50 minSeason 1 • Episode 3
LatestCoup d’etats, assassinations, sex scandals, radioactive poisoning....it’s the stuff of a Bond movie. But in today’s Russia, it’s all very real. Under Vladimir Putin, the KGB or FSB as it’s now called, rules Russia with an iron rod directly from the Kremlin. To challenge its authority, even from apparent safety abroad, means risking your life. The KGB has even managed to outlive communism itself. Today, Russia is no longer a State with a Security Service: instead, the Security Service has a State.
The KGB has influenced world events on numerous occasions before. Assassinations, coup d’états, theft of nuclear secrets and sexpionage are just standard trademarks for an organisation that still sends shivers down the spines of politicians and military figures the world over. It may have changed its name on various occasions, from Cheka to SPD to OGPU to NKVD to MGB to KGB to an array of different names after the collapse of the Soviet Union to FSB and SVR today, but it will forever be known, internally and externally, as the KGB.
Direction
Jamie Doran weaponizes archival footage like a prosecutor.
Editing
Ruthless cuts between then and now—same poison, new bottle.
Writing
Narration that treats ideology as pathology, not politics.
Creator
Jamie Doran
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The KGB's poison laboratory, 'Kamera,' tested assassination methods on Gulag prisoners—one weaponized umbrella gun killed Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London, 1978.
The series premiered months before the Skripal poisoning, making its warnings about Russian 'active measures' feel almost prophetically ignored.
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