KGB's Rehabilitation Becomes an Issue

In the latest sign of the creeping rehabilitation of the KGB under its former colonel, President Vladimir Putin, Russia yesterday marked the anniversary of the founding of Josef Stalin's counter-intelligence service by issuing a set of postage stamps bearing the portraits of six secret agents.

The stamps show the stern-faced profiles of the agents who played a key role in the early days of the revolutionary secret service, or SVR, which became the first chief directorate of the KGB.

The foreign intelligence arm of the revolutionary Cheka secret police was established 80 years ago today. One of its key figures, Vladimir Styrne, is one of the six being honoured on the new stamps.

He enjoyed a fearsome reputation for ruthlessness, and was once alleged to have had his own parents murdered.

The Russian government said the stamps were dedicated to "the outstanding patriotic counter-intelligence agents of the years 1922-37".

All of the six men featured were killed in Stalin's purges in 1937.

The stamps' issue appears to be part of a gradual rehabilitation of the KGB and its Stalinist antecedents, aimed at distancing the secret police from the regimes it served.