I’ve been watching “The Assets” – a TV series about Aldrich Ames – and got curious about the KGB in the immediate period following the end of the cold war. Clearly, the Russian security apparatus continued to function, but were there any immediate changes to the agency’s mission? Did field missions continue to operate as though nothing had changed?
Let me just Wiki that for you.
ETA : long story short, they changed the poster in the lobby, and that’s about it. Hell, the FSB is still HQ’d at the infamous Lubyanka, it of the deep soundproof cellars…
Obviously the OP has never read any Tom Clancy.
As I understand it, after the initial shockwave of the fall of the USSR, quite a few KGB formed, joined, or came to lead mafia organizations. I imagine that for a while there were some strong ties between the two. These days, I would imagine that the FSB and mafia work separately again, with it being the politicos above them who keep a finger in both pies.
Biggest change as far as your average schlub is concerned is that the name was changed from the KGB to the NKVD. Both are Cyrillic acronyms so I don’t know what they stand for. I think the average Russian always called it the NKVD, KGB was the Western term which became obsolete with the fall of the USSR. Or something like that…
You have that backwards. NKVD was the pre-KGB Soviet police and intelligence agency.
I think Soviet citizens often call it Cheka, which was the original name for the Soviet security service.
For the record:
Cheka - чрезвыча́йная коми́ссия - chrezvychaynaya komissiya - Emergency Commission
OGPU - Объединённое государственное политическое управление - Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye - Joint State Political Directorate
NKVD - Народный комиссариат внутренних дел - Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del - People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
KGB - Комите́т госуда́рственной безопа́сности - Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti - Committee for State Security
And the post-Soviet successor agency:
FSB - Федера́льная слу́жба безопа́сности - Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti - Federal Security Service
But the FSB, which you linked to, works mostly on internal issues within Russia. The SVR is the successor agency responsible for foreign espionage.