Original Item: Only One Available. This is a 1970s Soviet Russian KGB General's peaked visor cap. It is size 58cm which is approximately 7 1/4 US. Features wool body, heavy embroidering, enamel Soviet red star badge, leather sweat band, felt bottom visor, satin interior lining. Overall condition is excellent!

Mindful of ambitious spy chiefs—and after deposing Premier Nikita Khrushchev—Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the CPSU knew to manage the next over-ambitious KGB Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin (1958–61), who facilitated Brezhnev's palace coup d'état against Khrushchev in 1964 (despite Shelepin not then being in the KGB). With political reassignments, Shelepin protégé Vladimir Semichastny (1961–67) was sacked as KGB Chairman, and Shelepin himself was demoted from chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control to Trade Union Council chairman.

In the 1980s, the glasnost liberalisation of Soviet society provoked KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov (1988–91) to lead the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev. The thwarted coup d'état ended the KGB on 6 November 1991. The KGB's main successors are the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service).

The KGB (Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), tr. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, IPA: [kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪnːəj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ] (About this soundlisten)), translated in English as the Committee for State Security, was the secret police force that was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.

The agency was a military service governed by army laws and regulations, in the same fashion as the Soviet Army or the MVD Internal Troops. While most of the KGB archives remain classified, two online documentary sources are available. Its main functions were foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence, operative-investigatory activities, guarding the State border of the USSR, guarding the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, organization and security of government communications as well as combating nationalism, dissent, and anti-Soviet activities.

In 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the KGB split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.

After breaking away from Georgia in the early 1990s with Russian help, the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia established its own KGB (keeping this unreformed name). In addition, the Republic of Belarus has also established its own national security agency, the State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus, the name and acronym of which are identical to those of the former Soviet KGB.