The KGB, formally the Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), was the principal security and intelligence agency of the Soviet Union from its establishment in March 1954 until its dissolution in October 1991. For a broader overview of the intelligence contest, see the intelligence and espionage overview; for the American counterpart, see the CIA’s history and operations.
From Cheka to KGB
The KGB was the latest in a line of Soviet security agencies that began in December 1917 with the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), founded by Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka was given extraordinary powers — including the right to shoot without trial — and was the political instrument that allowed the Bolsheviks to win the civil war. It was reorganized as the GPU in 1922, then the OGPU in 1929, then the NKVD in 1934. The NKVD, under Nikolai Yezhov and then Lavrentiy Beria, ran the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and oversaw the death of perhaps 700,000 people in the Gulag system.
After the war, the security apparatus was reorganized several times. The MGB (Ministry of State Security) handled foreign intelligence and counterintelligence from 1946 to 1953. The MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) ran the labor camps. In 1953, Beria was arrested and shot; the MGB was abolished; and in March 1954, Nikita Khrushchev consolidated the security functions into a new Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers. The first chairman, Ivan Serov, was a Beria protégé and a mass murderer; he was replaced in 1958 by Alexander Shelepin, a Khrushchev loyalist.
The KGB was, in effect, three agencies inside one. The First Chief Directorate ran foreign intelligence; the Second Chief Directorate ran internal security and counterintelligence; the Third Chief Directorate ran the military counter-intelligence of the Soviet Army. Border guards, signals intelligence, and a vast bureaucratic apparatus completed the structure. By 1985 the organization employed more than 480,000 people, with a network of informers inside the Soviet Union estimated at several million.
Foreign intelligence: the First Chief Directorate
The First Chief Directorate, or PGU, was the KGB’s foreign espionage arm. It ran “legal” residencies under diplomatic cover at Soviet embassies and “illegal” lines run by officers with no official connection to Moscow. By the 1970s, the PGU had stations in nearly every capital that mattered, plus a global network of front companies, training schools in Moscow and Minsk, and a substantial capability in technical collection.
The PGU’s most famous early Cold War coup was the recruitment of the Cambridge Five, run by the “Station” at the London residency under Arnold Deutsch in the 1930s. The Five — Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross — were extraordinarily productive for the Soviet Union, particularly in the years 1941–1951, and even Philby alone delivered years of Anglo-American secrets. As Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin document in The Sword and the Shield (1999), the Cambridge network was, in raw asset value, the most productive penetration the KGB ever ran.
Later, the PGU scored the turn of CIA counter-intelligence officer Aldrich Ames in 1985; the recruitment of FBI officer Robert Hanssen, who had independently begun spying in 1979; and the technical penetration of the American embassy in Moscow with the rebuilt Studied book-bugging device, installed in 1978. It also ran, through the “Line X” department, the disinformation program known as Operation INFEKTION, which from 1983 spread the false claim that AIDS had been manufactured at Fort Detrick.
Counterintelligence and the suppression of dissent
The Second Chief Directorate was the political police. It supervised a vast informer network (the “apparatus of confidential contacts”) inside the Soviet population; tracked foreign correspondents and diplomats; and ran surveillance operations against dissidents. Its files on Soviet citizens were the basis of the system of privileges, residence permits, and travel controls that defined life in the USSR.
The KGB’s role in Eastern Europe was institutionalized through the 1955 Warsaw Pact and the bilateral security relationships the Soviet Union maintained with each satellite. The agency ran “active measures” — political warfare, propaganda, the support of foreign communist parties and front organizations — out of the First Chief Directorate’s Service A, while the Second Chief Directorate coordinated with the security services of the satellite states, including the East German Stasi, the Czechoslovak StB, and the Polish UB/SB.
The KGB’s domestic role, often described as protection of the Soviet state, was, in practice, the protection of the Communist Party’s monopoly. The dissident movement that emerged in the 1960s — Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group — was tracked, harassed, imprisoned, and in some cases killed. The political prisoners held in the KGB’s “psychiatric prisons” — most notoriously the Serbsky Institute in Moscow — were interned by administrative order without trial. Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, was sentenced in 1978 to seven years’ internal exile.
Andropov, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and reform
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov served as KGB chairman from May 1967 until May 1982, when he was promoted to the Politburo and then to General Secretary. He was the longest-serving chairman in the KGB’s history and the only one to become Soviet leader. He was a complex figure: genuinely cultivated, a serious reader of poetry, and at the same time the man who signed the orders that suppressed Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, expelled Solzhenitsyn in 1974, and locked up hundreds of dissidents.
Andropov’s tenure began badly. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 had been a humiliation for the KGB: the agency’s intelligence on Kennedy’s intentions had been catastrophically wrong — the PGU had been out-maneuvered by Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU colonel who was spying for MI6 and the CIA. The crisis forced a long reckoning inside the KGB and contributed, as Anatoly Dobrynin recalled, to the agency’s institutional caution for the next two decades.
Andropov used the KGB as his power base inside the Politburo. He recruited protégés — including Vladimir Kryuchkov, who became chairman in 1988, and Viktor Chebrikov — and positioned the agency as a source of policy advice. After Brezhnev’s death in November 1982 and Andropov’s assumption of the General Secretaryship, he attempted a limited anti-corruption campaign that ran out of energy as his own health failed. He died in February 1984.
The next two chairmen, Chebrikov (1982–1988) and Kryuchkov (1988–1991), were both Andropov men. Kryuchkov was the senior intelligence officer who, in August 1991, signed the orders for the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. He was arrested, amnestied in 1994, and never faced trial.
The end of the KGB
The KGB did not collapse all at once. The August 1991 coup accelerated a process that had been visible for years. On November 25, 1991, after the Baltic states had already created their own security services and the Russian SFSR had begun absorbing Soviet institutions, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR formally dissolved the KGB. Its functions were split. The First Chief Directorate became the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) under Yevgeny Primakov. The successor to the internal-security directorates was reorganized several times; in 1995 it emerged as the FSB (Federal Security Service) under the Russian Federation, headed first by Mikhail Barsukov and then, from 1998, by Vladimir Putin. The border guards became a separate committee. The signals-intelligence directorate became the FAPSI.
The institutional culture did not dissolve with the agency. Putin, who served in the KGB from 1975 to 1991, brought a generation of former officers into the Russian government. The SVR, the FSB, and the GRU have re-emerged in the 2010s as the principal instruments of Russian statecraft abroad — through the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the active-measures campaigns in the 2016 U.S. election, the SolarWinds compromise of 2020, and the war in Ukraine after February 2022. As Andrew notes in Defend the Realm (2010) and his later work, the Cold War did not end so much as change form.
Key sources
- Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1999). The most important single source on the KGB’s foreign operations, based on notes smuggled out of the PGU by its senior archivist.
- Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2010) and his collaboration with Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (1990). Gordievsky was the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to spy for Britain.
- Amy Knight, The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union (1988) and Spies Without Cloaks (1996). The standard account of the agency’s internal-security function.
- David E. Murphy, Battleground Berlin: The CIA, the KGB, and the Struggle for the City of Spies (1997) and his earlier work with Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin (1997). Murphy’s What Stalin Knew (2005) treats the intelligence failures on the Soviet side.