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.