History

Today, the Russian government under the leadership of Vladimir Putin is gearing up to take over Ukraine. The reasons for this act against world peace is hidden in the past of Russia’s KGB and its predecessors.  

The tale of Russian security and intelligence groups started with the formation of the Vecheka (Cheka for short) in the December of 1917. It was trusted with suppressing the revolution.  While in power, their actions led to the death of around 500,000 people. One example how they went about killing these people is that they would take peasants hostage until certain crops were delivered. If the crops were not delivered, the hostages would be killed. After five years, the Cheka was transformed into the GPU (state political administration).

The GPU was then integrated into the NKVD with the creation of the Soviet union in 1923. One year later, with the need of unification that the creation of the Soviet Union brought, the NKVD as a whole was transformed into a more unified security administration called the OGPU.

Kolyma Gulag gold mine

    The OGPU was responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Gulag camps. These camps were the Russian equivalent of the Concentration camps in Germany during the Holocaust.  Unlike the German camps, if a prisoner of war survived their term they would be set free. The Soviets did not intend on torturing these prisoners but only to put them to work with as little money wasted as possible. Unfortunately, this goal of being thrifty had a devastating effect on the living conditions of the prisoners and as a result of this, thousands of the prisoners died while in the camps. During their time in the camp, they would put to work under brutal conditions. One example of the conditions is at Kolyma.  This was one of the coldest and remote places on earth and the prisoners were forced to stay there for months on end to Mine gold. Some of the even prisoners said that it was “12 months of winter and all the rest summer.” Even though the Gulag camps were massively reduced in size after Stalin’s death, they would continue on building the infrastructure of the Soviet union in these conditions until its dismemberment in the 90’s.

    The OGPU was also responsible for finding and dealing with enemies of the Government.  These people would include: anarchists, leftists, or anyone who could possibly have a negative impact on the government.  

Bugged US seal

    After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1954, the OGPU was turned into KGB. The highly infamous intelligence group quickly grew to become the worlds largest surveillance department in the world. The KGB’s main focus was on gaining counterintelligence from enemy nations. They would send undercover agents over in order to find out how far the other countries were along on their nuclear technology and even sabotage certain operations.They even created top secret technology like RFID bugs to aid in

 their spying efforts abroad. They also acted as the secret police and were relentless in their pursuits against supposed “traitors of the government”.

Luckily in the 1980’s the stagnation of the Soviet government led to its collapse in the December of 1991.  The 15 Countries that comprised the Union dismembered into their individual countries. The Berlin wall came down and the KGB went down with it. Russian relations with the United States government improved until just recently with Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Putin used to be a member of the KGB and is rumored to have intentions of re-creating the Soviet Union today. The United States is determining action against this as you read this right now.

Map of the countries in the soviet union

Political cartoon showing the nations that the  Soviet Union broke up into