The KGB's legacy lasts until today
28 May 2025
The KGB – the Soviet Union's scary, almighty intelligence agency. During the late Soviet times, it was responsible for both foreign and internal espionage, as well as fighting the dissident movement. But what happened to it after the Soviet Union fell? Officially, the KGB was divided into the FSB (Federal Security Service) and SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service).
But its activities have never become the subject of public scrutiny, nor have its agents ever been lustrated. We know very little about how the organisation operates.
Now, a new investigation has found that a network of KGB informants continued to operate in St. Petersburg after the 1990s. In KGB fashion, it targeted pro-democracy activists, homosexuals, and journalists. According to the investigation, the network of four KGB informants, known in Soviet jargon as secsot (a Russian abbreviation for ‘secret collaborator'), infiltrated opposition and subculture circles, compromised activists by creating pornographic materials, and sexually abused and tortured them. The journalists' conclusions say the same agents operated on behalf of the agency for 40 years.
How do they work? Numerous accounts described that the tactic (used since the 80s) included targeting young teenagers, who were offered alcohol. They would then wake up being told they were compromised and forced to work for the FSB. The most recent case in investigation occurred in 2017, when an 18-year-old Navalny supporter switched sides after encountering the group and participated in anti-Navalny events.
In 2021, he died under unknown circumstances due to what was called "drug abuse". The journalists also connected other mysterious deaths of activists in the last 40 years with the work of the group.
 | Sascha Roslyakov The investigation gives us a rare glimpse of what Putin's police force is today. As the KGB has never been reformed and its archives remain classified, we still don't have answers to questions such as who worked for the KGB or how its practices were transferred to today's FSB. Notably, the investigation is at the centre of the St. Petersburg gay scene, making the FSB an active participant. It's precisely in St. Petersburg that a lawmaker, Vitaliy Milonov, introduced a anti-gay propaganda law in 2013 – the man the investigation said has been in tight contact with the FSB group. Reporting from the inside of Russia demonstrates that Russian law enforcement agencies are used to torture in prisons and police stations, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine hasn't introduced these practices as they existed before, but instead increased them. However, the systematic scale of the surveillance and the use of force against Russia's citizens might be far from being comprehensible. The author of the investigation, journalist Katya Arenina, says she "thinks these practices exist everywhere [in Russia]." |
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