This museum in Russia was a former Soviet spy office

A KGB agent uniform and desk with exhibition at the KGB Museum in Tallinn, Estonia. — Photos: ALAN BERH/TNS

The sign on the museum door says in Estonian, “There is nothing here”, a contemporary joke about a meandering set of rooms atop what had once been the country’s most modern hotel. These were offices of the KGB, the “Committee for State Security”: the Soviet agency that spied on foreigners and Soviet Union citizens with equal suspicion, distrust and disdain.

The rooms are now a museum in the Viru Hotel, which still operates in the centre of Tallinn, the nation’s charming and historic capital. The hotel has that block-like, straining-for-modernity look that was emblematic of Soviet architecture of the Cold War but was global in reach. The Viru is now well run and convivial, but it had been completed in 1972 to house Western guests, giving the visitors a bit of comfort largely out of reach of native Estonians and a providing convenient place for the KGB to keep an eye on them.