KGB (transliteration of "КГБ") is the Russian-language abbreviation for Committee for State Security, (Russian: Комите́т Госуда́рственной Безопа́сности (help·info); Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti).
The KGB was the umbrella organization name for the Soviet Union's premier security agency, secret police, and intelligence agency, from 1954 to 1991.
The term KGB is also used in a more general sense to refer to the successive Soviet State Security organizations before 1954 (from the Cheka in 1917). The term KGB is also sometimes used in the Western press to refer to the Russian Federation's Federal Security Service (FSB) since 1991.
Roughly, the KGB's operational domain encompassed functions and powers like those exercised by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the counter-intelligence (internal security) division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency, the Federal Protective Service, and the Secret Service in the United States, or by the twin organizations MI5 and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in the United Kingdom.
On 21 December 1995, the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin signed the decree that disbanded the KGB in Russia, to be substituted by the FSB. The official Russian name of the State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus is still KGB.