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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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021389
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02138900.023
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1990-09-17
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WORLD, Page 54SOVIET UNIONInside The KGB A rare glimpse into the workings of the Soviet secret police
No branch of the Soviet government has been so secretive -- and
so dreaded -- as the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti
(Committee for State Security), better known as the KGB. The
world's largest spy and state-security machine, the KGB employs
more than 500,000 people, including thousands of agents abroad. The
agency has long been the stuff of shadowy legend, its name
synonymous with terror and its doors shut tightly to the public.
Now they have been opened a crack, as attested by the photos
on these pages, obtained by TIME. In a remarkable display of
glasnost, the Moscow newspaper Nedelya last week published the
pictures in a three-page report that gave many Soviet citizens
their first look inside the forbidding KGB building on Moscow's
Dzerzhinsky Square. Nedelya Editor in Chief Vitali Syrokomsky and
photographer Viktor Akhlomov toured the KGB's headquarters, a KGB
officers' academy and the notorious Lefortovo prison, where Natan
Sharansky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and many lesser-known dissidents
have been detained. What Syrokomsky and Akhlomov saw, of course,
was carefully screened; they were not allowed into the KGB
communications center, laboratories and interrogation rooms. And
conspicuously absent from Nedelya's pages was any insight into
Vladimir Kryuchkov, the new chief of the KGB.