Spy story

When the KGB Wanted You Dead, This Is How They Killed You

The KGB Spy Museum, which had a soft opening in early January on West 14th Street in New York City, calls itself “The Largest KGB Spy Collection in the World.”

It’s in a long narrow street-level space with overhead pipes which previously housed a contemporary art gallery, and its ominous contents live up to the billing.

Installations include a wooden sculpture, colored like a child’s toy, of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police capo and rapist of teenage girls, standing above a KGB safe, spilling with rubles. Another Beria, this time a bespectacled white marble bust, sits above a replica of the killer umbrella with which Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was shot with a ricin pellet on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. He died three days later.

The KGB Spy Museum, which had a soft opening in early January on West 14th Street in New York City, calls itself “The Largest KGB Spy Collection in the World.”

It’s in a long narrow street-level space with overhead pipes which previously housed a contemporary art gallery, and its ominous contents live up to the billing.

Installations include a wooden sculpture, colored like a child’s toy, of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police capo and rapist of teenage girls, standing above a KGB safe, spilling with rubles. Another Beria, this time a bespectacled white marble bust, sits above a replica of the killer umbrella with which Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was shot with a ricin pellet on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. He died three days later.