Russia: Death and Resurrection of the KGB

Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 2004

The former KGB's takeover of Russia's political and economic institutions was easy to foresee when the post-Soviet government decided to preserve and rehabilitate—not repudiate—the entire legacy of the Bolshevik secret police. There was little serious attempt and no strategy to expose excesses and crimes or to prevent such a system from emerging again, whether from within the Russian leadership or from outside pressure. The KGB survived as a continuum with the Soviet past. By the 2000 presidential election, being an unrepentant career KGB officer had become a political asset instead of a liability. At the time of this writing in 2004, the former KGB is fully institutionalized throughout the Russian government, different from before in style and structure, but in greater control of the instruments of state power than even the Soviets allowed. For an appreciation of the nature of the security apparatus in today’s Russia, one first must review what the Cheka was, what it did, what it stood for, and what it begat.

1994

Today it is obvious to everyone that the Russian special services of the '90s and the current security agencies are very different from one another. Even if one does not follow how espionage matters are developing or how products of the system are occupying newer and newer posts in the government apparatus and big business one can't help but see this with a glance at the TV screen. Seven or eight years ago it was inconceivable to show a national celebration of Andropov's birthday and the revival of a KGB prize for the best work about security officials on leading television channels. The state security system of the '90s was created on the remnants of the USSR KGB which were deliberately destroyed in 1991. Part of the KGB sub elements were destroyed then and part redistributed to individual agencies, intentionally placing the successors of the Committee in conflict with one another. The problem is that the system of new Russian special services were created on the American model. Not because we had lost the "Cold War" and were tailoring ourselves after the victors, as patriotically-minded citizens think. By the beginning of the '90s in the West they had already endured scandals with the FBI, CIA, the British special services, managed to be frightened and, it seemed, devised an antidote to the lack of control of the [security] agencies. The special services are finding additional rights for themselves only when a terrible enemy threatens the country, on the wave of horror before which civil rights can be violated. From the middle of the '80s to the beginning of the '90s the USSR ceased to be that for the West and global terrorism had still not occupied the vacancy and the customs services began to atrophy. Back in the middle of the '80s the political intelligence subunit was disbanded in the US and the sinister General Intelligence Division in the FBI was no more. In Great Britain under the Conservatives only in the '90s did they get into the swing of things, namely when F Branch (combating subversive activity) in MI5 was transferred to antiterrorism. Moreover, in the West they understood more quickly than we did that the only way of controlling the special services was to strictly delineate the areas of responsibility and not allowing intelligence to operate inside the country or counterintelligence outside it. As a result, for example the counterintelligence center in the CIA was abolished so as not to lead intelligence into temptation. In Russia intelligence functions were removed from the successor to the KGB for the same reason: to withdraw the troops (the Border Guards were assigned to another agency and the communications troops to FAPSI), depriving them the right to guard the highest officials of the government, and also removing the secret bunkers (they even had to create a special directorate in the Presidential Administration for this). Such a

Perspective (Boston University), 1991

Written days after the Soviet putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, this article shows how, "In trying to construct a "law-governed state" that would preserve the supremacy of the center, Gorbachev laid down the legal framework for his own overthrow. His decrees flouting the democratic process and his refusal to promote parliamentary oversight of the internal security organs and the military permitted those forces to engineer his ouster," and ultimately to entrench the old Soviet security apparatus at the heart of post-Soviet political power.

Chinese Business Review, 2019

In this study, former Soviet Union's secret service, Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB) has been investigated by limited aspects. As the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)'s intelligence agency, KGB was the ordinary primary secret service in the world. This paper has been investigated USSR's secret service, KGB's secret activities in all over the world. It is popularity was extra ordinary before the Cold War 1990.

Journal of Democracy, 2006