A Century of Chekist Public Relations

Soviet and now Russian state security organizations have been notoriously opaque about their activities. At the same time, however, they have a 100-year-long history of managing public relations (PR) to shape domestic and international public opinion in accordance with their interests and present their activities in a favorable and positive light. This chapter presents a historical overview of the key institutional developments in the PR efforts of the Soviet and Russian state security organizations from the 1920s to the 2020s. The chapter discusses the work of the state security entities, such as the VChK Press Bureau, the Group Attached to the KGB Chairman for the Study and Lessons Learned from the Work of State Security and the Information about the Adversary, the KGB Press Bureau, the KGB Public Relations Center, the FSB Public Relations Center, and the SVR Press Bureau. The content of four specific PR projects of the Soviet and Russian state security services from different historical periods is explored in detail: (1) The Red Book of the VChK , (2) The Chekist Stories book series, (3) the professional journal Security Service – Intelligence and Counterintelligence News , and (4) the Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service book series. The chapter shows that while each historical period had its own political and ideological specificities, the basic orientation of Russian state security PR in the last hundred years has remained the same: to gain public support for the overt and covert state security activities portrayed as the legitimate defense of the Russian state against its foreign and domestic enemies.