What is this Russian organization about? i know it was sort of like the US’s CIA, but what are other details?
Okay, so you’ve just had a people’s revolution, and the entire capitalist world is terrified that their people are going to do some revolting, too, right?
So, obviously they will start sending agents into your new Communist state to unseat your shiny new popular government. Thus, you need a mechanism to protect the state from outside interference. You take the old Czar’s secret police (the Okhrana) and turn it into your own People’s Secret Police… the Cheka. It went through several other name changes, from Cheka to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, and finally, the KGB (after Stalin died). KGB stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security.
The First Chief Directorate, the department responsible for foreign intelligence, became the most important part of the organization, masterminding among other things the assassination of Leon Trotsky (an early anti-Soviet emigre).
KGB chiefs never lasted long; generally, they either became Premier or were killed. Stalin and Kruschev were among those who succeeded to the Chair of the Politburo from heading the KGB.
If you want really in-depth info, read The Sword and Shield: A Secret History of the KGB, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. An exceptionally detailed (and exceptionally long and boring) account of KGB foreign intelligence activities from Lenin to the present day.
They were (and are) the Soviet state security agency. They were more like the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and NSA rolled into one. They were charged with foreign intelligence, internal political control, and surveillence of both foreign and domestic people and groups, along with security of officials (Secret Service like bodyguards), and a host of other spying and information gathering. They also had their own anti-terrorist special ops groups along with border and internal security forces.
They were allegedly controlled by the Council of Ministers but in practice they were largely autonomous. in some cases almost acting as a psuedo-government.
Post collapse, the KGB was officially dissolved in 1991 and was broken into several groups that carry out many of the same functions as they did previously. Naturally, such a large and powerful group didn’t just go away, but they don’t have nearly the power that they once did, largely because several top officials and groups were involved in the 1991 coup attempt. Periodic attempts to combine old groups (largely the work of ultranationalists like Zhirinovskiy) have been voted down.
Still, not a good group to be on the wrong side of, even today.
KGB stands for Kabinet Gosudarstvienni Byezopaznost (my attempt at transliteration), or Cabinet of State Security.
Might be a little off topic, but it talks of the KGB. Written right after WWII when the USSR was still condired a half-assed ally, the author writes on a trip to USSR of the Soviet system. I forgot the author’s name, and can’t find the book right now, but hurry and read it. I have a dozen times or more.
The title is something like “Why They Act Like Russians” or “why they behave like like Russians”, you get the point.
It is non-political and takes an objective look at the system 30-some years into it. I think it was written in 1946 or 1947. If you like honest history, and reading something written long ago that you can look at today and say, “Goddamn, he was right on that”, this is the book for you.
Again, conservative or liberal, this is not an ideological book. It is nothing short of fascinating
Google is your friend
Second hit: http://www.fas.org/irp/world/russia/kgb/
Found it. The title is “Why Do They Act Like Russians?” It’s part Soviet system, part why they were and continued to be so paranoid of American power. Also gives you insight to why they wanted Afghanistan. I can’t emphasize what a great read it is.
Some more straight dope for the OP is apparently…
“No one ever leaves the KGB.”
Author?
dutchboy208’s response is excellent and correct in every respect except one. Josef Stalin and Nikita Khruschev never headed the KGB. Feliks Dzherzhinsky was head of the Cheka/OGPU when Lenin died and Stalin started his rise to power; there were several successors to Dzherzhinsky of whom Lavrenti Beria was the longest-lived and most infamous, but so far as I know Stalin was never in personal control of the NKVD or its predecessors. On the other hand, Yuri Andropov had indeed served as Chairman of the KGB before he became the Soviet premier.
dutchboy208 is correct that the “K” in “KGB” stands for “Komitet,” not “Kabinet.”
The KGB was disbanded shortly after the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in the early 1990s. The successor organizations are called the SVR and FSB. The SVR has inherited the foreign intelligence functions of the former KGB First Chief Directorate; the FSB has inherited the counterintelligence/secret police functions of the former KGB Second Chief Directorate. I believe that many of the changes are cosmetic, and that old KGB agents and bureaucrats continue to serve in the same functions they always have in the FSB and SVR.