In the Soviet Union, why was the Cheka renamed so many times?

Question

The Cheka was the secret police of the USSR. Wikipedia maintains a list of the Cheka and its subsequent renamings:

• 1917: Cheka
• 1922: GPU
• 1923: OGPU
• 1934: NKVD
• 1941: NKGB
• 1941: NKVD (again)
• 1943: NKGB (again)
• 1946: MGB
• 1954: KGB

It stops at KGB in 1954. This is roughly when Khrushchev came to power. The renamings start in 1922. Though Lenin had not died yet, 1922 - 1954 is roughly the era of Stalin. So I wonder, does this have anything to do with Stalin's rise to power or control via the Chekists? If so, how? How could renaming accomplish this or serve some other purpose? Were there really significant re-organizations each time it was renamed?

Answer 1

The secret police was key to the Soviet government (so-called Chekism), so its structure changed frequently in response to state political needs.

• CheKa: The "Emergency Commission" was formed in 1917, at the start of the Civil War, and was structured as appropriate for such a time - most notably, it was empowered to act extrajudicially. After the Civil War ended, The Ninth All-Russian Soviet Congress dissolved the CheKa and created the GPU, an organization more appropriate for a real country that was, in theory, more restrained by laws and rules.
• GPU/OGPU: The "O" stands for Joint, and was added after the various Soviet republics joined together to form the USSR in 1922, and the Russian agency had to become a Union one. While the original GPU reported to the NKVD of the Russian Republic, the OGPU reported to the SovNarKom (the executive government branch of the USSR).
• NKVD: The NKVD of the Russian Republic was transformed into an All-Union organization, and so they got their secret police back. This change also coincides with the beginning of the Great Purge, so it was likely that Stalin found it advantageous to arrange the state apparatus this way.
• NKGB: The NKVD soon became a target of the purges themselves. The secret police component was pulled out to make this more effective, then rolled back in during the war as an intelligence/counterintelligence arm, then taken out again to police occupied Eastern Europe.
• MGB: The "people's komissariat" was changed to the "ministry"; this was a change that affected all agencies as the USSR was rebuilding and reorganizing after the war. Nothing changed except the agency name.
• KGB: Stalin died in 1953, and the de-Stalinization process touched all parts of the government, including the MGB. The KGB resulted from a merger of the MGB and the MVD (the non-secret police); however, the MVD broke off again in 1954.

Note that the renaming and restructuring was fairly transparent to the population, and there was no "rebranding" effort - security officers were informally called "Chekists" up until the dissolution of the USSR.

Answer 2

An "umbrella" organization such as the Cheka was literally made up of hundreds of sub organizations with different purposes.

These suborganizations were recombined at various times under different chiefs to constitute new organizations with slightly different (mostly) internal mandates, and new umbrella organizations, with new names were created most of these times. For instance, the secret and non-secret police merged and de-merged from time to time.

The only thing that was constant was the ever-presence of the "organs." The forms often changed but the substance, seldom.