Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security, and chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during the Second World War, and promoted to deputy premier under Stalin in 1941. He officially joined the Politburo in 1946. Beria was the longest-serving and most influential and brutal of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after the war. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he was responsible for organising purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician who was the sixth leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After Leonid Brezhnev's 18-year rule, Andropov served in the post from 1982 until his death in 1984.
In the Russian political lexicon, a silovik is a person who works for any state organisation that is authorised to use force against citizens or others. Examples are the Russian Armed Forces, the Russian national police, Russian national drug control, Russian immigration control (GUVM), the Ministry of Justice, the Federal Security Service (FSB), former KGB personnel, GRU, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and the Federal Protective Service (FSO). This word is also used for a politician who came into politics from these organisations.
Active measures is a term used to describe political warfare conducted by the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. The term, which dates back to the 1920s, includes operations such as espionage, propaganda, sabotage and assassination, based on foreign policy objectives of the Soviet and Russian governments. Active measures have continued to be used by the administration of Vladimir Putin.
Oleg Danilovich Kalugin is a former KGB general. He was during a time, head of KGB political operations in the United States and later a critic of the agency. After being convicted of spying for the West in absentia during a trial in Moscow, he remained in the US and was sworn in as a citizen on 4 August 2003.
Stephen Frand Cohen was an American scholar of Russian studies. His academic work concentrated on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's relationship with the United States.
As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals, as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the United States, forming various spy rings. Particularly during the 1940s, some of these espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies. These Soviet espionage networks illegally transmitted confidential information to Moscow, such as information on the development of the atomic bomb. Soviet spies also participated in propaganda and disinformation operations, known as active measures, and attempted to sabotage diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and its allies.
Chekism is a term that relates to the situation in the Soviet Union where the secret police strongly controlled all spheres of society. It is also used to point out similar circumstances in post-Soviet intelligence states such as modern Russia. The term can refer to the system of rule itself, and to the underlying ideology that promotes and popularizes political police violence and arbitrariness against real and imagined enemies of the state.
Alexander Davidovich Goldfarb is a Russian-American microbiologist, activist, and author. He emigrated from the USSR in 1975 and studied in Israel and Germany before settling permanently in New York in 1982. Goldfarb is a naturalized American citizen. He has combined a scientific career as a microbiologist with political and public activities focused on civil liberties and human rights in Russia, in the course of which he has been associated with Andrei Sakharov, George Soros, Boris Berezovsky, and Alexander Litvinenko. He has not visited Russia since 2000.
Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky is a Russian American historian. Felshtinsky has authored a number of books on Russian history, including The Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, Towards a History of Our Isolation, The Failure of the World Revolution, Blowing up Russia, and The Age of Assassins.
Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host.
The poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera, was a covert research-and-development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the laboratory manufactured and tested poisons, and was reportedly reactivated by the Russian government in the late 1990s.
The Committee for State Security (CSS) was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
Russian espionage in the United States has occurred since at least the Cold War, and likely well before. According to the United States government, by 2007 it had reached Cold War levels.
Angela E. Stent is a British-born American foreign policy expert specializing in US and European relations with Russia and Russian foreign policy. She is professor emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and senior advisor and director emerita of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has served in the Office of Policy Planning in the US State Department and as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Putinism is the social, political, and economic system of Russia formed during the political leadership of Vladimir Putin. It is characterized by the concentration of political and financial powers in the hands of "siloviks", current and former "people with shoulder marks", coming from a total of 22 governmental enforcement agencies, the majority of them being the Federal Security Service (FSB), Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Armed Forces of Russia, and National Guard of Russia. According to Arnold Beichman, "Putinism in the 21st century has become as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th."
Boris B. Volodarsky is an English historian, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, specialising in Intelligence History, which he has studied for almost 30 years after having moved to the West, and the history of the Spanish Civil War. He formerly served as a captain in the Spetsnaz GRU, a Russian special forces unit.
