what does KGB stand for?

Answer 1

Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti

or

if you wish, "Knights of Glory and Beer"

Answer 2

If this question has to do with Russia, (Soviet Union), From the beginning of their regime, the Bolsheviks relied on a strong secret, or political, police to buttress their rule. The first secret police, called the Cheka, was established in December 1917 as a temporary institution to be abolished once Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power. The original Cheka, headed by Feliks Dzerzhinskii, was empowered only to investigate "counterrevolutionary" crimes. But it soon acquired powers of summary justice and began a campaign of terror against the propertied classes and enemies of Bolshevism. Although many Bolsheviks viewed the Cheka with repugnance and spoke out against its excesses, its continued existence was seen as crucial to the survival of the new regime.

Once the Civil War (1918-21) ended and the threat of domestic and foreign opposition had receded, the Cheka was disbanded. Its functions were transferred in 1922 to the State Political Directorate, or GPU, which was initially less powerful than its predecessor. Repression against the population lessened. But under party leader Joseph Stalin, the secret police again acquired vast punitive powers and in 1934 was renamed the People's Comissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. No longer subject to party control or restricted by law, the NKVD became a direct instrument of Stalin for use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s.

The secret police remained the most powerful and feared Soviet institution throughout the Stalinist period. Although the post-Stalin secret police, the KGB, no longer inflicted such large-scale purges, terror, and forced depopulation on the peoples of the Soviet Union, it continued to be used by the Kremlin leadership to suppress political and religious dissent. The head of the KGB was a key figure in resisting the democratization of the late 1980s and in organizing the attempted putsch of August 1991.

Answer 3

Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti which translates to Committee for State Security.

Answer 4

KGB (transliteration of "КГБ") is the Russian-language abbreviation for Committee for State Security, (Russian: Комит́ет Госуд́арственной Безоп́асности (help·info); Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti).

From March 13, 1954 to November 6, 1991 KGB was the umbrella organization name for the Soviet Union's premier security, secret police, and intelligence agency. The term KGB is also used in a more general sense to refer to the Soviet State Security organization since its foundation as the Cheka in 1917.

Roughly, the KGB's operational domain encompassed functions and powers like those exercised by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the counter-intelligence (internal security) division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Federal Protective Service, and the Secret Service.

The first of the forerunners of the KGB, the Cheka, was established on December 20, 1917, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky and personally praised by Vladimir Lenin as a "devastating weapon against countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet power by people who are infinitely stronger than us" (The Sword and the Shield, 29-30). It replaced the Tsarist Okhranka. The Cheka underwent several name and organizational changes over the years, becoming in succession the State Political Directorate (OGPU) (1923), People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) (1941), and Ministry for State Security (MGB) (1946), among others. In March 1953, Lavrenty Beria consolidated the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the MGB into one body--the MVD; within a year, Beria was executed and MVD was split. The re-formed MVD retained its police and law enforcement powers, while the second, new agency, KGB, assumed internal and external security functions, and was subordinate to the Council of Ministers. On July 5, 1978 the KGB was re-christened as the "KGB of the Soviet Union", with its chairman holding a ministerial council seat.

The KGB was dissolved when its chief, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov, used the KGB's resources in aid of the August 1991 coup attempt to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On August 23, 1991 Colonel-General Kryuchkov was arrested, and General Vadim Bakatin was appointed KGB Chairman--and mandated to dissolve the KGB of the Soviet Union. On November 6, 1991, the KGB officially ceased to exist. Its services were divided into two separate organisations; the FSB for Internal Security and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) for Foreign Intelligence Gathering. The Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) is functionally much like the Soviet KGB.

From its inception, the KGB was envisioned as the "sword and shield" of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The KGB achieved a remarkable string of successes in the early stages of its history. The then comparatively lax security of foreign powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom allowed the KGB unprecedented opportunities to penetrate the foreign intelligence agencies and government with its own, ideologically-motivated agents such as the Cambridge Five. Arguably the Soviet Union’s most important intelligence coup, detailed information concerning the building of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project), occurred due to well-placed KGB agents such as Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The KGB also pursued enemies of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin such as the counter-revolutionary White Guards and Leon Trotsky, eventually resulting in Trotsky’s assassination.

During the Cold War, the KGB played a critical role in the survival of the Soviet one-party state through its suppression of political dissent (termed "ideological subversion") and hounding of notable public figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. It also achieved notable successes in the foreign intelligence arena, including continued gathering of Western science and technology from agents like Melita Norwood and the infiltration of West Germany’s government under Willy Brandt alongside the Stasi. However, the double blow of the compromise of existing KGB operations through high-profile defections like those of Elizabeth Bentley in the United States and Oleg Gordievsky in Britain, as well as the drying up of ideological recruitment after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring, resulted in a major decline in the extent of the KGB’s capabilities. However, the KGB was assisted by some mercenary Western defectors such as the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI mole Robert Hanssen, helping to partly counteract its own hemorrhage of skilled agents.