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On Sunday, Vadim Bakatin, the last chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB), died in Moscow at the age of 85. Under his leadership, the once powerful and feared Soviet secret police split into several separate intelligence services. This was reported by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian government.
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Bakatin came from the Siberian city of Kiseljovsk. He started in heavy industry in the Kuznetsk Basin. After becoming the city and regional secretary in the city of Kemerovo, he was noticed by the future member of the Communist Politburo Yegor Ligachev. This launched Bakatin’s career at the highest level.
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In 1983, he became an inspector of the Central Committee of the CPSU, after less than two years he was sent to the post of first secretary of the regional party committee in Kirov. In 1988, party leader Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly offered him the post of Soviet Minister of the Interior. According to his own words, he wanted a politician to replace the police officers at the head of the office.
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“Gorbachev was sure that I would never steal, and my weaknesses, my provincialism, were more to his advantage,” Bakatin later recalled.
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He led the Ministry of the Interior during turbulent times, when the governments of individual Soviet satellites, including the former Czechoslovakia, fell, but the Soviet Union itself began to disintegrate. However, Bakatin allegedly paid for the fact that he did not want to use force to disperse demonstrations in the union republics. He was released in December 1990.
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The last chairman of the KGB of the USSR, Vadim Bakatin, who revealed to the United States the technology of eavesdropping on the American embassy, has died. He died in Moscow at the age of 84: https://t.co/iU2UuWEOyu pic.twitter.com/XZulfTHkVg
— Izvestia (@izvestia_ru) August 1, 2022
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In June of the following year, he ran as an independent candidate for the new position of Russian president. In the election program, he advocated the preservation of the Soviet Union led by Russia, but he had no chance against the later president Boris Yeltsin and received only 3.5 percent of the vote.
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During the attempt to overthrow Gorbachev in August 1991, Bakatin tried to negotiate with the organizers, among whom was then KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov. After the failure of the coup, at the insistence of Yeltsin, Bakatin was appointed as the new head of the state police.
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Although he started with reforms of the KGB, with radical changes such as the complete abolition of the organization and the dismissal of all employees and the recruitment of new people into new services, which Yeltsin advocated, according to the Rossiya newspaper, but Bakatin did not agree. He warned that there would be a collapse of the security forces.
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However, he did not succeed in his vision of continuing the KGB. Some of its departments became independent, the most important role of the state police was given to the Federal Counterintelligence Service, later the FSB, which was also headed by the current President Vladimir Putin.
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In November 1991, Bakatin himself was appointed head of what remained of the Soviet level, the Inter-Republican Security Service (SSB). However, in January of the following year, Yeltsin relieved him of this position.
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Before signing the appeal decree, the Russian president allegedly offered Bakatin to become ambassador to the US. Bakatin refused. At the same time, he did a great service to the Americans when, as a gesture of goodwill, he handed them a diagram of the wiretapping system in the new complex of buildings of the United States Embassy in Moscow. It was later revealed that he was instructed to take this step from above.
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