KGB

The Committee on State Securityor more commonly KGB (in Russian, CCP (?·i), Komitet gosudárstvennoy bezopásnosti It was the name of the intelligence agency and the main secret police agency of the Soviet Union from March 13, 1954 to November 6, 1991. The KGB domain was approximately the same as the CIA or the FBI's counter-intelligence division in the United States. He's been popularly known as Centre.

He was in charge of obtaining and analyzing all the intelligence information of the nation. He disappeared weeks before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. From there the Foreign Intelligence Service arose, which went on to direct espionage activities outside the country and keep all the documentation referring to the KGB.

History

The KGB in the countries of the socialist bloc

In the same way (and with the same procedures) as the Okhrana during the tsarist regime, of which it is in some ways a successor, the task of the KGB in the Soviet Union and the socialist countries during the Cold War was to exhaustively supervise public opinion, internal subversion and possible destabilizing plots in the Soviet bloc. The KGB came to the support of the communist governments and intervened in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that ended with the so-called Prague Spring.

After the Hungarian revolt, KGB Chairman Ivan Serov personally oversaw the "normalization" of the country after the Soviet intervention. Consequently, the KGB had satellite monitoring of the populations of the State to prevent "harmful attitudes" and "hostile acts". Putting down the Prague Spring, overthrowing a liberating-minded communist government, was his greatest "achievement."

KGB hardliners groomed members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, such as Alois Indra and Vasiľ Biľak, to assume power after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The invasion had consequences for the KGB. The KGB, which was acting with the backing of related secret services, on this occasion received great support from the Stasi to control the situation after the intervention.

The KGB had predicted political instability, as a consequence of the rise to power of Pope John Paul II, the first Polish Bishop of Rome, because of his pro-independence and anti-communist sermons against the government of the Polish United Workers Party. On this subject, it has been speculated that the KGB was involved in the attack suffered by John Paul II, a hypothesis that ex-KGB agents such as Mikhail Lyubimov have always denied, despite the fact that according to some agencies there is supposed evidence.

The Służba Bezpieczeństwa and the KGB successfully infiltrated spies into the newborn Solidarity union, and the Catholic Church and into Operation X. In coordination with General Jaruzelski and the Polish United Workers Party, they declared martial law in Poland. However, the move proved unsuccessful given Solidarity's pro-independence and anti-communist focus, which fatally weakened Poland's communist government in 1989.

Suppression of internal dissent

Monument to victims of KGB/NKVD operations in Vilnius, Lithuania

During the Cold War, the KGB actively tried to combat "ideological subversion" - anti-communist political and religious ideas and the dissidents who promoted them - which were generally treated as a matter of national security to discourage the influence of hostile foreign powers. After denouncing Stalinism in his secret speech "On the cult of personality and its consequences" in 1956, head of state Nikita Khrushchev eased the repression of "ideological subversion." As a result, critical literature resurfaced, including the novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to whom the KGB gave the code name PAUK (" spider"). After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev once again placed the state and the KGB in a situation of active and harsh repression; house searches to seize documents and continuous surveillance of dissidents became routine again. For example, in 1965, such a search and seizure operation resulted in Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts being "libelous fabrications," and the subversion trial of novelists Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel; Sinyavsky (aka "Abram Tertz"), and Daniel (aka "Nikolai Arzhak"), were captured after an informant from the Moscow literary world told the KGB when to find them at home.

In 1967, the campaign for this suppression increased under the new KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov. After suppressing the Prague Spring, KGB Chairman Andropov established the Fifth Directorate to monitor dissent and eliminate dissidents. He cared especially about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, “public enemy number one.” Andropov failed to oust Solzhenitsyn before 1974; but he did internally exile Sakharov to Gorky in 1980. The KGB failed to prevent Sakharov from collecting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, but it did prevent Yuri Orlov from collecting his Nobel Prize in 1978. President Andropov oversaw both operations.

KGB infiltration of splinter groups included "agents provocateurs" pretending to be 'sympathetic to the cause', smear campaigns against prominent dissidents and show trials; once imprisoned, the dissident had to put up with KGB interrogators "and" to his sympathetic cellmates. In this case, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies lessened the persecution of dissidents; he was carrying out some of the policy changes that had been demanded since the 1970s.

Notable Operations

With Operation Trust, the OGPU managed to trick many Russian right-wing leaders, counterrevolutionaries and members of the White Movement into returning to the USSR, where they would be tried. The NKVD infiltrated and destroyed Trotskyist groups in 1940; The Spanish Ramón Mercader was the agent in charge of the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City. One of the measures used by the KGB was disinformation as a way to discredit the enemies of the USSR.

In the 1960s, thanks to information from KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, CIA counterintelligence director James Jesus Angleton believed that the KGB had moles in two key places, the CIA's counterintelligence department CIA and the counterintelligence department of the FBI, through which they could learn and control US terrorist counterintelligence to protect infiltrated KGB agents and make it difficult to capture communists. On the other hand, the KGB counterintelligence investigated foreign intelligence sources, so that the spies could "officially" approve the attack. to a double agent in the CIA as if he were someone they could trust. The CIA captured some of the suspected moles, such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

The KGB sometimes killed enemies of the Soviet Union, mainly defectors from the Soviet bloc, either directly or to help the secret services of other communist countries. One of the cases in which the KGB is believed to have been allegedly involved is the plane crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961.^{[citation needed]} A more famous case still in the history of espionage is the poisoning of the Bulgarian dissident Gueorgui Márkov in 1978, who was injected with a pellet of ricin by pricking him with the tip of an umbrella that is speculated to have been designed by the KGB.

Structure

General Management

KGB headquarters main entrance.

The KGB leadership consisted of a president, one or two first vice presidents, and four to six vice presidents. The collegiate leadership, made up of the president, vice-presidents, the heads of the board of directors, and one or two leaders of the KGB organizations in each republic, met to make key decisions.

Directories

The KGB was organized into various directorates, some of them with high status due to their importance.

• The 1.o High Directory (operations abroad): responsible for external operations and counterintelligence. This high directory had numerous subdirectories in its interior, each assigned to a geographical area of the planet.
• The 2.o High Directory: responsible for counterintelligence and political control within the Soviet Union.
• The 3.o Alto Directory (Armed Forces): responsible for military counterintelligence and political control of the Soviet Armed Forces.
• The 4.o Directory: transport security.
• The 5.o Alto Directory: also responsible for internal security, originally combated political dissidence; later he assumed tasks of the 2.o High Directory, such as control of religious dissent, intellectuals and media censorship; was renamed Directory Z (Protective Director of the Constitutional Order) in 1989.
• The 6th Directory: economic counter-intelligence and industrial security.
• The 7.o Directory: responsible for the provision of monitoring, monitoring and listening equipment and methods.
• The 8.o High Directory: responsible for communications, surveillance of foreign communications, cryptological systems used by KGB divisions, transmissions to stations abroad and development of communication technology.
• The 9th Directory (KGB Protection Service): Guard force consisting of 40,000 men for escort and security services for PCUS leaders and the most important facilities of the Soviet government (including nuclear weapons facilities). They also operated in the surveillance of Moscow Metro-2 and in the control of the telephone system between the government and the PCUS.
• The 15th Directory: Government Installation Security.
• The 16th Directory: Communications Interception. From department to directory, it operated on the telephone and telegraphic systems of the USSR government, ensuring the interception of all communications of interest to the KGB.
• Border Guard Directory: border security force consisting of 245,000 men deployed along Soviet borders on land, naval and air contingents.
• Operations and Technology Directory: responsible for all KGB scientific centers and laboratories, responsible for the production of listening materials, poison, psychotropics, etc.

The departments

The KGB also consisted of the following independent departments and detachments:

• Department of Person
• LIMITED Finance Department
• Department of Administration
• Secretariat
• Technical Support Directorate
• Archives
• PCUS Committee
• Kremlin Guard Force – under control of the 9th Directory-. It was the escort of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

The structures of the KGB Special Operations detachments (OSNAZ) such as Group Alpha, Group Beta, Dolphin and Výmpel remain unknown at this time.

General Managers

N.o	Director		Party		Period
1		Ivan Serov		Communist Party	13 March 1954 - 8 December 1958
2		Aleksandr Shelepin		Communist Party	25 December 1958 - 5 November 1961
3		Vladimir Semichastny		Communist Party	13 November 1961 – 18 May 1967
4		Yuri Andropov		Communist Party	18 May 1967 – 26 May 1982
5		Vitali Fedorchuk		Communist Party	26 May 1982 - 17 December 1982
6		Víktor Chébrikov		Communist Party	17 December 1982 - 1 October 1988
7		Vladimir Kriuchkov		Communist Party	1 October 1988 - 28 August 1991
8		Vadim Bakatin		Communist Party	29 August 1991 - 3 December 1991

Additional bibliography

• (Counterintelligence dictionary) (in Russian). Moscow: Высшая красснознаменая школа Комитета Государственной BRести при Совете Министровов СССР им. Ф. Р. Рого [The Higher Red Banner School of the State Security Committee at the Dzerzhinsky Council of Ministers of the USSR]. 1972. Archived from the original on 23 March 2016.
• Петров Н. В., Кокурин А.. ВЧК-ОГПр-НКВ-НКГ-МГB-MВВ-КГB. 1917–1960. (Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB) 1917–1960. Handbook) (in Russian). Moscow. ISBN 978-5-89511-004-1. Archived from the original on December 27, 2013.
• Петров Н. В., Кокурин А.. LIABINEA. Органы ВЧК-ОГПр-НКВ-НКГ-MГ b-МВ-КГ b. 1917–1991. (Lubyanka) Organs of Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB. 1917–1991. Handbook) (in Russian). Moscow: Международный фонд "емократия". ISBN 978-5-85646-109-0. Archived from the original on 19 October 2012.
• Петров Н. В. (2010). Кто руководил органами Гостопасности. 1941–1954 гг. Справочник (Who headed the organs of the State Security. 1941–1954. Handbook) (in Russian). Moscow: Zвенья. Archived from the original on 19 October 2012.
• Jong, Ben de (June 2005). «The KGB in Eastern Europe during the Cold War: on agents and confidential contacts». Journal of Intelligence History (in English) 5 (1): 85-103. S2CID 220331155. doi:10.1080/16161262.2005.10555111.
• Shlapentokh, Vladimir (Winter 1998). «Was the Soviet Union run by the KGB? Was the West duped by the Kremlin? (A critical review of Vladimir Bukovsky's Jugement à Moscou)». Russian History (in English) 25 (1): 453-461. ISSN 0094-288X. doi:10.1163/187633198X00211.
• Солжницын, А. Архипелаг Г lasta: 1918 - 1956. Опыт худоественного иследования. T. 1 - 3. Mосква: Сентр "Новый мир". (in Russian)
• Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia — Past, Present, and Future Farrar Straus Giroux (1994) ISBN 0-374-52738-5. (in English)
• John Barron, KGB: The Secret Works of Soviet Secret Agents Bantam Books (1981) ISBN 0-553-23275-4 (in English)
• Vadim J. Birstein. The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Westview Press (2004) ISBN 0-8133-4280-5 (in English)
• John Dziak Chekisty: A History of the KGB, Lexington Books (1988) ISBN 978-0-669-10258-1 (in English)
• Knight, Amy (Winter 2003). «The KGB, perestroika, and the collapse of the Soviet Union». Journal of Cold War Studies 5 (1): 67-93. ISSN 1520-3972. S2CID 57567130. doi:10.1162/152039703320996722. (in English)
• Sheymov, Victor (1993). Tower of Secrets. Naval Institute Press. p. 420. ISBN 978-1-55750-764-8. (in English)
• Василий ванович (2004). Руководители Ренинградского управления КГ: 1954–1991. Санкт-Петерг: Выбор, 2004. ISBN 5-93518-035-9 (in Russian)
• Кротков, шрий (1973). «КГ в действии». Published in "News" No.111, 1973 (in Russian)
• Рябчиков, С. В. (2004). Ровимия вместе настем товым // Откртый муръ, n.o 49, сте 2-3. Там была установлена "мясорубка", при помощи котрой трупы срасывались чекистами в городскую кали Razmyshlyaya vmeste s Vasilem Bykovym (in Russian)
• Рябчиков, С. В. (2008). Великий химик rí. Рябчиков // Вiсник МirugÃародного дослiдного центру "Lюдина: мова, культура, пiзнана. КГ ССССР убийства великого руского ученого) (in Russian)
• Рябчиков, С. В. (2011).,,,, 25–45. (in Russian) Zametki po istorii Kubani (materialy dlya khrestomatii)