KGB (Committee for State Security of the USSR, 1954–1991)

Founding

According to a study by Filip Kovacevic for the Cold War International History Project (Wilson Center, 2023), its full name was the Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. The KGB was formally established on 13 March 1954 by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, but detailed regulations were adopted only on 9 January 1959. Ivan Serov became its chairman.¹

The author notes that after Beria’s fall the party leadership wanted to ensure that the security apparatus could not threaten its power; Serov’s candidacy raised doubts among some party officials.¹

The chain of the KGB’s predecessors begins with the Cheka of 1917; during the Second World War the military counterintelligence service SMERSH operated.³

Structure

Foreign intelligence was the responsibility of the First Chief Directorate, and counterintelligence of the Second Chief Directorate. Drawing on the transcript of a meeting of the Second Chief Directorate’s leadership on 30 July 1955 (Lithuanian Special Archives, Vilnius), Kovacevic describes its departments, including those dealing with the US and Israeli intelligence services, Britain, West Germany, France and Scandinavia, and anti-Soviet émigré organisations. The union republics had their own committees with counterintelligence departments.¹

According to the author, the transcript has never been declassified in Russia; it survived in the Lithuanian archive.¹

Dissolution and successors

The report of the British public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko (2016) states that the KGB was dissolved in November 1991 and that its security functions passed to a succession of successor organisations, the last of which, the FSB, was created in 1995. An intermediate link was the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK).²

The UK government describes the SVR as the successor to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate.⁴

Cases known from documents

According to the FBI, CIA officer Aldrich Ames offered his services to the KGB at the Soviet embassy in Washington on 16 April 1985; he was arrested on 21 February 1994 and sentenced to life imprisonment. FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied from 1985 for the KGB and later for the SVR (see mole).^5,6

Vasiliy Mitrokhin, an archivist of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service, secretly copied files between 1972 and 1984; after his defection in 1992 his notes were taken to Britain, and in 2014 the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge made redacted versions of them available.⁷

According to the IPN, the 1974 agreements between the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW) and the Stasi were concluded mainly because the KGB had initiated similar agreements (see the MfS entry).⁸

Sites of memory

The former KGB buildings in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn are now museums; in Vilnius the exhibition covers, among other things, the KGB’s activities in 1954–1991 (see the map of intelligence museums).^9,10