Los expedientes de Sajarov

An important point to understand from the start is that the book’s title is somewhat misleading. The KGB’s files on Sakharov and Bonner, some 583 volumes of raw reports compiled by the Fifth Directorate on surveillance and operations and from informants, were ordered destroyed in 1989.[2] What Rubenstein and Gribanov present, instead, are translations of 146 finished KGB memos and reports on Sakharov, often signed by the chairman of the KGB and submitted to the Central Committee or individual Soviet leaders, and have survived in other files and archives. Based on the nonstop monitoring of the dissident’s activities, the documents provide a chronology of Sakharov’s development as a dissident and the growth of the opposition movement in Russia. This is the story from the Soviet leadership’s point of view, and it shows the combination of alarm and confusion in the Kremlin as leaders struggled to understand and limit the phenomenon. The documents are not easy reading, for they are in the formal, ponderous style of the communist bureaucracy, but they give an excellent insight into the minds and workings of the dictatorship.

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Leo sobre espionaje, sobre el estilo burocrático y sobre la vigilancia. Mucho, de cierto, es como Caos y Control. Mucho, de cierto, son tonterías. Pero no todo, no todo...