[…] As a result of the re-organisation [in 1926], carried out in part to break up Trotsky's hold on the army, the Fourth Department seems to have been placed directly under the control of the State Defense Council (Gosudarstvennaia komissiia oborony, or GKO), the successor of the RVSR.

Thereafter its analysis and reports went directly to the GKO and the Politburo, apparently even bypassing the Red Army Staff.The first head of the Fourth Directorate was Yan Karlovich Berzin, who remained in the post from March 1924 until April 1935 (in 1938, he was arrested and executed as a Trotskyite during the Stalinist purges).

[10] Military intelligence was headquartered in a small and nondescript complex west of the Kremlin, whereas the NKVD was in the very centre of Moscow, next to the building that housed People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs at the bottom of Kuznetsky Most.

[11] The existence of the GRU was not publicized during the Soviet era, though it was mentioned in the 1931 memoirs of the first OGPU defector, Georges Agabekov, and described in detail in the 1939 autobiography, I Was Stalin's Agent, by Walter Krivitsky, the most senior Red Army intelligence officer ever to defect.

According to Suvorov, even the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the country's de facto leader, needed to undergo a security screening to enter GRU headquarters.

Evidencing its growing strategic profile, in 2006 the GRU moved to a new headquarters complex at Khoroshovskoye Shosse [ru], which cost 9.5 billion rubles to build and incorporates 70,000 square meters.

[22][23] The tenure of Sergun's successor, Igor Korobov, was marked by what some news media[24] construed as multiple high-profile setbacks, such as the thwarted 2016 coup d'état attempt in Montenegro, the failed 2018 Salisbury poisoning, and an unprecedented number of disclosed GRU agents.

[46] The unit originated from Soviet GLAVPUR (Glavnoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, or the Main Political Department) and was created in early 1990s and notably employed colonel Aleksandr Viktorovich Golyev, whose memoirs were published in 2020 along with other GRU documents.

[56][57][58][59] In July 2019, Austria's Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the colonel's handler was a Moscow-born GRU officer Igor Egorovich Zaytsev, a Russian national, for whom an international arrest warrant had been issued.

[68][69] The GRU received intelligence from Jeffrey Delisle of the Royal Canadian Navy, leading to the expulsion of several Russian Embassy staffers, including the defence attaché to Ottawa.

While official cause given for the raid was multi-million euro money laundering and tax fraud, media speculated that the company had been a cover for GRU preparing infrastructure for a surprise attack on Finnish locations in case of a conflict situation.

[46] GRU's APT – Fancy Bear used fake Facebook accounts to pose as associates of Emmanuel Macron's campaign staff, with the goal of interfering with the 2017 French presidential election.

[94] In February 2021, Germany charged German citizen Jens F., a worker whose company maintained Bundestag electrical equipment, with espionage, accusing him of providing the building's floor plans to GRU operatives in the Russian embassy in 2017.

[100] In October 2018, Latvia's Constitution Protection Bureau accused Russia of conducting a years-long phishing campaign targeting "state institutions, including the foreign and defense sectors.

[114][115] In early October 2018, the government of the Netherlands announced they had arrested four GRU operatives on 13 April: Aleksei Morenets, Evgenii Serebriakov, Oleg Sotnikov, and Aleksey Minin.

[116] The Russians allegedly attempted to launch a major "close access" cyberattack[117] against the headquarters of the OPCW in the Hague and also intended to travel onwards to the Spiez laboratory in Switzerland, which was testing Novichok samples from Salisbury at the time.

[121] In June 2022, the Dutch AIVD stated that GRU intelligence officer Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, under the alias of Viktor Muller Ferreira, was denied entry to the Netherlands after arriving for an internship with the International Criminal Court.

As Ferreira, Cherkasov is alleged to have attended university in the United States and Republic of Ireland, building a cover identity for years as a Brazilian national with an interest in international affairs.

AIVD head Erik Akerboom [nl] described the attempted infiltration as a "long-term, multi-year GRU operation that cost a lot of time, energy and money," calling it a "high-level threat.

Mikushin had posed as a Brazilian academic named Jose Assis Giammaria and was, at the time of his arrest, researching Norwegian Arctic policy and hybrid threats at the University of Tromsø.

[130] In March 2022, the Polish Internal Security Agency (ABW) arrested reporter Pablo Gonzalez, whom they identified as "an agent of the [GRU]," as he planned to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border.

[36][135] Anatoly V. Belashkov and Vasily A. Bogachyov, thought to be GRU members, were found guilty of the murder by a Qatari criminal court, which said the men had acted under direct orders from the Russian leadership.

[149][150] In late 2022, elite police arrested Russian-born Swedish citizen Sergey Skvortsov, accusing him of nearly 10 years of "gross illegal intelligence activities against Sweden and against a foreign power" (later identified as the United States) on behalf of the GRU.

[46] News media and private cybersecurity firms allege that the GRU hacked the computer networks of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, a key player in the 2020 Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory.

[172][173] GRU officer Stanislav Lunev, who defected to the U.S. in 1992 while he was posted in Washington under the cover of a TASS news agency correspondent, in the 1990s publicized his claims that small nuclear weapons that could be fit into a knapsack or a briefcase or suitcase had been secretly pre-positioned in the U.S. and other countries around the world to be used for sabotage by Russia's agents in the event of war.

[176] On 29 December 2016 the White House sanctioned the nine entities and individuals, including the GRU as well as the FSB, for their alleged activities to disrupt and spread disinformation during the 2016 US presidential election.

[181] In July 2018 Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein released an indictment returned by a grand jury charging twelve GRU officers with conspiring to interfere in the 2016 elections.

[182][183][184] According to Microsoft VP Tom Burt, a GRU-run group dubbed Strontium (alternatively known as APT28, Sofacy, and Pawn Storm, and Fancy Bear)[185] has been engaged in spear phishing attacks against at least three campaigns in the 2018 midterm elections.

[186] On 19 November 2021, the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots in the United States (CCORC) or (KCOPC) closed and on 9 March 2022 Elena Branson was accused of working as a foreign agent by the FBI.

[187][188][189][190][191] In August 2024, Middle East Eye, citing a US official, reported that personnel of GRU were stationed in Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen to assist the militia's attacks on merchant ships during the Israel–Hamas war.