Nick Spicer has been the CBC News correspondent in Moscow since October 2004. Before that, he was a Paris-based reporter for the CBC and National Public Radio in the U.S. for 10 years. His Russian reporting has taken him the length and breadth of the country as well as into Afghanistan with Canadian troops.

When I can't sleep at night, I wonder what dark dreams could have disturbed the rest of the KGB executioners who for decades lived in my building here in Moscow, in bedrooms just metres above, beside and under my bed.

My friendly neighbour is an amateur historian, and the son of one of the KGB officers who lived here.

"Actually, they were just the men who gave the execution orders," he told me one sunny day as we crossed paths in the parking lot. "The guys who did the actual killing lived in that building over there."

I haven't yet asked him what his father's exact job was.

I live in Moscow's Lubyanka district. For decades, the yellow building overlooking Lubyanka Square was the headquarters of the KGB. For Russians over the age of 30, the name Lubyanka evokes secret police interrogations, torture and summary executions in the maze of underground jail cells on the square.

Under Stalin, it was a world of anonymous terror and industrial-scale killing. But for the KGB officers who populated this part of town before the end of communism, Lubyanka was a nice neighbourhood, with all the amenities needed to stay loyal. I buy food at the same gastronom where they would purchase imported goods with the special coupons reserved for the favoured servants of the workers' state.

The KGB is now called the FSB. The yellow building is still filled with agents. Under President Vladimir Putin (a former lieutenant-colonel in the KGB), there are perhaps even more agents than before. You can't take a picture of their workplace without being stopped and told to delete your picture. I've tried.

However, there is something like a KGB place nearby were you can take pictures, I discovered recently while looking to have a drink with a Canadian filmmaking friend.

It's a restaurant called The Sword and the Shield, after the motto of the KGB. The food is cheap, the beer is good, and the walls are covered with espionage memorabilia and the portraits of former secret police bosses.

These include Lavrenti Beria, the architect of Stalin's great terror, who also patrolled Moscow's streets in a limo, looking for beautiful women to rape.

There is no irony in this place, no tongue-in-cheek. It's just a theme restaurant — like many others now in Moscow — a five-minute walk from Lubyanka Square. The only thing special about it is that it is frequented by a disproportionate number of FSB agents.

The night I was there with my friend Peter Raymont, the place was about to close down. They were turning off the lights, but Peter, true to his trade, wanted some pictures, and therefore some light. I doubted the waiter flicking the switches would oblige, but then Peter asked me to tell the waiter that his dad was the head of Canadian intelligence during the Second World War.

I translated his request, and the lights went back on with a knowing smile. In the new light, it was as if to say we were all from the same world of shadows, somehow.

Out of the shadows

The KGB's successor, the FSB, is still powerful, but like so many other things in Russia, it can be bought. The corruption and greed that hurt the rest of this country have struck its spy world as well.

If you are rich, or desperate, you can actually buy your FSB file. It could be considered a kind of insurance, because you never know …

Nowadays, the old KGB is a source of nostalgia in Russia. Even the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Union's first secret service, has been discreetly re-erected in Moscow.

In 1991, the toppling of the statue in Lubyanka Square, before Western TV cameras, became one of the iconic images of the fall of communism around the world. But more and more, "Iron Felix" and KGB T-shirts and theme restaurants have come back, at least into Russian pop culture, evoking perhaps a time that seems simpler and (for some) nobler in its struggles.

Which may help explain the enduring popularity of President Putin. He was, of course, a KGB man in the Cold War, posted in East Germany — something American conservative commentators love to point out, as if that were proof of innate skulduggery and neo-imperial ambitions.

The fact is many talented people served in the KGB, as their counterparts did in the CIA, or MI-5 in Britain, in roles that did not involve bullying dissidents or stifling democracy.

People admire Putin in part because he reminds them of that simpler era. It was the Cold War, of course, a time of us against them, black versus white, do or die. And Putin reminds his compatriots of a period when Russia was feared and ready to fight.

It's a feel-good reflex, the psychological equivalent of enjoying a meal at the KGB theme restaurant, rather than contemplating solitary confinement and impending execution, deep under Lubyanka Square.