The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or "State Security Committee" in Russian, was the Soviet Union's espionage agency. The Soviet Union's espionage and intelligence agencies were once on a par with those of the United States, and were known for their strength and sophistication, even surpassing the United States in some respects. Since the Soviet Union's dramatic transformation, Russia has inherited its mantle, but its power has been greatly diminished. After a restructuring, it has emerged with a new face and is active again.
The KGB was established in 1954. The agency traces its origins to the "Cheka", which was formed in December 1917, when the Bolshevik government was first established, with Dzerzhinsky as its first head.
The Cheka was headquartered at 2 Gorokhovaya Street in Petrograd, and when the Soviet government moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, the Cheka's headquarters were moved to 11 Lubyanka Square in Moscow's Kremlin Palace in 1920.
The main bodies of the KGB were: the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Domestic Counterintelligence Service, the Army Directorate, the Border Guard Directorate, the General Directorate, and the KGB's foreign station groups. At one point, the KGB system staff reached more than 500,000, with 10,000 in the headquarters agency, 200,000 in the departments of espionage, counterintelligence and technical support, and 300,000 in the border guards, in addition to 1.5 million informants throughout the country and 250,000 spies abroad, with an annual budget of $10 billion.
The KGB has always been the main department responsible for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence work, counter-espionage work, domestic security work and border defense, is a "super ministry" above the party, government and military departments, is a supreme institution, which is only responsible for the Central Politburo.
British intelligence called the KGB "the world's largest spy agency for gathering secret information".
The most influential leaders in the history of the KGB were Andropov and Beria, with Andropov ending up as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union and Beria losing a power struggle and being executed by Khrushchev for treason.