The History of the KGB
Good Fit
- Readers interested in 20th-century Soviet history, especially the role of the secret services
- Fans of popular history grounded in documentary sources (archives, letters, memoirs) but paced like a thriller
- Anyone wanting to understand how the agency's name changed from the Cheka to the KGB, and its institutional continuity
- Readers who want a close look at the decision-making of figures like Lenin, Trotsky, and Dzerzhinsky
Not a Fit
- Readers averse to any narrative-style popular history with a citation apparatus (the book has extensive footnotes, though the main text flows freely)
- Those who want to skip straight to Cold War-era espionage and bypass the 1917 foundations
- Readers sensitive to depictions of mass violence and executions
The book opens on the morning of October 25, 1917 (November 7 by the new calendar) in Petrograd — posters plastered across the city announce that the Provisional Government has fallen and power has passed to the "Military Revolutionary Committee." The author sets the scene with an eerie calm: residents who had dined at restaurants the night before had no idea that a small band of radicals, a few steps away, had seized power in what was nearly a bloodless coup. Prime Minister Kerensky has fled, ministers are under arrest, and a "strange, heavy, uncertain" mood hangs over the city.
The following pages trace how the Bolsheviks consolidated power — particularly through the tension surrounding the Constituent Assembly elections. The Bolsheviks won only about 20% of the vote, taking 168 of 703 seats — a clear minority. Lenin prepares to reject the results: he has election-commission members arrested, bans the liberal party, and, at a Sovnarkom meeting on December 5, proposes converting the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee into a special "commission" dedicated to fighting all "counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs."
The author is explicit about the new body's model: the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. The difference is that Dzerzhinsky's team declares it won't be bound by any bourgeois moral code of the proletarian revolution — it won't have to send its victims through the justice system; it will judge and execute on its own authority. The matter is settled on December 7, 1917, when Dzerzhinsky formally asks Lenin to establish a body to "deal with the counter-revolutionaries." Its name: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage — the Cheka, for short.
A brief notice published in Izvestia on December 10, 1917, presents the Cheka's creation as an ordinary bureaucratic item — readers were far more interested in a story about the founding of the Red Army. The author stresses how wrong that judgment would prove: the Cheka quickly becomes the "armed fist" of Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership, playing a decisive role in the forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918 — Latvian riflemen surround the palace, delegates are sent home at night, and two liberal deputies are killed in street clashes the next day.
The section's most striking thread is Lenin's own explicit invocations of the French Revolution — Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, and the Terror are repeatedly recalled, and the intent to tear down the "old order" through terror alone is openly declared. The death penalty is formally reinstated in June 1918 — the author notes that the thousands, even tens of thousands, of executions the Cheka carried out in its first year alone would soon dwarf the 6,321 political executions the tsarist Okhrana carried out across its entire history.
- Lecomte pins down events with documentary precision and an extensive footnote apparatus, yet builds the narrative in cinematic scenes — exact dates, times, locations
- Parallels with the French Revolution (Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, the Terror) serve as a recurring frame — the author carefully tracks how the Bolsheviks themselves invoked these references
A source cited repeatedly in the book, documenting the violence of communist regimes
Renders the human face of Soviet repression in first-person testimony, complementing Lecomte's institutional history
According to the table of contents, after the Cheka the book moves on to double agents, Stalin's «dirty work», the Münzenberg networks, the Cambridge Five, the Red Orchestra, the life and death of Beria, the atomic race, the KGB versus the CIA, and de-Stalinisation.
The hero of chapter 13 is Vladimir Vetrov, an engineer and KGB lieutenant colonel. Longing for France, he makes contact with the French counter-intelligence service, the DST, through his friend Prevost and, under the codename «Farewell», hands over the secrets of Soviet industrial espionage. In May 1983 Mitterrand gives the green light for «about forty» expulsions, and in the end 47 Soviet diplomats are sent home. The press prints hundreds of articles, yet no one mentions Vetrov's name. Vetrov himself is jailed for twelve years for an ordinary crime and soon falls under suspicion.
Chapter 16 covers the August 1991 coup: Gorbachev refuses to sign the state-of-emergency decree, KGB chief Kryuchkov and the other plotters try to remove him, but the army will not storm Yeltsin's White House, the coup collapses and calls go up to dissolve the KGB. The epilogue ends with Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin, who served in Dresden and saw «his world disappear» when the Berlin Wall fell: he becomes Sobchak's assistant and on 24 July 1998 is appointed head of the FSB — its sixth director in seven years.
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