Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov

Vladimir Kryuchkov was born in 1924 to a workers' family in Tsaritsyn, the later Volgograd. Trained in the procuracy and the diplomatic academy, he was posted to the Soviet embassy in Budapest in 1955, and there lived through the Hungarian uprising of 1956 at the side of ambassador Andropov. The sight of a socialist regime collapsing in days scarred both men for life: the so-called Hungarian complex, the lesson that hesitation in a crisis loses everything.

His career thereafter traced Andropov's own. He served him in the Central Committee, moved with him when Andropov took over the KGB in 1967, and from 1974 headed the First Chief Directorate, ruling the foreign-intelligence empire at Yasenevo for fourteen years. Cold, diligent, buried in papers, he seemed less a conspirator than the very type of the bureaucrat.

In 1988 Gorbachev made him KGB chairman, judging him an intelligence professional who would cooperate with reform. That this was a misjudgement became clear three years later. To a man carrying the lesson of Budapest, the crumbling union looked like 1956 replayed.

Vladimir Kryuchkov's career grew in the shadow of Yuri Andropov. During the Hungarian uprising of 1956 he was a young diplomat at the Soviet embassy in Budapest, watching at Ambassador Andropov's side as a socialist government collapsed. The experience marked both men for life. When Andropov became KGB chairman, Kryuchkov followed him, and from 1974 he headed the First Chief Directorate, in charge of foreign intelligence, for fourteen years.

In October 1988 Gorbachev appointed him KGB chairman, expecting an intelligence chief sympathetic to reform. But to Kryuchkov's eyes the last years of perestroika looked like accelerating state dissolution. As Eastern Europe broke away, the Baltic republics declared independence, and the party's authority crumbled, he read it all as the harvest of Western intelligence operations through agents of influence. In June 1991, in a closed session of the Supreme Soviet, he warned that the country was heading for catastrophe.

From late 1990 he became the centre of the hardliners urging the introduction of emergency rule. On his instructions the KGB prepared planning documents for emergency governance, documents that would be put to use the following August.

To Kryuchkov, the new union treaty due to be signed on 20 August 1991 looked like the legal consummation of the union's dissolution. On 18 August a delegation he organized flew to the presidential dacha at Foros in Crimea to demand Gorbachev's consent to a state of emergency; refused, they cut his communications and confined him there. On the morning of 19 August the State Committee on the State of Emergency, the GKChP, declared the president incapacitated and sent tanks into Moscow.

Yet the committee had no political plan for rallying the 76 percent who had voted in March to preserve the union. Acting president Yanayev's hands trembled at the press conference, the order to arrest Yeltsin was never given, and the plan to storm the White House dissolved as the army and the Alpha group, unwilling to shed blood, stood aside. Three young men crushed by armoured vehicles in an underpass on the night of 20–21 August were almost the coup's only bloodshed. The committee collapsed in three days, and Kryuchkov was arrested.

The attempt to save the union ended by cutting its lifeline: within four days of the coup's failure the party's activity was suspended, and within four months the union itself was dissolved. Imprisoned in Matrosskaya Tishina, Kryuchkov was released under the State Duma's amnesty in 1994 and insisted to the end that he had acted out of duty to preserve the state. He died on 23 November 2007. History records the episode as a tragic failure: an attempt that possessed neither the capacity nor the plan to protect what it meant to save.

After the coup failed, Kryuchkov was held in the Matrosskaya Tishina remand prison. No trial was ever completed: the Duma's 1994 amnesty freed him with the other plotters. In his memoir Lichnoe delo he justified his act as an attempt to save the state; in his telling, perestroika was a demolition operation run by Western intelligence through agents of influence, with Yakovlev at the apex of his accusations. Asked for evidence, he produced none.

Historians largely name him the organiser and initiator of the August coup. It was the KGB chairman who held the leadership's movements in his hand through surveillance, who assembled the delegation to Foros, who drew up the emergency committee's roster. Yet that coup collapsed in three days without his ever giving the order for bloody suppression. That a man who spent his life at the summit of the security apparatus could not move the state at the decisive moment is read as evidence that by 1991 even the organs of coercion had lost conviction.

He died in 2007, at eighty-three, calling the dissolution of the USSR the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century to the last.