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.