The KGB ran as the Soviet Union's main security agency from 1954 until the state itself collapsed in 1991, the latest link in a chain that stretched back through the MGB, the NKGB, and the Cheka. This film lays out what the committee actually did: foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, guarding the Soviet border, protecting the Communist Party leadership and government, and running the internal campaign against nationalism, dissent, and anything classified as anti-Soviet activity. It notes the KGB's odd institutional status, governed by army law like a military service rather than a civilian ministry, and describes how similar security committees were set up in nearly every Soviet republic except Russia itself. Because most of the KGB's own archives remain sealed, the film works from the public record and the handful of documentary sources that exist, sketching the shape of an organization built to watch its own population as closely as its foreign enemies.