The KGB

Chairmen

Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin (KGB)
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov (KGB)
Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov (KGB)
Vitali Vasilyevich Fedorchuk (KGB)
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (KGB)

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KGB Ops In the US

KGB (transliteration of "КГБ") is the Russian-language abbreviation for State Security Committee.

From March 13, 1954 to November 6, 1991 KGB was the umbrella organization name for the principal Soviet security agency, the principal intelligence agency, and the principal secret police agency. The term KGB is also used in a more general sense to refer to the Soviet State Security organization since its foundation as the Cheka in 1917.

Roughly, the KGB's operational domain encompassed functions and powers like those exercised by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the counter-intelligence (internal security) division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Federal Protective Service, and the Secret Service.

The first of the forerunners of the KGB, the Cheka, was established on December 20, 1917, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky and personally praised by Vladimir Lenin as a “devastating weapon against countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet power by people who are infinitely stronger than us” (The Sword and the Shield, 29-30). The Cheka underwent several name and organizational changes over the years, becoming in succession the OGPU (1923), NKGB (1941), and MGB (1946), among others. In March 1953, Lavrenty Beria consolidated the MVD and the MGB into one body--the MVD; within a year, Beria was executed and MVD was split. The re-formed MVD retained its police and law enforcement powers, while the second, new agency, KGB, assumed internal and external security functions, and was subordinate to the Council of Ministers. On July 5, 1978 the KGB was re-christened as the "KGB of the Soviet Union", with its chairman holding a ministerial council seat.

The KGB was dissolved when its chief, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov, used the KGB's resources in aid of the August 1991 coup attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On August 23, 1991 Colonel-General Kryuchkov was arrested, and General Vadim Bakatin was appointed KGB Chairman--and mandated to dissolve the KGB of the Soviet Union. On November 6, 1991, the KGB officially ceased to exist, although its successor national state security organisation, the Russian Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB), is functionally much like the Soviet KGB.

From its inception, the KGB was envisioned as the “sword and shield” of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The KGB achieved a remarkable string of successes in the early stages of its history. The then comparatively lax security of foreign powers such as Britain and the United States allowed the KGB unprecedented opportunities to penetrate the foreign intelligence agencies and government with its own, ideologically-motivated agents such as the Cambridge Five. Arguably the Soviet Union’s most important intelligence coup, detailed information concerning the building of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project), occurred due to well-placed KGB agents such as Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The KGB also pursued enemies of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin such as the counter-revolutionary White Guards and Leon Trotsky, eventually resulting in Trotsky’s assassination.

During the Cold War, the KGB played a critical role in the survival of the Soviet one-party state through its suppression of political dissent (termed “ideological subversion”) and hounding of notable public figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. It also achieved notable successes in the foreign intelligence arena, including continued gathering of Western science and technology from agents like Melita Norwood and the infiltration of West Germany’s government under Willy Brandt alongside the Stasi. However, the double blow of the compromise of existing KGB operations through high-profile defections like those of Elizabeth Bentley in the United States and Oleg Gordievsky in Britain, as well as the drying up of ideological recruitment after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring, resulted in a major decline in the extent of the KGB’s capabilities. However, the KGB was assisted by some mercenary Western defectors such as the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI mole Robert Hanssen, helping to partly counteract its own hemorrhage of skilled agents.