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.