On June 3, the Belarusian KGB released a disturbing video showing a clearly injured and distressed Roman Protasevich, the dissident journalist kidnapped from a forced-down plane, recanting his beliefs and expressing support for dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko. (I will not link to any of the videos I mention; they are easy to find via Google, if necessary.) On Monday, Protasevich was dragged in front of the cameras again at a press conference to deny, under clear coercion, that the first video was made under coercion.
To anyone with a soul, these appearances were chilling, a barbaric excursion into dictatorship. Very few people could possibly fall for the idea that Protasevich’s sentiments were genuine. But what’s the real point of such hostage videos, of which this is only the most recent example?
For hundreds of years, officials and interrogators have known that if you want to collect valuable intelligence, torture simply doesn’t work. Torture, however, is very useful when you want a false confession to be signed. This is why the KGB, along with its predecessor the NKVD, has a long and sordid history of torture in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union needed to pretend, not just to the outside but on the inside, that its victims were guilty. Torture is good for this kind of bureaucracy, for stating, “The guilty person is guilty, because they confessed, and this is why we’ll shoot them in the head or send them to be raped and/or frozen to death in a labor camp.”
