The KGB’s guards were also a danger to the leadership. In 1964
the Guards Directorate failed to protect Nikita Khrushchevfrom
those planning a coup. At the beginning of the 1991 August putsch,
the chief of the Ninth Directorate informed Mikhail Gorbachevthat
an emergency commission had taken power and took his “suitcase”
with the codes needed to launch a nuclear attack.
On becoming president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin
relied heavily on his chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, who
reestablished leadership protection in the Presidential Security Ser-
vice (PSB). From 1991 to his dismissal in 1996, Korzhakov was
one of the most powerful people in Moscow. Since his fall, the PSB
has faded into the background, playing the same role the Ninth Di-
rectorate did for decades. See alsoRUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE
SERVICES.LENIN, VLADIMIR ILYICH (1870–1924).Born into a family of the
petty nobility, Vladimir Ulyanov became a revolutionary at univer-
sity. Rather than becoming a member of the populist revolutionary
parties, which saw power coming from a revolutionary peasantry, he
embraced Marxism. In exilein Western Europe for more than two
decades, he adopted the nom de guerre Lenin and became the leader
of the Bolshevik(majority) faction of the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party (RSDLP), which supported a small, tightly organized
party run by a dedicated political elite. Unlike European Marxists and
Russian opponents in the RSDLP, Lenin embraced conspiracy and
political violence. The Bolsheviks supported political terror as an ab-
solute necessity; for them a revolution without a firing squad or a
guillotine was unthinkable.
Without Lenin, there could not have been a Revolutionin 1917.
As both the ideologue and organizer, he put fire into the belly as well
as building an effective militant party with its own strong paramili-
tary section. Within weeks of the revolution, Lenin instituted a secret
police, the Cheka, an acronym for Chrevzuychanaya Komissiya po
Borbe s Kontrarevolutsei i Sabotazhem(Extraordinary Commission
for the Struggle against Counterrevolution and Sabotage), which was
placed under the Polish revolutionary Feliks Dzerzhinsky. From its
formation on 20 December 1917, the Cheka was designed to be used
against the enemies of the revolution among the former ruling144 •LENIN, VLADIMIR ILYICH (1870–1924)06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 144