KGB

I

Introduction

KGB, in full, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (State Security Committee), the government agency of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in charge of the Soviet political police from 1954 to 1991. The KGB, the last in a series of Soviet security agencies dating from 1917, was officially disbanded when the USSR collapsed. During its years of operation the agency’s main directive was to protect the Soviet regime from internal and external threats by means of a vast police and spy network.

II

Functions

The Soviet leadership needed an extensive security and intelligence system in order to ensure the political loyalty of the population at home and to promote its goals as a superpower abroad. The KGB’s domestic functions included closely monitoring the Soviet people and suppressing expressions of political discontent. The KGB was also responsible for guarding Soviet borders, protecting party and government leaders, and enforcing security in the Soviet armed forces.

The KGB relied on a vast network of secret informers and a sophisticated surveillance technology to carry out its domestic mission. Authorized by law to conduct investigations of people suspected of anti-Soviet behaviour, the KGB sent hundreds of so-called dissidents off to forced labour camps (see Gulag). In some cases the KGB avoided court trials by simply having people declared insane and committed to psychiatric hospitals.

The KGB had the largest and most active foreign intelligence apparatus in the world. Its primary mission was to further Soviet foreign policy goals by gathering secret political, military, and technological information abroad and by conducting propaganda and disinformation campaigns, directed mainly against the West. In carrying out its operations the KGB relied heavily on the intelligence services of Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe.

III

Structure

As a state committee, the KGB was formally under the jurisdiction of the Soviet government’s Council of Ministers. In practice, however, the KGB was controlled by the Politburo, the Soviet Union’s highest decision-making body, and the Secretariat of the Central Committee, which in turn were organs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The KGB was a highly centralized, hierarchical organization, headed by a chairman and several deputies, who together formed the key decision-making body, the KGB Collegium. At its headquarters in Moscow the KGB was divided into several directorates, or departments, each with a different functional responsibility.

The KGB had branches duplicating many of these functions in the 14 non-Russian republics of the USSR. It also had offices in every district, region, and city, as well as special departments in all government institutions, factories, and enterprises. The Soviet regime never released figures on the total number of KGB employees, but Western estimates ranged from 400,000 to 700,000 full-time employees, exclusive of agents and informers, during the KGB’s peak in the 1970s and 1980s.

IV

History

The KGB’s origins dated from December 1917, when the first Soviet political police agency, the VeCheka (the Russian acronym for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), was created under the leadership of Feliks Dzerzhinsky. In 1922 the VeCheka, also known as the Cheka, was replaced by the GPU (Russian initials for State Political Administration), which in 1923 became the OGPU (United State Political Administration). A succession of different police organizations followed: the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) in 1934; the NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security) in 1943; the MGB (Ministry of State Security) in 1946; and the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) in 1953. The death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953 initiated another reorganization of the political police, and the KGB was formed in 1954 to take over state security functions from the MVD.

The chief method of the KGB’s predecessors was terror, implemented by such notorious security chiefs as Nikolay Yezhov, who directed the Great Purge in the 1930s, and Lavrenty Beria, who took over in late 1938 and ran the organization during World War II. In the post-Stalin years, widespread police terror was abandoned for less violent methods. Yuri Andropov, who was KGB chairman from 1967 to 1982, before becoming general secretary of the Communist Party, promoted a more legitimate image for the KGB. Nevertheless, its underlying mission remained essentially unchanged until the late 1980s, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his sweeping reforms. As a result of Gorbachev’s policies, the KGB had to curtail its operations against dissidents and its struggle against the West.

The KGB’s participation, under the leadership of Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, in the failed coup of August 1991 in Moscow led to public demands for a complete reform of the security police. These demands were strengthened as a result of revelations from the government archives about how the KGB infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church and how it secretly spied on Soviet citizens. After the break up of the USSR, Russian president Boris Yeltsin split the KGB into five separate agencies, including the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) and a new organization for internal security and counterintelligence, known currently as the FSB (Federal Security Service). In the other former Soviet republics, which inherited the KGB branches on their territory when they became independent states, new security services were established. Despite these reforms, the successors to the KGB still play a powerful role in politics.