Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin

Vadim Bakatin, born in 1937 in a mining town of Kemerovo province, was a construction engineer. Moving from Siberian building sites into the party apparatus, he served as first secretary of Kirov and then Kemerovo provinces, and in 1988 Gorbachev made him interior minister, the unorthodox choice of a reform-minded party man, not a career policeman, to head the police.

He published the ministry's doctored statistics, opened it to the press, cut back its political surveillance, and returned autonomy to the republican interior ministries. His line, that crime and ethnic strife must be answered with politics rather than coercion, won the reformers' applause and the hardliners' fury at once. To the chiefs of army and KGB he was the minister who was dismantling order, and his replacement by Pugo in December 1990, as Gorbachev turned right, belonged to the same season as Shevardnadze's warning that dictatorship was coming.

Dismissed, he stayed on the president's Security Council, and in June 1991 ran in the Russian presidential election, finishing last with 3.4 percent, a candidacy closer to a statement of conviction than an ambition. Two months later history would hand this also-ran the last keys to the most feared organisation in the Soviet Union.

On the morning of 19 August 1991, Bakatin learned of the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP) from television news. He immediately went to the Kremlin to see Vice President Gennady Yanayev. According to Bakatin's memoirs, Yanayev was 'extremely nervous' and unlike himself, claiming Gorbachev was 'in complete prostration' and 'no longer in control of himself,' and that 'we must take over.' Bakatin replied, "I don't play those games." He submitted his resignation from the Security Council 'in connection with the unconstitutional removal from power of the President of the USSR.'

On 20 August, Bakatin and Yevgeny Primakov issued a joint statement to the media declaring the GKChP's actions unconstitutional, demanding the withdrawal of armored vehicles from city streets and that Gorbachev be given an opportunity to speak publicly. Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh refused to sign. At the request of RSFSR Vice President Alexander Rutskoy, Bakatin also telephoned Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, urging him not to storm the White House (the Russian republic's Supreme Soviet building). Yazov assured him there would be no assault.

On 21 August, Bakatin joined Rutskoy, RSFSR Prime Minister Ivan Silayev, Primakov, and others on a flight to Foros in Crimea. Their mission was to bring Gorbachev, who had been held there under house arrest, back to Moscow. Two days later, on 23 August, Gorbachev and Yeltsin offered Bakatin the chairmanship of the KGB, charging him with the task of 'destroying this fearsome system of repression.'

Bakatin's actions during the three days of the August coup show him not merely as a Gorbachev loyalist but as one of the few senior officials who translated principled opposition to the putsch into concrete action.

Two days after the coup, Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed on one thing: the KGB, which had served as the coup's headquarters, must never again stand above the state, and Bakatin would be the man for the job. As the last KGB chairman he actually cut the giant apparatus apart in a tenure of some hundred days: foreign intelligence (the future SVR), signals interception, government protection and the border troops each went their own way, and the organisation of hundreds of thousands was recast as a reduced counterintelligence service. Chekism, he held, must cease to exist as an ideology.

In December 1991 came his most controversial act: he handed the American ambassador the complete schematics of the listening devices built into the new US embassy in Moscow. A confidence-building measure agreed with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, by his account; to the professionals it was the donation of state secrets, and he became the chekists' eternal traitor.

Leaving office with the Soviet Union's extinction, he lived quietly in the private sector and died in 2022. He was the only Soviet official who ever truly tried to dismantle the political police, and the dismantling did not last: those two facts bracket his career.