The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia--Past, Present, and Future

Albats, a Russian journalist in Newsweek's Moscow bureau, argues that despite the breakup of the Soviet Union, the KGB remains powerful. Drawing on documents from state security files, interviews with former secret police and her own journal, she maintains that the KGB engineered the perestroika policy of the late 1980s to reposition itself at the top of the infrastructure, then choreographed the coup attempt of August 1991, which served to entrench itself even more solidly. She holds out little hope for democracy in Russia as long as the KGB-now known as the Federal Counterintelligence Service-continues to flourish. In this engrossing mix of first-person reportage and lucid analysis, Albats shows the KGB as a political institution operating in a legal vacuum with no checks or balances. (Nov.)