This story is from Michael Koffman, about the first of two very personal encounters he had with the Soviet secret police:
I had two major encounters with the Soviet secret police, the KGB. We all understood that every Soviet citizen was constantly being watched by Big Brother, but these two cases were different. They were extremely personal. They were also very scary.
The first one happened in September 1970, when I had just started my sophomore year at the university. Our group was sent to an ovoshebaza, a place where agricultural produce was collected before being distributed to city stores.
Logistics was never the strongest point of the socialist economy. These places were also always short-handed. As a result, a huge amount of produce was already rotten by the time it reached the stores. The easiest way to improve the situation was to use free labor: university students.
Because arranging our work there was an additional burden for the management, we were supposed to spend the whole day at the ovoshebaza regardless of how much work actually needed to be done. But we were young and idealistic. We wrongly decided that we could improve this extremely inefficient arrangement.
We offered the supervisor a different deal: he would tell us what needed to be done for the day, we would do it at our own pace, and once the work was finished, we would leave.
He agreed.
We completed the assignment much faster than expected and happily left.
Several days later, some of us were accused of initiating an ideological provocation: the introduction of a "capitalistic" way of doing things. Each of us was called separately for a talk in Department No. 1 of our university.
You should know that every Soviet enterprise had a special department that watched the ideological aspect of that enterprise's activity. These departments were, of course, staffed mostly by KGB operatives.
We were terrified, and we did not talk to each other about the summons. That is why I do not know exactly what was discussed with the others, though I can guess.
My own "discussion" is one I will probably never forget.
From the very beginning, I was threatened with expulsion from the university for leading this capitalistic provocation. Then I was offered an opportunity to stay and continue my education if I signed a paper stating that I would regularly report on my friends in the faculty to Department No. 1.
It was clearly their typical recruiting technique.
Later I realized that each group had at least one student who reported regularly on everybody else in the group. Usually these were students with very bad grades who were about to be expelled. They were promised that their grades would be improved enough for them to stay. The paper with their signature would be kept by the KGB until graduation, and maybe even longer, to keep them on the hook in their future jobs.
Anyway, I was given several days to think the "offer" over.
Apparently they already had enough informants in our small group, and the whole thing was eventually swept under the rug.
That was my first "call to duty."
But it was not the last one.