According to several bnooks that I read on the post Stalin kgb and the kgb at the end of Stalin's regime, the KGB did not mellow but they were restricted in the methods that they could use. this did not make them any less effective. While they didnt on the whole use really brutal methods to interrogate suspects, they did use techniques like forcing someone to stand for days in one spot or putting them into really confining cells where they couldn t sit or interrogating them for days so that the suspect got no sleep for days. I am sure they used more brutal methods on some cases but my research shows this was limited. I am anything but soft on the KGB. They were despicable enforcers of ideology. The best thing they produced was Gorbachev.
The Stalinist OGPU/NKVD/KGB used exactly these same methods, of forcing people to stand for days in a corner or putting them in confining cells where they couldn't stand upright, lie down, or even sit properly, but had to crouch for days and nights on end. All these methods are considered torture under the Geneva Convention, I believe, and rightly so. And, as you say, they continued throughout the Soviet period, at least until Gorbachev.
Frankly I don't know if after Stalin's death the Soviet secret police still felt free to beat up prisoners to the extent that the victims' bones were broken and their blood was left on their written "confessions," as happened in many cases during the Great Terror, as I recall. But I suspect you're correct, Constantinople, that after the deaths of Stalin and Beria, this sort of outright brutality was rapidly made a thing of the past.
Still, there exist more subtle forms of cruelty on the face of this earth. Aside from the methods of torture named above, Petr is right to draw our attention to the very cruel methods used against dissidents in the Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov eras. Psychiatric hospitals, employing all the scientific jargon and very heavy sedation against their dissident patients, worse, anti-psychotic drugs which left patients in an absolute stupor, and even worse yet, shock treatments, which often destroy long-term memory all together, and can make a mush of one's intellect. All this could be understood as a further development, an evolution, even an actual
refinement of the methods of the 1930s, because it was a far more subtle and sophisticated version of inhumane treatment, but this time under the guise of "science," i.e., psychiatry, and therefore excusable, if not, strictly speaking, legal -- I honestly don't know about that point, perhaps the lawyers here like Petr can help us out.
What's interesting about the Soviet Union under Stalin is that almost (almost!) everything was made very legal, technically speaking, if not before or during the fact, then after the fact. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought it was spelled out quite clearly under one of the Stalinist legal codes that if, for example, one stole an ear of corn (i.e., gleaned an ear of corn from a previously harvested field, because one was starving) one could expect to get at least 5 years forced labor in the camps. My impression was that the Soviets under Stalin were every bit as eager to "legalize" their crimes against humanity as Nazi Germany. But I'm not a lawyer, so obviously I don't know anything but what I've read in books on the subject!
