Retired Major General Oleg Kalugin is not a traitor, he is a Russian patriot.

We had a sense of deja vu yesterday when a Russian court handed down a sentence of 15 years in a maximum-security prison for retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin for alleged treason. It took us back to the old days of Soviet communist show trials, trials held in absentia, and where law was at the whim of what those in power wanted. The trial was held in secret, no media could attend, there were no witnesses, the defendant was in absentia and his lawyer never met or talked with him. Even Russian elected politicians and Russian media realized the entire trial was a sham, an embarrassment and a step backwards. One Russian newspaper blasted the trial for resembling “some sort of farce.”  The courtroom, the Kommersant noted, “was completely closed to the press, and it was impossible to grasp what the disgraced general was being tried for.” The Los Angeles Times quoted Boris E. Nemtsov, a prominent member of Russia's parliament, who called the trial “a flagrant violation of all human rights.” The Russian Gazeta newspaper said that Kalugin’s defense attorney reviewed evidence in the case file and came to the conclusion that it contained “no objective evidence of Kalugin’s crime.” He added that the case file did contain references to media publications, gossip and conjectures as well as “interviews of people who are in no way concerned with Kalugin’s case.” Even the timing of the trial was rushed to beat the July 1 deadline of a new Russian law that bans the old-style Soviet trials in absentia.

Kalugin’s old former KGB colleagues, still true believers in a communist system that devastated the lives and spirits of the Russian people for so long, had one last, petty dig into a man who has not been afraid to speak the truth to power.

Kalugin spent his life in the elite foreign intelligence and counterintelligence of the KGB, meaning he was an operations or case officer always assigned overseas, always looking outwards towards other countries and people. It was only when he was assigned to KGB internal counterintelligence in Leningrad where he had to focus on his fellow Russian citizens did he begin to realize the true nature of the KGB. He found he wasn’t supposed to protect the people, he was supposed to protect the government from its own people. In the eyes of the KGB, the Russian people were the potential enemies of the state.

He also saw first-hand the corruptness of the Soviet system and how the Russian people were suffering as a result. He began to speak out. He boldly wrote a letter to Gorbachev in 1987 telling him the system needed to be fixed before democratic reforms could take effect. His outspokenness caused the ire of his KGB colleagues who appear to have had no trouble with their own consciences over what the KGB was doing to its own people. Kalugin spoke up for human rights, he marched for the independence of countries like Lithuania which had been swallowed up into the Soviet Union by force. He ran for public office and was elected to the parliament. Kalugin was the unofficial advisor to the last KGB chairman Bakatin who was a reformer and had the impossible task of attempting—in current US terms—to “change the culture” of the KGB. A culture where the history of your organization includes the execution of your own officers? An organization whose purpose is to be the “sword and the shield” of the Soviet communist government, not the Russian people? Defending communism which is responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the globe in the past century? (We recommend the 1999 book, “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression” by Stephane Courtois and others)

Kalugin said in a Baltimore Sun article that his trial is an act of political vengeance, the settling of an old score. “I was never a defector. I never betrayed Russia. But I did what I could to destroy that monster, the KGB.” Kalugin is not a traitor just as the German citizens who resisted the Nazi government in power in their country were not traitors.

Major General Oleg Kalugin has been a professor since 1999 with our Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies and has taught regularly since then. He is an important part of our staff and we find him to be a brave and honorable man who lives by his long-time favorite quote from Disraeli, “Justice is truth in action.” It is a regrettable situation for the Russian people that the old KGB still has its grasp on power in Russia and that this trial, and the other trials of those who have spoken out against abuses of this power, shows that the old KGB is back and gaining strength to the detriment of Russian advancements towards freedom, democracy, human rights and freedom of the press.