"As Masha Gessen observes in her new book, appropriately titled The Future Is History, even Boris Yeltsin was more interested in getting right to the “reconciliation” part by skipping almost entirely over the antecedent “truth.” Only a small portion of the KGB archives was declassified because Yeltsin foreclosed on a policy of full lustration for fear of what that might do to a fragile society just discovering freedom.

How does one reckon with an intelligence apparatus so vast and powerful that its reach touched every living soul in nearly one-third of the planet and transformed even good men and women—mothers, fathers, and children—into informants or accomplices? Recriminations on this scale could cannibalize a democratic Russia before it even had a chance to take hold. Better to let past stay past and hidden. If granting impunity to all KGB operatives meant that those who otherwise might have been brought to justice were now in excellent positions to seize control of the Russian government, so be it.

[..] Virtually everyone living in the Soviet Union was a potential spy, as the KGB harvested “a certain amount of its data from Soviet citizens in various ministries who work with foreigners.” Poets, novelists, singers, painters, ballerinas could be enlisted in sophisticated operations aimed at snaring both minnows and whales from the West. French President Charles De Gaulle’s ambassador to Moscow once got reeled in by a KGB cast of hundreds, including some of the finest Soviet prostitutes.

[..] What began as a pantomime of professional courtesy—a simple invitation to attend a symposium—has culminated in your personal and professional destruction. You have become a citizen of no-man’s-land, as one fictional hero of counterintelligence memorably phrased it, the collateral damage of History. No one told you it would ever be otherwise."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-kgb-papers-how-putin-learned-his-spycraft-part-1?ref=author?ref=home