NY Times - December 20, 2000

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's top spies made a rare move from the shadows to mark secret police day Wednesday, giving interviews, revealing the songs they sing and recalling the old days of their cloak and dagger world.

Liberals reacted warily to the anniversary of a force which in the past murdered and tortured millions of Russians, but now presents itself as a defender of the homeland against international terrorism, drug running and foreign spies.

Russians voted overwhelmingly in March to make Vladimir Putin, a former spy, their president and people on the streets of Moscow seemed unconcerned about the anniversary.

Largely glossing over the past, the heads of the FSB domestic security service and the SVR foreign intelligence agency, successors to the feared KGB, broke with their usual secrecy in rare interviews to mark the ``Day of Security Organs.''

Earlier known as ``Chekist Day,'' it marks the birth of the ruthless Cheka Soviet secret police, later the NKVD and KGB.

The SVR added to the occasion with a new compact disc, ''Being an agent is their difficult job,'' which revealed for the first time the songs sung when Russian spies relax -- songs like ``My profession; intelligence officer,'' ``From Kabul to Washington'' and ``I obey orders.''

``Being an intelligence officer means being reliable, it means dedication, dedication to one's homeland, to one's comrades, it means being noble,'' SVR chief Sergei Lebedev told Izvestia newspaper.

Such is the image Russia's modern spies project, and one which Putin, a former KGB agent and head of the FSB before becoming Russian leader in 1999, would agree with.

Lebedev said that with the end of the Cold War, his men both fought and cooperated with rival foreign agencies and intended to pursue such cooperation.

LUBYANKA STILL STANDS

The past was mentioned by FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev, but only as something his countrymen had to cope with.

``The history of the Lubyanka in the last century is our history, no matter how bitter and tragic it was,'' Patrushev said, referring to the KGB's Moscow headquarters, still synonymous with the torture and repression of the Stalinist era.

The Lubyanka, a hulking pink and yellow neo-classical building, still stands in a central square, albeit without the statue of Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, torn down by pro-democracy demonstrators in 1991 as the Soviet Union fell.

A former head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, bemoaned the day the statue was unceremoniously transplanted and thought the modern-day secret police was less of a force than before.

``I think a goal was set to destroy the KGB, to make it toothless,'' he told a news conference, speaking of the splitting of the secret police by former President Boris Yeltsin into the FSB, SVR and a unit that looks after communications.

Semichastny was KGB head from 1963 to 1967 and welcomed British spy George Blake to the Soviet Union in 1966 after the latter escaped from jail in his home country.

PAST MUST BE REMEMBERED, LIBERALS SAY

Yelena Zhemkova, head of the Memorial group, which researches past crimes and is still trying to collate lists of those killed, exiled or who suffered discrimination in the Soviet era, said she had nothing against professional holidays.

But she insisted the tragic past had to be remembered.

``It is a similar situation as in Nazi Germany. Of course you could remember, for example, that in Nazi Germany the Germans had work or were well protected socially,'' she said.

``But you cannot forget that this took place on the background of concentration camps,'' she said.

One man who passed by the Lubyanka said he did not associate the secret police with repression.

``I felt no fear, I never had anything to do with them, I felt they were directed against other intelligence services,'' said Konstantin Malyshev.