KGB Full Form
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
What does KGB stand for? A government term, explained.
KGB Full Form in English, letter by letter
KGB is the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Soviet Union's main intelligence and secret police agency from 1954 to 1991.
KGB Full Form in Indian Languages
KGB is the usual shorthand for Soviet spying in Cold War books and films. It stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, and the name is given below in six Indian languages.
What the letters KGB stand for
The KGB full form is Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Russian for Committee for State Security. It was the security, intelligence and secret police agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until it was broken up in 1991.
It was not the USSR's first such body. The Cheka, the OGPU and the NKVD came before it, and the MGB, which was the state security ministry of the late Stalin years, was its direct predecessor. When people write 'KGB' they usually mean the organisation as it existed after 1954, the one that Cold War histories describe.
Its headquarters were at Lubyanka Square in Moscow, in a building that had been an insurance company's offices. The name became shorthand for repression, because the complex held the leadership's offices and an internal prison. The KGB answered to the Communist Party leadership and formally to the Council of Ministers.
What the KGB actually did
The agency was organised into directorates. The First Chief Directorate ran foreign intelligence, with officers posted abroad, often under diplomatic cover. The Second Chief Directorate handled counterintelligence and watched the Soviet population for political unreliability.
Other units covered military counterintelligence, signals intelligence and the surveillance of foreign embassies. The KGB also controlled the Border Guards and a directorate responsible for protecting the party leadership. It supervised government communications security as well.
Its reach was very wide. Counting border guards, the KGB employed hundreds of thousands of people, and its network of informants extended into universities, factories, cultural bodies and the armed forces.
Abroad, it ran what it called 'active measures': forged documents, planted stories, influence operations and the recruitment of agents inside Western governments. The Cambridge Five, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen are among the best known cases of Western officials who worked for Soviet or Russian intelligence.
How the KGB ended
The agency collapsed together with the state it protected. Its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was one of the leaders of the August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup failed, and Kryuchkov was arrested.
By the end of 1991 the KGB had been abolished and its functions split. The SVR took foreign intelligence, the FSB took domestic security and counterintelligence, and the FSO took the protection of senior officials. The Border Guard Service was placed under the FSB in 2003.
Two mix-ups are common among students. The GRU was Soviet military intelligence and was never a part of the KGB. The Stasi was East Germany's separate security service, though it worked closely with the KGB.
The cases that keep the KGB in the news
The Cambridge Five (Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross) passed British secrets to Soviet intelligence from the 1930s. Philby's defection to Moscow in 1963 is one of the best known betrayals in the history of espionage.
Other operations people look up include Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet officer who passed information to the West in the early 1960s, including data on Soviet missiles before the Cuban missile crisis, and the extraction of Oleg Gordievsky from Moscow in 1985.
The label outlived the agency. When the United States arrested ten Russian sleeper agents in 2010 and exchanged them in Vienna, many newspapers called it a KGB-style affair, although the SVR, not the KGB, had run the network.
Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI spied for Soviet and then Russian intelligence until their arrests in 1994 and 2001. The damage they caused is still described in American counterintelligence circles as among the worst of the Cold War era.
Why the term still turns up in Indian reading
The comparison readers want most is KGB versus CIA. The CIA is a foreign intelligence agency. The KGB combined foreign intelligence, domestic counterintelligence and political policing in one body, so it was closer to a mix of the CIA, the FBI and a secret police.
For Indian readers, the Soviet Union was a close partner during much of the Cold War, so the KGB appears in histories of Indo-Soviet relations. One much-quoted source is the Mitrokhin Archive: Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist, defected to Britain in 1992 with notes on the agency's operations abroad. Historian Christopher Andrew later published them in two volumes, and their claims about India remain debated.
The KGB was the Soviet Union's all-in-one intelligence and secret police agency. It was dissolved in 1991, and its work was divided among the SVR, the FSB and the FSO.
KGB Full Form: Common Questions
What is the full form of KGB?
The full form of KGB is Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Russian name for the Committee for State Security, the main security agency of the Soviet Union.
What does KGB mean in English?
It translates as Committee for State Security. The agency handled intelligence, counterintelligence and political policing inside the Soviet Union and abroad.
When was the KGB formed and dissolved?
It was formed in 1954 and dissolved at the end of 1991, after the failed coup against Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Which agency succeeded the KGB?
Its work went to the SVR for foreign intelligence and the FSB for domestic security and counterintelligence, with the FSO responsible for protecting senior state officials.
What is the difference between the KGB and the CIA?
The CIA is a foreign intelligence service. The KGB also spied abroad, but it ran domestic surveillance, counterintelligence and political policing at the same time, which the CIA is not allowed to do inside the United States.
Was the KGB the same as the NKVD?
No. The NKVD was an earlier Soviet security and police organisation, and it ran the secret police during the Stalin years. The KGB was created in 1954, after Stalin's death, as a committee under the Council of Ministers.