The Soviet secret service, renowned for ruthlessness and duplicity

A Dictionary of the Cold War These Cold War definitions are unfortunately all too relevant again with the advent of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Some terms are from the original period of nuclear anxiety between the United States and the Soviet Union, and are being fleshed out with new terminology from the age of frigidity […]

Siloviki is a Russian term for those who have backgrounds and employment in security services, the military, and police under the former USSR. More unofficially, the word can refer specifically to a group of high-ranked politicians around Putin, his security cabal, and the heads of the Russian power ministries — many of whom were formerly […]

Sistema is a Russian term to denote “how the government really works” (as opposed to via formal state institutions). The term refers to a complex and pervasive system of governance, influence, and control that was deeply embedded in the Soviet Union’s political and intelligence fabric, particularly embodied by the KGB during the Cold War era. […]

A systematic corruption of government by organized crime syndicates. Term coined by former KGB/FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko. See also: kleptocracy

the oldest top-secret research facility of the KGB, 12 miles east of Moscow

The Russian Federal Security Service, formerly known as the KGB under the Soviet Union. The main intelligence division within the Russian military apparatus, containing the GRU and other specialty units.

“Eternal Rome” is an ideology positing Russia as a geopolitical bulwark of conservatism against a weak-kneed West (part of Alexander Dugin‘s reformulation of Eurasianism theory). It explains part of the seemingly sudden appeal of Russia to a political party once responsible for McCarthyism — whose acolyte Roy Cohn would later groom Donald Trump for the […]

Loyalty to the concept of an unbroken chain of Russian security services, all the way from Lenin’s Cheka to the KGB to the FSB