Guillaume Minea-Pic

This project examines how local branches of the KGB in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union adapted, or failed to adapt, to the reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost between 1985 and 1991. Existing scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on Moscow, leaving the Soviet peripheries underexplored, despite them being at the forefront of national independence movements and ultimately central to the Soviet Union’s dissolution. By decentralizing the traditional focus, this project aims to reconstruct the perspective of rank-and-file KGB officers and personnel and to analyze how authoritarian security services responded to the contradictory pressures of liberalization on the one hand, and the Soviet center’s need for continuous control over the Soviet republics on the other. The project interrogates whether local KGB branches resisted reform, pragmatically adapted, or fell into institutional paralysis. To answer this question, I employ a comparative perspective across different Soviet republics, enabling analysis of both common patterns and divergent strategies. Primary sources include local KGB archives, judicial records, press investigations from the late 1980s / early 1990s, and oral history interviews. I synthesize to capture both the institutional practices of the late Soviet security services and the ways their agents understood and acted upon the transformation unfolding around them.