Portal:Communism/Selected quote/53

“ A small but highly unpleasant group of APN-KGB people are the retired KGB, who think of Novosti as a charitable institution. Into this category fall some security guards, drivers, administration officials, members of the personnel department and the "military desk," some cleaners, doormen, technicians, and, last but not least, our movie projectionist, Uncle Vasya. He was a short, chubby man, with an expressionless face bearing countless pock marks, like the face of the Great Father of All Progressive Journalists, losif Vissarionovich Stalin, whose bodyguard, they say, Uncle Vasya was. When I last saw him, Vasya's main occupation was screwing up the sequence of foreign film reels shown to the Novosti staff, and getting drunk in between.

Like most of his colleagues, the other KGB old-timers, Uncle Vasya never said a word about his past career. No wonder. These days Novosti employs quite a number of children of posthumously "rehabilitated enemies of the people," liquidated under Stalin. Reminiscences about the old days might result in severe fractures to Uncle Vasya's skull. It should be remembered that every second family of an intellectual, writer, journalist, etc., lost at least one relative to the GULAG death camps or Lubyanka's shooting ranges. This is one reason the old guards keep wisely silent, opening doors for the children of their victims, the Novosti's "new class." Some of the KGB's victims' children are now KGB themselves.

” — Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993)
World Thought Police , 1986