The KGB Gets Spanked | TIME

TIME

January 19, 1987 12:00 AM EST

When Viktor Berkhin, a reporter for the monthly magazine Soviet Miner, was arrested last July on charges of “hooliganism,” cries of foul came from an unlikely Big Brother. None other than the mighty Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, rushed to Berkhin’s defense with two articles setting out the details of his arrest, 14-day detention and the police search of his apartment. Pravda charged that Berkhin’s only crime was that he had done his job too well, riling local authorities by exposing government corruption in a coal-mining region of the Ukraine. The paper concluded that the secret police had committed “gross violations of socialist legality” in their treatment of Berkhin.

Last week the case came to a startling and unprecedented conclusion. The KGB official who had engineered Berkhin’s arrest was fired, and there were warnings that more dismissals were in the offing. Even more surprising was the way the firing was announced: on the front page of Pravda. In a statement signed by KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov, the offending officer was castigated as a discredit to his profession. Chebrikov pledged to take measures to “ensure the strict observance of law” by state security forces.

Both the admission of misconduct and the public disclosure of punitive action against a ranking KGB officer were virtually unheard-of events. They seemed to indicate that even the elite secret police will not be immune to Mikhail Gorbachev’s calls for glasnost, a program of openness aimed at exposing shortcomings and abuses of power in Soviet life. Some analysts speculate that the Kremlin is determined to bring the KGB under control. It will undoubtedly take time, and more disciplinary actions, before KGB agents lose their enthusiasm for trampling on the civil rights of Soviet citizens. But the incident is certain to encourage Soviet journalists to write more frankly about their country’s problems.

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