Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most of Andropov's major appointments to date seem designed to consolidate KGB power further. He elevated onetime Azerbaijan KGB Chief Geidar Aliyev, 59, to the key post of Deputy Premier. He sent Vitali Fedorchuk, 64, who replaced Andropov as KGB chief last year, over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which
...controls the conventional police, or militsia. That move appeared to compromise a formal separation between the police and the security service that has been in effect since 1954. The new chief of the KGB is Viktor Chebrikov, 60, who served for 13 years as Andropov's deputy...
Some Western analysts speculate that Andropov's election as party chief reflects the gradual gravitation of political power in Communist countries toward the military and security sectors. Andropov's first round of appointments certainly suggests that he wants to use KGB men and methods to run the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB agent in Iran who defected to the British last June, insists that Andropov has been and remains a loyal party man. As Kuzichkin told TIME: "In the West people talk about the KGB as if it were an independent body. It is an instrument...
...empire. That incautious move roused a vengeance-minded Politburo to action. Beria was arrested and executed. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in a famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, vowed that the state security forces would be subservient to the principles of "revolutionary socialist legality." The KGB would be run by political appointees answerable to the party leadership, men like Andropov...
...former Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov was chosen by Brezhnev in 1967 to continue the gradual "politicization" of the KGB. He took over a security service still demoralized after several reorganizations. Andropov set about winning friends among the power groups hostile to the secret police. The military, for example, has been a traditional KGB rival. Security police ruthlessly purged the military high command on Stalin's orders in 1937, and uniformed KGB agents still riddle the armed services at all levels, a power unto themselves. It was a measure of Andropov's political skill that he managed to form an alliance...