Cold War Spy Stories From Eastern Europe by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2019-08-01T23:00:00+00:00

The Chekist as Guardian Angel

Central to Dudko’s writings is the motif of the chekist as a kind of disguised guardian angel. Dudko focused especially on the nature of his relationship with his chekist investigator.22 Over the years Dudko set forth these relations in a series of parables relating scenes and dialogues from his interrogation and imprisonment (see esp. Dudko 2001). Here we can situate Dudko within the Soviet tradition identified by Eric Naiman and Anne Nesbet (1995, 53, 56), whereby the trope of the interrogation provided not just “an arena for the demonstration both of personal integrity and historical ‘truth’” but also “the metaphysical occasion for a grander, metaphorical investigation of history.”23

Dudko’s writings are also an idiosyncratic example of the Soviet confessional autobiographical genre. In his reminiscences Dudko charted a highly distinctive radical transformation of self—one that is engendered precisely by his intimate and intense encounter with his KGB investigator. In many respects the text resembles a conversion narrative recording the path to spiritual rebirth and transformation into a new person. But what is striking about Dudko’s epiphany is that it comes about precisely through his contact with chekists, his communion with them. Chekists were the agents or catalysts of Dudko’s spiritual growth. In some mysterious way, Soviet chekists, despite their external superficial appearance as agents of an atheist state and as persecutors of believers, actually functioned as the vehicles of God’s will, as disguised manifestations of virtue.

Dudko first mentioned his bond with his chekist captors during his television address in 1980, when he said: “My investigator and I have a single patronymic: Sergeevich. [Does this not point to the fact that we are in fact brothers?] My investigator and I, it turns out, are brothers?” (2001, 222). In later writings he described the process whereby he had become imbued with love for his investigator during his stay in prison (Smyk 1990; Dudko 2001, 218–23). This deep identification with the chekist is a consistent feature of Dudko’s writings, to the point where, indeed, we might even think of this as a case of Stockholm syndrome.24 At one point, for example, Dudko imagined his interrogator as the physical embodiment of Dudko’s own conscience (2001, 218–19). More conventionally in his written press statement issued the day after his television appearance, Dudko (1980) further described how in prison he had finally arrived at the realization that despite his crimes, the Soviet state had shown great patience and mercy, making concessions for him and making repeated attempts to steer him onto the true path before being forced to resort to arresting him.

Dudko elaborated on his encounter with his investigator in greater depth in texts produced the year after his arrest. By Dudko’s own account, it was in fact his KGB investigator who encouraged Dudko to write up his reflections on his encounter with the KGB, even providing him with a typewriter and a kind of writer’s retreat in order to do so (Dudko 2001, 223). The result was a text in which Dudko outlined

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