Get spooked at KGB museum
“This is a Bulgarian umbrella; have you heard about this one?” Agne Urbaityte asked, pointing to a blue umbrella behind a glass case. There was a needle peeking out from the top.
“It’s a weapon umbrella,” she said. “You press the button here, you see the needle, the needle goes out and shoots a small shot of ricin poison. It’s still the most harsh poison in the world.”
Thankfully this was not the real thing. It was the kind of tool famously used to kill Bulgarian dissident author Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978, roughly a decade after he defected to the West. Many have speculated since that the KGB was involved.
Urbaityte, 29, was standing against a wall Wednesday at the recently opened KGB Spy Museum in Chelsea, a warehouse-type space housing what Urbaityte said were thousands of artifacts documenting the rise of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or the Committee for State Security in English, which is better known as the KGB, the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency and secret police.
The museum opens at a time when Russian intelligence services have been at the forefront of both pop culture and current events. But this museum, Urbaityte said, is apolitical. “It’s historical and about technological progress; you cannot erase facts from history,” she said in an interview, sitting next to her father, Julius Urbaitis, 55. They are the co-curators of the new institution.
Urbaitis said the Spy Museum was the culmination of three decades of collecting items related to the KGB. He first had an interest in Second World War artifacts, but when he acquired a listening device that belonged to Adolf Hitler, he became fascinated with espionage, he said. The family hails from Lithuania, where they founded a museum in 2014 called Atomic Bunker — which was actually based in an old nuclear bunker.
Some of the objects from Atomic Bunker have migrated to Chelsea. About half the items in the collection, a combination of original artifacts and copies, are owned by the father-daughter duo. The other half were acquired separately by the curators. Urbaityte and Urbaitis do not own the museum, which is private and for-profit.
The museum does not shy away from depicting the harsh tactics of the KGB. There are interactive exhibits, like a model of a chair used for interrogations.
“If people want to, we can tie them up,” Urbaityte said.
Many exhibits are dedicated to showing exactly how the KGB carried out business, particularly surveillance. Several glass displays show where KGB agents would embed lenses and bugs: in rings, watches, belt buckles, cuff links and dishes, among other places.