 "Trusted contacts" were high placed civilians who collaborated with the KGB without signing any official working agreements, such as directors of personnel departments at various institutions, academics, deans, or writers and actors.Informers were citizens secretly recruited by the KGB, sometimes using forceful recruitment methods, such as blackmail.The precise number of people from various categories remains unknown, but one of the estimates was 11 million "informers" in the Soviet Union, or one out of every eighteen adult citizens 

The active reserve was established by Yuri Andropov in the end of the 1960s.