KGB

For most of the twentieth century, the Soviet state watched its own people through a single institution, and it was very good at it. The KGB, the Committee for State Security, was the sword and shield of the Soviet Union from 1954 until the country dissolved in 1991: at once a foreign spy service to rival the CIA and a domestic secret police without equal. Its longest-serving chairman, Yuri Andropov, ran it for fifteen years and then rose to lead the Soviet Union itself, the only spymaster ever to reach the top. The agency's job was never only to guard the state against foreign enemies. It was to guard the regime against its own population.

From Cheka to KGB

The lineage runs straight back to the revolution. Six weeks after seizing power in 1917, Lenin created the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky to hunt down 'counter-revolutionaries', and it pioneered the Red Terror. The apparatus was renamed and reorganized again and again: the OGPU in the 1920s, then the NKVD, which under Stalin ran the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938 and built the Gulag, the vast network of forced-labor camps. In 1954, a year after Stalin's death and the arrest and execution of secret-police chief Lavrenty Beria, the leadership repackaged the machine as the KGB, hoping to tame it and put it firmly under Communist Party control. The name changed; the sword-and-shield emblem and the underlying mission did not.

Two faces

The KGB was enormous. Alongside its spies it sealed the Soviet borders, protected the leadership, and helped secure the nuclear arsenal, employing an estimated half a million people and leaning on a far larger web of informants. Abroad it was among the most formidable intelligence services on earth: it ran deep-cover 'illegals', recruited agents like Britain's Cambridge Five, stole Western nuclear and technical secrets, and specialized in what it called active measures, disinformation, forgery, and front groups meant to bend foreign opinion. At home it was an instrument of control. It read mail, tapped phones, and planted informers in workplaces and apartment blocks; it hounded dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, confined critics in psychiatric hospitals, and crushed protest before it could spread. The First Chief Directorate handled foreign espionage; the notorious Fifth Directorate fought 'ideological subversion', which meant its own citizens' ideas.

The afterlife

The KGB helped end itself. In August 1991 its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was a ringleader of the hardline coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup collapsed in three days, jubilant crowds toppled the Dzerzhinsky statue outside the Lubyanka headquarters, and within months both the KGB and the USSR were gone. The agency was carved up: foreign intelligence became the SVR, domestic security the FSB, with other functions spun off.

But the story did not end there. A former KGB foreign-intelligence officer named Vladimir Putin, who had served in Dresden, took over the FSB in the late 1990s and then the presidency in 2000. For a quarter-century he has governed Russia by rebuilding exactly the kind of security-service state the KGB embodied: staffing the government with veterans of 'the organs' and reviving active measures for the age of the internet. The old habits proved durable: the fatal 2006 poisoning of the defector Alexander Litvinenko in London carried the unmistakable fingerprints of the service Putin came from. Dzerzhinsky's heirs never really left the building. They just changed the letters on the door.