Spy chief says Stalin purges not all that bad

RUSSIA: The director of Russia’s FSB security service said the Stalinist purges of the 1930s had ‘‘an objective side’’, despite hundreds of thousands of people being executed during the Great Terror and historians saying many trials were fabricated.

Alexander Bortnikov was marking the centenary of the founding of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka. He suggested that spies should not reject their roots in the Cheka, which organised Lenin’s Red Terror during the civil war after the revolution in 1917.

Bortnikov referred to the purges as ‘‘mass political repressions’’, adding: ‘‘I don’t want to whitewash anyone.’’

He cited Soviet figures that 642,980 people were sentenced to execution between 1921 and Stalin’s death in 1953. He said there were ‘‘different kinds of people’’ working in the NKVD, the precurser of the KGB that carried out most of the killings.

‘‘That included yes-men who followed the principle ‘the end justifies the means’ but also those motivated by selfless ideals ... Although this period is associated with the mass fabrication of allegations, the archive materials bear witness to the presence of an objective side in a significant part of the criminal cases.’’

Bortnikov also stressed the heroic side of the Cheka. Asked if he was embarrassed that FSB officers were often called ‘‘chekists’’ after the ruthless service, Bortnikov said: ‘‘It does not bother me at all.’’

The Cheka was founded in December 1917 by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its official name was the All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

The commission was created to spy on the Bolsheviks’ opponents but also killed thousands of ‘‘class enemies’’ during Russia’s civil car, often without trial.

Bortnikov, 66, told Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper that the work of modern-day spies had ‘‘nothing in common’’ with that of the early Soviet period. But he argued that the traditions of the Cheka, known as the ‘‘punishing sword of the revolution’’, carried on for decades after it was dissolved in 1922. ‘‘Disowning the word ‘chekist’ would only be to commit our forebears to oblivion,’’ he added.

Bortnikov cited the arrest of Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British vice-consul in Moscow, in 1918, as an early Cheka success. Lockhart was accused of plotting against the Bolsheviks. The FSB director also praised the unmasking the next year of the MI6 agent Paul Dukes, ‘‘the man with a hundred faces’’. He escaped to Britain, where he was knighted by George V.

Bortnikov warned that foreign intelligence services were ‘‘trying to infiltrate all spheres of our state’s activity. The destruction of Russia remains an idee fixe.’’