Soviet Union Inside The KGB

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.