The KGB is the most commonly used acronym for Soviet Russia’s (and subsequently the USSR’s) political police, which was named Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) for most of its post-war existence, more precisely between 1954 and 1991. The KGB was originally established in December 1917 as the Cheka (Russian acronym for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Repression of the Counter-revolution and Sabotage), which functioned as the coercive instrument of the dictatorship of the Communist Party over Russia and all Soviet republics. It successively bore the names of GPU (an acronym for the State Political Administration) and NKVD (an acronym for the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs).  Immediately after the end of the Second World War, on 16 March1946, the People’s Commissariat for State Security, which had been established in 1941, became the MGB (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti – Ministry for State Security). In March 1953, after Stalin’s death, the MGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) merged into a common institution under the latter name, which was headed by Lavrenti Beria. In the MSSR, the new MVD continued to function under the republic’s notorious first security chief, Iosif Mordovets, who was heavily involved in the massive campaigns of repression and deportation in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A year later, on 13 March 1954, a decision of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU created a new structure of the security apparatus which remained basically unchanged until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. State security was now entrusted to the Committee for State Security (KGB) and its branches in the republics, separated from the MVD. Mordovets remained head of the new committee for another year, after which he was replaced by one of Khrushchev’s loyalists.

The structure of the central apparatus of the Moldavian KGB was typical for the general pattern prevalent throughout the USSR. It was divided into the following sections: Section I (general intelligence), Section II (counter-intelligence activity), Section III (operative collaboration with the MVD), Section IV (operative activity concerning the sphere of transportation), Section V (struggle against ideological deviations, later known as Section “Z” – defence of the constitutional Soviet order), Section VI (operative activity in the industrial sphere), Section VII (surveillance), the technical-operative division, and several auxiliary services. For our purposes, the most interesting and relevant subdivision of the Moldavian KGB was Section V, which dealt directly with the repression and “re-education” of potential dissidents, unreliable and untrustworthy persons. This section was responsible for controlling and keeping under close surveillance all those opposed to the regime, including those who expressed dissenting views in the sphere of culture and identity issues. It thus combined a repressive dimension with an aspect of propaganda that overlapped with the party’s own Agitprop department. At the end of the 1980s, the Moldavian KGB had around 300 permanent employees. Out of this total number, approximately two thirds worked in the central apparatus of the organisation. Seventy employees worked in the five city branches of the Moldavian KGB (Chişinău, Bălţi, Bender, Tiraspol, and Ungheni), while another sixty operatives were divided among the nineteen district bureaus (as a rule, each bureau was responsible for two districts). Around forty KGB operatives were working in Transnistria, and another ten people in the Gagauz region.

The Moldavian KGB had an excellent reputation at the all-Union level and was deemed one of the most effective branches of the Soviet security apparatus. In Soviet Moldavia, the KGB’s record (like that of its predecessor organisations) was that of a pivotal instrument of communist nation-building, political control, and repression, with its key positions entrusted, as a rule, to Russian or Ukrainian officers. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Moldavian KGB was especially preoccupied with the purported threat of “local nationalism,” investing a lot of resources and efforts to combat this phenomenon. After the breakup of the USSR, the assets and part of the personnel of the KGB in the MSSR were transferred to Moldova’s Ministry of National Security, a predecessor of the Information and Security Service, the country’s intelligence agency since 1999. According to 1997 official reports, some 30 percent of the personnel working in Moldova’s Ministry of National Security were hired before 1990 as KGB officers. The KGB was officially disbanded by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1991.