The Forest

Closing Down the K.G.B.

By David Wise

November 24, 1991

November 24, 1991, Section 6, Page 30

YASENEVO.

Even to most Soviet citizens, the name is unfamiliar. But to anyone in the K.G.B., it needs no explanation. The highly guarded, restricted compound in a wooded area southwest of Moscow is the headquarters of the K.G.B.'s First Chief Directorate, its intelligence and espionage arm. The spies.

It is night, and we are speeding east along Moscow's outer ring road in a black Volga. I am the first Western reporter ever to be allowed into the directorate, the Pervoye Glavnoye Upravlenie. The huge K.G.B. man at the wheel has the broad shoulders of a linebacker; he is so tall that his head touches the top of the car.

All at once, through the darkness and the mist, the red lights atop the 21-story skyscraper inside Yasenevo come into view. A few minutes later, the Volga swings into an unmarked exit on the right. All that is visible from the ring road is an international "no entry" sign, designed to turn back any hapless civilians who take a wrong turn.

The Volga moves along a narrow road amid birch trees and we come, incongruously, to a small farm-style gate. The car stops for a moment, scrutinized by unseen armed watchers in a guardhouse just beyond. Then the gate swings open.

I had asked to visit Yasenevo, not believing it would really happen. Suddenly, in a burst of post-coup glasnost, I am actually inside. It is surreal.

Physically, the parallels with the rival Central Intelligence Agency are remarkable. Like the C.I.A., the espionage directorate is out in the woods, away from the capital. Indeed, K.G.B. insiders call Yasenevo "the Russian Langley." The sign at the C.I.A. turnoff reads "Bureau of Public Roads." Inside the grounds of the directorate, the sign says, "Scientific Research Center." Even the rivals' ultramodern offices bear a close resemblance.

Like C.I.A. officers, who call their agency by a variety of nicknames, of which "the Company" is best known, Soviet case officers never refer to the K.G.B. -- the initials stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security -- by name. They call headquarters the "les" (forest) or the "kontora" (office).

In a moment, we are at a smaller, low building, its driveway bathed in bright floodlights. With my K.G.B. escort, I am shown to a second-floor reception room.

A few minutes later, Maj. Gen. Vyacheslav Ivanovich Artyomov, the acting chief of the directorate, mounts the stairs. He is 55 years old, a career spy with a crew cut, sharp features and a swarthy complexion. He invites me into an adjoining office furnished much like a traditional Russian living room, with two large low cocktail tables set with bottles of mineral water.

Forget Boris and Natasha, the cartoon character Russian spies. At the top, the K.G.B. leadership today is smart, smooth, sophisticated and well tailored. For three hours in near-perfect English, Artyomov covers a wide range of subjects, from past abuses to the spy agency's future.

Artyomov says he was born in Grozny, in the Caucasus, "the son of a truck driver." He pauses for a beat, and adds, "a teamster." It strikes me that Artyomov's command of the language is all the more remarkable if, as he claims, he has never lived in an English-speaking country.

He graduated from Moscow's Oriental Institute, joined the K.G.B. in the late 1950's and was a station chief, or resident, as they are known in the K.G.B., in Africa and Asia. As he speaks, his left hand fiddles with a double row of white worry beads, or chotki , a habit he picked up in his years abroad in Muslim countries. As acting chief, his rank is roughly equal to that of the director of the C.I.A. But this is the K.G.B., after all, and nothing is quite what it seems. Artyomov is an operational name, an alias. He declines to reveal his true name. (From other sources, I was able to learn that it is Vyacheslav Ivanovich Gurgenev.)

I ask him whether even a repackaged K.G.B. could ever fit into a democratic system. "Unfortunately for the K.G.B., it became and remained until recently the tool of the party," he responds. "And the party used it indiscriminately against all sorts of dissent. The K.G.B. should have completely divorced from the party. It should just be part of the Government. Intelligence agencies exist in all countries, and the K.G.B. should be like them. I believe it is possible.

"The K.G.B. had become a mammoth, monstrous organization, with too many functions. Instead of an institution to protect the state, the K.G.B. became an institution dangerous to the state." For a moment, I thought I had wandered into a seminar in Washington on the dangers of intelligence agencies to democratic government. Did Artyomov talk that way before the coup? Did he really believe what he was saying? He certainly seemed to, but there was no way to tell.

"I believe what remains of the K.G.B. will be two separate institutions," he says. "One for counterintelligence, antiterrorism, organized crime and corruption on the highest levels. The other, this directorate, will just be foreign intelligence, without any domestic powers. I don't know what the name will be, but I'm quite sure it will never be K.G.B. again. The society simply will not stand it."

Four days after my visit, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced that the directorate would become an independent agency under a presidential appointee, Yevgeny M. Primakov, who served as Gorbachev's closest foreign policy adviser. Its new name will be the Central Intelligence Service.

During the interview, Artyomov had talked about Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, the man who ran the espionage arm for 14 years before he was elevated to K.G.B. chief in 1988 and who is now imprisoned, charged with treason for leading the failed coup. Kryuchkov led the coup, Artyomov says, "to roll history back. It was a terrible miscalculation."

But the intelligence directorate, Artyomov adds quickly, "was not implicated, not at all. At 8 o'clock in the morning of Aug. 19, I was shaving and my wife had gone to her daughter to help with the children and she telephoned me. I said, 'Who the hell can be calling me at this time of the morning?' She said, 'You're shaving and there's been a coup.' "

All K.G.B. residencies around the world were alerted, Artyomov says, but not instructed to support the plotters. "It became clear that the whole affair was absolutely idiotic and unlawful. And then we did nothing but watch CNN."

The conversation is interrupted by a full-course dinner: lavish zakuski -- mushrooms, vegetables and other typical Russian hors d'oeuvres -- then beef stuffed with prunes, blueberry pie and tea. There is no food shortage in the K.G.B.

I ask Artyomov about the pervasive network of K.G.B. informers, the stukachi . Although Vadim V. Bakatin, the new K.G.B. chief, abolished the system of informers, he declined to release their names, on the grounds that it would tear Soviet society apart. Artyomov agrees. "We don't want a civil war in our country," he says. "The problem of reporting, of mutual suspicion, fear, these are the problems so deeply rooted in our soul and our genes, even. If we open up certain things in many parts of our country, real vendettas will start. You had wives, children, informing and so on. Most were not paid; they were forced into it."

K.G.B. bugging and wiretapping had turned the entire Soviet Union into a sort of giant electronic ear. What, I ask, would happen to the wiretap technicians, and the employees of the notorious Fifth Directorate and its recently disbanded successor, Directorate Z, which monitored internal dissent? It was the Fifth Directorate that hauled opponents of the regime off to the prison camps, suppressed dissident writers and artists and over the decades served as the secret police of a system that claimed millions of victims.

The wiretappers will be re-employed, Artyomov replies, and the officers of Directorate Z transferred into other jobs, some in the police. "The policy of the present bosses is that these people should not be made pariahs," he says. "If you force them into a tight corner, people with those skills can join all sorts of mafias."

Is it true that spies being sent to the United States are trained near Moscow in an exact replica of an American village? He laughs. "Coca-Cola city? Absolutely ridiculous. It doesn't exist."

It is approaching midnight and time to go. We walk out to the front of the building, into the strange bright floodlights. The Volga has turned around and the linebacker is in place at the wheel. I shake hands with the chief K.G.B. spy, get into the car and we move off into the darkness.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the failed coup, the question facing Soviet society is not so much whether the K.G.B. can be caged, whether a decades-old instrument of terror and repression can be brought under control. Rather, it is which parts of the vast security apparatus will survive at all, or should, and in what form. As the Soviet Union fractures, so does the K.G.B.

The C.I.A., of course, is closely watching what happens to its old adversary. Last month, Richard J. Kerr, then the agency's acting director, spoke privately to a group of Yale alumni -- including many former and current agency employees -- in the C.I.A.'s white-domed auditorium at Langley. "There are at least three K.G.B.'s today," he said, "and perhaps as many as 18." Kerr's point is that the K.G.B. is no longer a monolith, but is fragmenting, both in Moscow and in the republics, many of which may establish their own security agencies or take over existing K.G.B. organizations.

C.I.A. officials believe that the intelligence arm will concentrate on collecting the West's scientific and technological secrets and will reduce covert political action. This view is shared by Donald F. B. Jameson, a former senior Soviet operations officer for the agency. "Covert action, propaganda and political operations were really under the international department of the Communist Party, which used the K.G.B. as an instrument," Jameson says. "Since the party is gone, I expect a lot of that will disappear."

Although it continues to spy, the K.G.B. has fallen on hard times. Its former chairman, Vladimir Kry uchkov, is sitting in cellblock No. 4 of Matrosskaya Tishina prison, a grim building on the northern edge of Moscow, facing a possible death sentence. All of the intelligence agency's leaders have been fired by the new K.G.B. chief, Bakatin, a reformer and a leader of the democracy movement in what is left of the Soviet Union. Morale is low, and the K.G.B.'s size has been cut drastically. It no longer controls any troops or border guards. Bakatin has lost his army of spies, now that the First Chief Directorate has been declared independent. To top it off, the K.G.B. is broke; it does not have enough money to pay its officers.

If all that were not enough, Boris N. Yeltsin, the President of the Russian republic and the hero of the resistance to the coup, is eyeing the K.G.B., especially the intelligence directorate, as a rightful prize. The agency has become a pawn in the larger struggle for political control between Yeltsin and Gorbachev.

If its leaders in Lubyanka, the former prison that still serves as K.G.B. headquarters, have any doubt how far the K.G.B. has fallen, they have only to look out the window. The 14-ton statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who founded the Cheka, the first Bolshevik secret-police agency, is gone, toppled by the cheering crowds. In its place is a bare pedestal.

VADIM BAKATIN, THE modish, youthful-looking chairman of the K.G.B., is seated in his fourth-floor office in Moscow, drawing little circles in pencil on a sheet of white paper. Each circle represents a piece of the K.G.B. already stripped from his domain and transferred elsewhere.

"For the K.G.B.," Bakatin tells his visitor, "I see a process of disintegration."

Bakatin had headed the Interior Ministry until hard-liners forced him out last year. Now Bakatin is a player once more, albeit on a much smaller playing field.

His office, in a gray granite building across the street from Lubyanka, gives no hint of this; it is as big as a bowling alley. Bakatin has six white phones on his desk, another status symbol. The Soviets apparently do not believe in multiline phones. Bakatin sits in the chair occupied a few months ago by Kryuchkov.

The building, 3 Lubyanka Street, in which his office is located also houses the Second Chief Directorate, the K.G.B.'s counterintelligence arm, on the seventh floor. The building is packed with electronic equipment, as Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d discovered when he called on Bakatin in September. "There is so much stuff in here," one K.G.B. man says, "that your walkie-talkies didn't work. Baker's security people couldn't speak to each other."

Square-jawed, handsome and athletic-looking, Bakatin has reddish brown hair, brushed in the style of a television anchorman. He turned 54 on Nov. 6.

A photograph of Gorbachev hangs over his desk. But not all of the icons of the Soviet state have disappeared -- a white bust of Feliks Dzerzhinsky watches over Bakatin's reception room. In front of his desk, chairs are neatly arranged on both sides of a polished table at least 30 feet long. Before the coup, it was the meeting place of the K.G.B. collegium, the intelligence agency's board of directors. Bakatin fired them all; the collegium is no more.

Spies are being fired as well. K.G.B. sources say the espionage directorate is being slashed by 30 percent, and earlier this month Bakatin said the number of intelligence officers abroad would be cut by half.

Bakatin finishes drawing circles for his visitor. The circles, he explains, form a chart of independent intelligence components that he sees as loosely linked.

"To talk about the K.G.B.," he says, "we have to know what kind of state we will have in the Soviet Union. Assuming the Soviet Union will be preserved, there will be some independent directorates such as for intelligence, counterintelligence, Government communications, customs, border troops, the directorate that deciphers communications." He pauses, puts down his pencil and adds:

"We won't have a K.G.B."

What, then, will be left for Bakatin to preside over? Essentially, he says, the K.G.B.'s Second Chief Directorate, the unit in charge of counterintelligence, now renamed the Inter-republican Security Service. But as Bakatin envisions it, the service would also combat organized crime, terrorism and high-level official corruption. "We will coordinate the activities of the republics," he says.

Bakatin demonstrated a sure sense of public relations early on by firing his son from the K.G.B. ("I don't want him working under his father"), and permitting the wife and two daughters of the K.G.B. defector Oleg Gordievsky to join him in England.

Was it true that he liked the Beatles and Elvis Presley? "When I was younger. Now I like music of the 30's. I like American jazz, my favorite album is 'Blue Pyramid.' " (The K.G.B. chief has discriminating taste; the recording, from the mid-1960's, features Johnny Hodges, one of the greatest alto saxophonists, and two other artists from the Duke Ellington band.)

"I like tennis," Bakatin says. "I'm not a good player, but I don't like to lose. I try to fight, but I have an awful game." Bakatin's wife, Ludmilla, is a physician, a neurologist. He has two sons, Alexander, 32, and Dmitri, 26.

Asked what would happen to all the bad guys, the K.G.B. officials who suppressed dissent and bugged innocent citizens -- the people who exiled the Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov to Gorky, for example -- Bakatin tries a lob. "Brezhnev had to be responsible for Sakharov. Can we accuse a colonel of the K.G.B. who took Sakharov to Gorky? He was accomplishing the will of the system. As for the bad guys, the whole collegium who presided over this table" -- he gestures toward it -- "they were dismissed. Nothing will happen to the others.

"We still have bugging of persons involved in intelligence or major crime. But I have decided to make reductions of 30 percent for bugging by the end of the year." Although Bakatin does not mention it, he fired Gen. Yevgeny Ivanovich Kalgin, chief of the notorious Department Twelve, the unit that actually performs the bugging and wiretapping.

Did Bakatin think the K.G.B. could be controlled?"Well, it can be," he replies. "The most complex problem is personnel. Old habits, customs. At the same time, I'm optimistic that all these people are military and will do exactly what they are told. If earlier they were taught to do bugging, they did bugging, but if today you tell them, 'Don't do it,' they won't do it. That's what makes me think its possible."

Old C.I.A. hands, of course, are skeptical. And Jameson, the former C.I.A. Soviet specialist, says he thinks the K.G.B. faces a real problem with its surplus operatives. "The K.G.B. may find jobs for some of their people in the Interior Ministry and the police," he says. "But there could be a lot of card shuffling going on without necessarily reducing the number of cards in the deck. Early retirement will be one option, whether willing or not."

FOR 74 YEARS, THE K.G.B. was much more than a spy agency. In American terms, it was the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, Border Patrol and other intelligence units, all rolled into one. To the Soviet people, it was the jackboot on the stairs, the instrument of terror that could, in an instant, pluck people from the safety of their homes and send them to some Siberian gulag. The K.G.B., especially under Stalin, was truly the Ministry of Fear.

Founded in December of 1917, two months after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet secret police metamorphosed through a series of initials -- O.G.P.U., N.K.V.D., N.K.G.B., M.G.B. and M.V.D. -- before emerging as the K.G.B. in 1954. Abroad, its officers spied on the perceived enemies of the Soviet state, particularly the United States. Its gruesomely named Department of Wet Affairs (Mokriye Dela) assassinated its enemies abroad. In recent years, it has succeeded in recruiting an astonishing number of spies in United States intelligence and defense agencies, people like John A. Walker Jr., whose Navy spy ring passed cryptographic secrets to Yasenevo for 17 years.

In 1982, after the death of Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri V. Andropov became the first K.G.B. chief to lead the Soviet Union. His protege, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in March of 1985. Gorbachev thus owed much of his own rise to the K.G.B., and he relied on the security apparatus for political support. In 1988, he appointed Vladimir Kryuchkov, another Andropov protege, to head the K.G.B.

Despite its role in the failed coup, it was the K.G.B., the most worldly part of the Soviet bureaucracy, that recognized most clearly that the system was falling apart and needed reform to survive. "The K.G.B. was dedicated to the idea that somehow the system could be made to work right," Jameson says. "Their increasing opposition to Gorbachev was because the K.G.B. thought he was destroying the system, not modifying it."

Although there is a notably freer atmosphere today, fear of a resurgent K.G.B. and a return of the hard-liners lurks not very far below the surface. Is the fear realistic? Jerry Hough, a Soviet specialist at Duke University, says it's not. The K.G.B. has splintered, he says, adding: "The split is permanent. What the coup showed was that the K.G.B. was capable of levels of incompetence that are hard to believe."

Even veteran K.G.B. hands are gloomy about the future. Mikhail Petrovich Lyubimov served as a K.G.B. officer in London and as resident in Copenhagen before he retired and became a novelist and journalist -- and a highly vocal critic of his former employers. Lyubimov does not see happy days ahead for his old service. Asked to predict what will happen to the K.G.B., he replies, "I think, frankly, it's over."

The coup starkly revealed that the K.G.B. was riven by the same ideological and generational fault lines that were weakening all the major Soviet institutions long before August. Early this year, in an effort to consolidate his power, Kryuchkov named his own team, weeding out much of the pro-Gorbachev leadership. But when the crunch came in August, Kryuchkov's orders to prepare to attack the Russian Parliament were ignored by the K.G.B.'s crack young Group Alpha and lesser-known Cascade troops. Kryuchkov never gave the actual order to attack, because he knew it would not be obeyed.

GEN. ALEKSANDR Nikolayevich Karbainov is the K.G.B.'s full-time public relations man. His large, sunlit office is on the third floor of Lubyanka, the nine-story ocher building that housed an insurance company in czarist times. Under Communism, thousands of prisoners were held and tortured in its dungeons.

I suggested to the general that the K.G.B. was a tough sell. General Karbainov smiled, showing gold teeth. Although formal in manner, he is an affable man of 46, an engineer with no background as a spy.

The P.R. office has been busy. In an attempt to create an image of a warmer, friendlier K.G.B., the spy agency, among other gambits, held a beauty contest and selected one of its employees, Katya Mayorova, as "Miss K.G.B." She is rumored to be a crack shot. More recently, Karbainov has permitted reporters to tour the Lubyanka dungeons, which have been converted to offices for the K.G.B.'s cafeteria staff.

With the aid of his deputy, Col. Oleg I. Tsarev, a smooth career spy, Karbainov detailed the wrenching structural changes that have taken place in the K.G.B. since the failed coup. Before August, there were 13 directorates. Now, there are only five.

The K.G.B.'s size is an official secret, but the best estimate is that it had 620,000 employees. With the removal of some 220,000 border guards, that figure will drop to about 400,000, and much lower as the K.G.B. breaks up. By early November, Bakatin was claiming that the total reporting to him would soon shrink to a little more than 39,000.

"The budget of the K.G.B. is 4.9 billion rubles," General Karbainov says, which would be $8.3 billion at the inflated official rate. "The budget of the U.S. intelligence community is $30 billion," he adds, smiling. "That's four times as high as the K.G.B." It occurred to me that General Karbainov would do very well on Madison Avenue.

THE ARCHIVES OF the K.G.B. may hold the key to a number of mysteries to which the world hopes for answers, ranging from whether President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had a relationship with the K.G.B. to whether the K.G.B. in cooperation with Bulgarian intelligence tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981. In time, the K.G.B. or its successor agencies may release information on these and other mysteries.

However, K.G.B. officials are quick to deny any link to Oswald or the plot against the Pope. One former high-ranking operative, Boris A. Solomatin, was in a position to know. Solomatin, 67, is a gray-haired man with hawklike features and an uncanny resemblance to Lyndon Baines Johnson. While the K.G.B. resident in Washington in the mid-1960's, he recruited the Navy's John Walker. Later, Solomatin was resident in Rome when Mehmet Ali Agca shot the Pope.

Was there a K.G.B. connection? "The answer is no," Solomatin says. He is smoking Pirins, Bulgarian filtered cigarettes. "It would have been idiotic to be involved. If anything was going on with the Bulgarians, I would have known."

Similarly, senior K.G.B. officials deny any link to Oswald, who lived in the Soviet Union for two and a half years before he returned to the United States and assassinated President Kennedy. I came away from these meetings thinking that K.G.B. denials of complicity in the assassination conspiracies might well be true. But I had the unsettling feeling that the K.G.B. would be saying exactly the same thing if it had been involved. As Kryuchkov once said: "Intelligence is a game without rules."

And did the K.G.B. have a mole inside the C.I.A. in the 1960's? The controversial C.I.A. counterintelligence chief, James J. Angleton, spent years looking for one, without success. "No," Artyomov says. "Mr. Angleton was one of the casualties of the cold war. You had McCarthyism inside the C.I.A." And is there a mole today? "Even I would not be told," he says. "And if I was told, I wouldn't tell you."

YURI MODIN LUMBERS into the little restaurant like a Russian bear. He is 69, a huge man who, with his gray hair and white goatee, looks more like Santa Claus than what he is, a retired colonel of the K.G.B. He is a legendary figure, Kim Philby's controller, the man who ran the K.G.B.'s greatest spy.

He has come for a rare interview with a reporter from the West. He is an old-line officer, not very impressed with the reformers who have taken over Lubyanka. But he is happy to talk about Philby, the MI6 mole who betrayed the secrets of British intelligence to the Soviets over a lifetime.

It was Modin, stationed in London, who arranged the escapes of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the two Foreign Office spies for the K.G.B., as the net tightened on them in 1951. Their flight cast suspicion on Philby, who was subsequently fired by MI6 and was out of work.

"So in 1954, I made a special trip to London to give him money," he says. He did not dare to contact Philby directly. That had to be done through Anthony Blunt, the art historian and another member of the famed Cambridge spy ring. "It took me three months to find Blunt," Modin says. "I had to bump into him accidentally. I was haunting art exhibitions. I learned Blunt was to be at a large public gathering. I had a postcard with a Madonna on it. On the other side, I wrote the date, time and place for a meeting, a street crossing. After the meeting, Blunt was surrounded. I waited until only four or five people were left and went up to him and handed him the postcard and asked if the picture had been moved from one museum to another. He looked at the card, turned it over, saw the writing and said 'Yes, yes,' and handed it back. He met me two days later. We set up a meeting on the street with Philby in the western part of London. I gave Philby $:5,000."

Modin was unhappy with the disintegration of Soviet power. "There should be an authority, some things to be obeyed whether you like them or not," he says. "But I was against the coup. It wouldn't have helped." The K.G.B.'s espionage arm will certainly survive, Modin says. "We are silly, but not that silly."

IF BORIS YELTSIN TAKES over the K.G.B., Sergei Stepashin will be his point man. At 39, Stepashin, a member of the Parliament of the Russian republic, was named by President Gorbachev to investigate the K.G.B.'s role in the coup and to recommend reforms in its structure. But the committee, although technically appointed by Gorbachev, was heavily stacked with -- and controlled by -- Yeltsin supporters.

If Stepashin has his way, the K.G.B. will be abolished and the intelligence directorate absorbed into the Russian security service. That scenario may not come about, now that Gorbachev has named Yevgeny Primakov to head an independent spy agency, the Central Intelligence Service. A shrewd, jowly, veteran diplomat, Primakov, 62, is moving at full tilt to take control in Yasenevo.

"Authority of the K.G.B. on the territory of Russia has been passed to the Russian Federation," Stepashin insists. "Yeltsin signed a decree on Sept. 30 doing this. But the same day, Gorbachev signed a decree separating the intelligence directorate from the K.G.B. This illustrates the problem in our country; on the same day, two conflicting laws."

Did he really think Kryuchkov would be executed? "I don't think so," he replies. "I would be against it myself. Personally, I would set him free and make him work on a collective farm. But people who violate the law should be punished in accordance with the law. He will get a prison sentence."

The intelligence operations of the K.G.B. may well be absorbed into the Russian republic. But a Yeltsin power grab would almost certainly bring strong opposition from the other republics, which aren't about to subject themselves to a K.G.B. run by Russia. Moreover, even a scaled-down K.G.B. is enormously expensive. At a time when Yeltsin has called for painful economic measures, how can he justify financing Gorbachev's K.G.B.?

THE STATUES OF Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, Kalinin, Sverdlov, Khrushchev and other Communist icons lie broken and scattered in a little fenced area near the new Tretyakov art gallery. People come to photograph them or just to stare.

As I watch, Olga Prokhorova, a 16-year-old schoolgirl with dancing brown eyes, climbs atop the statue of Stalin and, giggling, straddles his head. Is she afraid of a resurgent K.G.B.? "I think the repressive system has almost collapsed," she replies. "The people were afraid. But now there is nothing to worry about and to fear." She says this with absolute, nonchalant assurance.

Boris M. Bakhrekh, 51, an engineer, has his camera out but does not want his own picture taken. "What we are seeing here is our past," he says. "And our children must understand the past in order to understand the future. We lived as in a prison, and now we hope that this nation, which struggled for freedom, will get it." His wife, who declines to give her name, motions toward the statue of Dzerzhinsky and says, "The problem is that he is lying down, but a lot of them aren't." K.G.B.

BEFORE THE COUP FIRST DIRECTORATE: Foreign intelligence. SECOND DIRECTORATE: Counterintelligence. THIRD DIRECTORATE: Military counterintelligence and criminal investigation in the armed forces. FOURTH DIRECTORATE: Transportation security for railroads and airports. DIRECTORATE Z (FORMERLY THE FIFTH): Internal dissent. SIXTH DIRECTORATE: Economic crimes. SEVENTH DIRECTORATE: Physical surveillance of people. EIGHTH DIRECTORATE: Government-wide communications and codes. NINTH DIRECTORATE: Security for top leaders. FIFTEENTH DIRECTORATE: Security for nuclear command centers. SIXTEENTH DIRECTORATE: Interception of electronic intelligence signals. INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS DIRECTORATE: Analysis and evaluation of intelligence information. BORDER GUARDS DIRECTORATE: Security at all border crossings. DEPARTMENT TWELVE: Electronic eavesdropping. CURRENT STATUS FIRST DIRECTORATE: Made an independent agency by Mikhail Gorbachev and renamed Central Intelligence Service. SECOND DIRECTORATE: Renamed the Inter-republican Security Service, will likely absorb the fourth and sixth directorates. THIRD DIRECTORATE: To be transferred to the military. FOURTH DIRECTORATE: To be merged with the sixth, which is to be folded into the second. DIRECTORATE Z: Abolished in September. SIXTH DIRECTORATE: To be merged with the second, where it will focus on fraud and corruption. SEVENTH DIRECTORATE: Undetermined. EIGHTH DIRECTORATE: Independent agency under the republic-dominated State Council. NINTH DIRECTORATE: Renamed the Bodyguard Service and placed in the direct control of President Gorbachev's office. FIFTEENTH DIRECTORATE: Undetermined. SIXTEENTH DIRECTORATE: Undetermined. INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS DIRECTORATE: Undetermined. BORDER GUARDS: Made an independent agency under the direction of the State Council. DEPARTMENT TWELVE: To be cut by 30 percent by the end of the year.