father, a high-ranking bureaucrat, was liquidated in the 1930s, Granovsky tried in frustration to reason with the NKVD, eventually earning himself an extended stay in Lubyanka prison, known to Russians as “the tallest building in Moscow… one can see Siberia from its basement.”
Finally, after making an appeal to NKVD head honcho Lavrentiy Beria, a cruel, tyrannical Georgian who presided over mass murder and appalling massacres, notably the Katyn massacre of the Polish elite in 1940, Granovsky was recruited as an NKVD agent to spy on his former elite friends, with whom he had spent his childhood before his family’s fall from power.
The NKVD, later to become the KGB, was the Soviet Union’s secret police, and was the domestic arm of state control. Due to Stalin’s enormous paranoia and lust for power, the NKVD grew into a monstrously powerful organization that permeated every niche of Soviet society. The chekists, as NKVD agents were known, had enormous power and privilege, which they ostensibly used to further the goals of Communism, but also to enrich and enjoy themselves in various manners according to their tastes.
What I found most interesting about the book was the picture it gave of the life of a chekist, and of the organization as a whole. Although it’s fairly well-known that brutality and lack of concern for human life characterized the Soviet secret police, I hadn’t been aware that the organization was comprised largely of very young men (and some women). Granovsky himself began his career as an agent in his late teens, and ended it in his mid 20s. In some ways, the NKVD resembled a Los Angeles street gang more than a Western-style bureaucracy. Rule of law was essentially nonexistent, and authority rested upon one’s ability to liquidate opponents. True friendship and comradery existed to some extent, but ultimately a fatalistic attitude toward all tender human emotions prevailed, and one’s ability to get by, indeed, to survive, often depended upon a man’s willingness to betray, abandon, and sometimes even destroy, those he cared about.
If the book is an accurate account of a chekist’s life, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, there was no matriarchy in the Soviet Union. Feminism played no part in Soviet power politics, and it appears that nobody took it seriously in any event. Women may have had it a little better than men, but this was only because of the unchecked brutality with which men treated each other; where men were ruthlessly beaten and then murdered, women were simply raped or forced into sexual service. And rape was exceedingly common, often used as a tactic to humiliate husbands or intimidate them into confessions. In one anecdote Granovsky relates, a prisoner was forced to watch his pregnant wife beaten until she lost the baby, all while agents were screaming at him to confess.
WWII occupies the latter half of the book, and the picture the author gives us of the Great Patriotic War is one of chaos, deprivation, and barbarism of the highest degree — on both sides. Rather than a front that rolled along neatly to the war’s conclusion as in Western Europe, the Soviet march to victory was marked by messy conflagrations that continued for some time after Germany’s surrender. Breslau, the site of a prolonged siege lasting months until the city finally surrendered, was evidently defended largely by Soviet POWs who fought the Red Army to the last man, fully aware of what fate awaited those who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner by the enemy. Eastern European nationalists continued to engage in attacks on the Russian rear, which continued for several years after the war.
All in all, it was a good read, and I’d recommend the book to those interested in the history of Communism and the Soviet Union. Although not a comprehensive history by any means, it is a compelling story and lends some insight into Soviet society.
What I took away from the book is that in societies where men do not respect or value each other, everyone suffers. A lack of respect for men’s human rights – for their very humanity – does not result in a better society for women or children. Quite the opposite, in fact. Feminists, who would improve women’s condition by degrading men’s, are doing their sisters a grave disservice. Although men, as always, will bear the brunt of the abuses, women eventually pay a terrible price as well.
