The ENTIRE History of the KGB in 13 Minutes

December 1989, Dresden. A KGB officer burns files so fast the furnace bursts. A crowd is at the gate. He calls for help and the answer is Moscow is silent. His name is Vladimir Putin. This is the entire history of the KGB, from 40 men to an empire of secrets and why it never

died. The Cheka. Petrograd, December 20th, 1917. Lenin's revolution is 6 weeks old and it has enemies everywhere. Lenin wants a sword to protect it. He hands that sword to Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish nobleman who has spent 11 years in Tsarist prisons, hard labor and exile. The new body gets a long name, the

All-Russian Extraordinary Commission and everyone uses its Russian initials, the Cheka. In its first months, it has about 40 officials working from the fourth floor of a building at Gorokhovaya Street number two. Then the government moves to Moscow and the Cheka takes over the headquarters of an insurance company on Lubyanka Square. That building will

be the home of the secret police for the rest of the century. In August 1918, a woman named Fanny Kaplan shoots Lenin twice. On September 5th, the Red Terror is declared. Historians count at least 50,000 executions by the Cheka and some estimates go as high as 200,000. By the end of the civil war in 1922, the

commission that began with 40 officials has at least 200,000 people. Dzerzhinsky earns a nickname that will stick to him forever, Iron Felix. In February 1922, Lenin's government abolishes the Cheka. Its officers keep their desks, their files and their address and all they need now is a new name. New names, same building. The new name is the GPU, then

the OGPU and in 1934, the NKVD. Each one sits in the same building on Lubyanka Square. By now, Lenin is dead and Joseph Stalin rules the country. Stalin trusts no one, and the secret police become his main tool of government. In 1937 and 1938, the Great Terror sweeps the country. Generals, poets, and farmers