As the Soviet Union’s main secret intelligence agency during the Cold War, the KGB gained notoriety for its widespread global espionage. But the organization – and its Communist-era predecessors – also played a key role inside the Soviet Union: stifling political dissent.
Protecting the homeland from internal enemies has preoccupied Russian leaders for centuries, spawning a long line of repressive secret police agencies. During the Imperial era of Russia, the Okhrana worked to identify and destroy the enemies of the Tsars. After the communist revolution of 1917, the Cheka played the same role for the Bolsheviks. An alphabetical soup of agencies (OGPU, NKVD, GRU, MVD) followed until 1954, when the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti) was created. Satellite states of the Soviet bloc, such as Hungary, Poland and East Germany, supported their own version of these agencies.
Here are some of the ways the Soviet-era secret police carried out their internal security duties, responding to the demands of different leaders and changing historical circumstances.
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1917: The Bolshevik Revolution and the “Red Terror”
Man detained and executed during the Russian Revolution, c. 1918.
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After the October Revolution of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power, a civil war raged, with the Communist Red Army being fought by a loose coalition of counter-revolutionaries: monarchists, social democrats, foreign powers and others. To help root out enemies and protect their fragile new regime, the Bolsheviks formed the Cheka (All-Russian Emergency Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage). When Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party, was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 1918, the agency quickly embarked on a program of state violence known as the “Red Terror”.
Cheka leader Feliks Dzerzhinsky (whose statue stood outside KGB headquarters in Moscow until after the fall of the Soviet Union) proclaimed that “anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp”. In practice, however, merciless mass shootings and hangings without trial began almost immediately. Being the wrong kind of person (a priest, a hungry food hoarder) or being in the wrong place at the wrong time or simply owning a gun was enough to earn someone a death sentence by newly formed Revolutionary Courts. Estimates of the total death toll range as high as 100,000.
These courts sanctioned the purges of everyone from surviving members of the Russian imperial family to peasant landowners, setting the tone for decades to come. Even during periods of relative domestic tranquility, the shadow of state terror loomed over the Soviet population.
READ MORE: How Joseph Stalin starved millions during the Ukrainian famine
1930s: purges and show trials of the Stalinist regime
The 1938 Trial of the Twenty-One was the last in a series of show trials of prominent Bolsheviks during Stalin’s Great Purge.
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The Red Terror and Civil War ended in the early 1920s, but after a brief abatement, repression continued and worsened. When Joseph Stalin took over the Communist Party after Lenin’s death, he focused on consolidating his control over both the party and the country by any means necessary. The NKVD, which had replaced the Cheka in 1922, played a key role in supporting the dictator’s draconian culture of toe the line or pay the price.
While the Cheka had persecuted enemies of the Bolshevik Party, the NKVD targeted well-placed party members whom Stalin perceived as potential rivals, including government officials, army officers, and the older Soviet party guard, such as the Trotskyists. The secret police used torture and fabricated evidence to extract “confessions”. Highly public show trials, whose verdicts were never in doubt, caused widespread terror, as did Stalin’s decree authorizing the execution of families of suspected traitors, including children as young as 12 .
After the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, a Bolshevik veteran and potential rival to Stalin, the Soviet dictator used the murder – which some historians say he himself ordered the NKVD to carry out – as an excuse to undertake purges , deportations and murders that became known. as “The Great Purge”. In 1937 and 1938, according to a Moscow-based researcher, about 40,000 NKVD agents oversaw the arrest of about 1.5 million Soviet citizens and the murder of almost half that number. Those not killed by the NKVD were sentenced to hard labor in one of the many brutal gulags that proliferate around the USSR.
Wartime: block any retreat of the Red Army
The terror of the 1930s decimated Soviet military strength, leaving it unprepared to repel a Nazi invasion in 1941. During World War II, the role of the NKVD was to fight not only the Germans, but any sign of defeatism among the troops of the Red Army.
When the propaganda did not work, “blocking detachments” of NKVD troops used force to stop unauthorized Red Army retreats, often from certain-death battlefield scenarios. Suspected deserters were summarily shot, sent to prison camps or punishment battalions. A 1941 NKVD report listed over 650,000 arrests for desertion among Red Army personnel.
From the 1960s to the 1980s: censorship, exile and “treatment” in the hospital
Soviet authors Yuli M. Daniel (left) and Andrei D. Sinyavsky sit in the prisoner’s bench at the opening of their trial, c. 1966. The writers were accused of waging a propaganda campaign aimed at undermining and weakening the Soviet Union by spreading “slanderous concoctions smearing the Soviet state”. Both men have pleaded “not guilty, in whole or in part” to the charges.
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After the war and Stalin’s death in 1953, the NKVD – renamed the KGB in 1954 – retained much of its power over the lives of Soviet citizens. For the first time, dissent became possible in the 1960s, following the famous 1956 speech by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, which attacked the dictator’s personality cult and the resulting excesses. But dissent always had consequences, even if it wasn’t a firing squad or a noose.
The KGB sought to silence writers like Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, sentencing them to hard labor in gulag camps for the crime of “malicious libel” of Russia in stories that had been smuggled to the West and published under pseudonyms. Decades after the iconic Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago was first published overseas, Russians could still only buy it on the black market, and anyone who broke the law and read it risked losing a job, a place at university, or their freedom. The KGB forced Pasternak himself out of the Soviet Writers’ Union and demanded that he refuse to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature. After Pasternak’s death in 1960, they arrested his lover and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, sending her to the gulag.
The KGB found other ways to muzzle internal critics. Writers and dissidents like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn were arrested, imprisoned, then stripped of their citizenship and forced into exile abroad. When physicist Andrei Sakharov began to defend human rights in the USSR, the KGB kidnapped him and locked him in a hospital, where he was tied to a bed, drugged, brutally force-fed and subjected to other tortures. When the KGB could not dissuade critics from speaking out, even by arresting them, they sought to discredit them by sending them to mental hospitals for “treatment”.
In August 1991, after Russians under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin foiled a KGB-led coup attempt, the statue of the intelligence agency’s notorious founder, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, was finally removed from the plinth in outside the Lubyanka secret police headquarters in central Moscow. But just as the statue remains intact – albeit in an open-air museum of Soviet-era sculpture – so does the KGB legacy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB gave way to the FSB (Federal Security Service), which cannot send Russian dissidents to Stalinist-style Siberian labor camps. But he still relies on intelligence tools honed in Soviet times to silence his critics.
