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Understanding the KGB: A Historical Quiz

This quiz tests your knowledge of the KGB, its operations, and its historical context, including significant events and figures associated with Soviet intelligence and espionage.

#KGB #Soviet Union #Cold War #Intelligence #Espionage #History

1 [8] Throughout, the ________ (CPUSA) and its Gen.-Sec'y Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government, business, and industry.

2 The scope of foreign intelligence operations prompted Lenin to authorise the Cheka's creation of the INO (Innostranyi Otdel – Foreign-intelligence Department)—the precursor to the ________ (FCD) of the KGB.

3 Where are the headquarters of KGB?

4 ________ (Foreign Operations) – foreign espionage.

5 It was Cold War policy for the KGB of the Soviet Union and the satellite-state KGBs to extensively monitor public and private opinion, internal subversion, and possible revolutionary plots in the ________.

6 During the Hungarian revolt, KGB chairman ________, personally supervised the post-invasion "normalization" of the country.

7 The KGB prepared the Red Army's route by infiltrating to ________ many illegal residents disguised as Western tourists.

8 Operations and Technology Directorate – research laboratories for recording devices and ________ for poisons and drugs.

9 but the Russo–German ________ (1939) and the suppressed Hungarian Uprising (1956) and Prague Spring (1968) mostly ended ideological recruitment.

10 He was especially concerned with the ________ and Andrei Sakharov, "Public Enemy Number One".

💡 Interesting Facts

  • during the 1980s more than half of the personnel of the Soviet embassy in Zambia were KGB and GRU agents.
  • the former KGB agent Yuri Nosenko was incarcerated for five years by the CIA including 1,277 days of interrogation, because the American agents did not believe he had truly defected.
  • up to 78 percent of 1,016 leading political figures in post-Soviet Russia have served previously in organizations affiliated with Russian intelligence services like the KGB.
  • David Colville Anderson, whose career was ended by a scandal involving teenage girls, blamed it on the KGB.
  • British MP Anthony Courtney was blackmailed by the KGB using photographs of him with a tour guide.
  • KGB head Ivan Serov did not go on tour in Britain as planned because the British press labelled him "Ivan the Terrible".
  • Russian pastor Gennadi Kryuchkov led his illegal Baptist organisation for 20 years in the USSR while hiding from the KGB.
  • Russian billionaire, politician and philanthropist Alexander Lebedev started his career as a KGB agent working in London.
  • flatwater canoer Vladas Česiūnas was forcibly returned by the KGB to the Soviet Union out of fear that he would publish a book on doping in the Soviet Union prior to the 1980 Summer Olympics.
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