Vadim Bakatin, 84; faced intense pressure as last chair of KGB
Vadim Bakatin, a liberal Russian politician who in the late 1980s rocketed from Siberian obscurity to President Mikhail Gorbachev’s inner circle, then in the final days of the Soviet Union took control of the KGB with a promise to curtail its size and strength — only to see it reemerge under a new name soon after he stepped down — died July 31 in Moscow. He was 84.
His death was announced by Russian state-owned news media, which did not specify the cause.
Mr. Bakatin assumed the chairmanship of the KGB, the feared Soviet spy agency, in August 1991, just days after a failed coup against Gorbachev. He did not want the job at first, but Gorbachev was short on options: Many of the people with experience running military or intelligence organizations had joined the effort to oust him, including the previous KGB leader, Vladimir Kryuchkov.
Over the next few months, until his job vanished along with the Soviet Union itself, Mr. Bakatin undertook the herculean task of bringing the sprawling spy agency to heel.
He split off its armed divisions and its border guard unit, effectively cutting its personnel in half. He promised to end spying on politicians, journalists, and foreign officials. He even fired his own son, a KGB lieutenant colonel, as a signal that he would not tolerate nepotism or corruption.
He made several gestures of international goodwill. He allowed relatives of Oleg Gordievsky, a prominent defector, to join him in Britain after the Soviets had blocked them from emigrating for years.
He looked into allegations of Soviet involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (he found nothing, he said), and he gave the Swedish government several dozen documents related to the case of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who disappeared at the end of World War II and was later reported to have been executed in Soviet custody.
He met with US Secretary of State James Baker and even gave Robert Strauss, the American ambassador, 70 pages of detailed schematics showing how the Soviets had bugged the US Embassy in Moscow, along with a bag of the bugs themselves — a move that, even decades later, blemished Mr. Bakatin’s name among Russian nationalists.
He was much better liked by Western reporters, who often compared his disarming good looks to those of a news anchorman (he did bear a resemblance to ABC newsman Peter Jennings). Novelist John le Carré interviewed him at length, as did New York Times columnist William Safire.
Le Carré came away impressed by Mr. Bakatin’s thoughtful transparency, Safire less so. “He is bamboozling the reformers and the Western press by using all the ringing words we like to hear,” Safire wrote.
Safire was on to something: Mr. Bakatin’s reforms fell short. He dissolved the KGB’s board of directors but kept its members on the payroll. He promised to fire thousands of agents but let only a few dozen go.
He still believed in the Soviet Union, and he thought he could tame the security agency without having to kill it. But he also faced intense pressure from inside the government to keep the spy agency intact.
His counterpart in the Russian republic, Viktor Ivanenko, was a particularly dogged opponent, and when the Soviet Union disintegrated at the end of 1991 — and with it Mr. Bakatin’s job — Ivanenko effectively replaced him. He and his successors, including future Russian President Vladimir Putin, rebuilt the agency, which is now known by its new Russian initials, FSB.
“It must be plainly said here that success was not achieved,” Mr. Bakatin told Russian paper Izvestiya in 1992. “I do not believe that it was possible anyway to significantly reform anything in such a short time in the conditions that actually exist.
“Thus,” he added, “I do not think that our special services have already become safe for our citizens. There are no laws, no control, no professional security services.”
Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin was born Nov. 6, 1937, in Kiselyovsk, a small city in southern Siberia, about 2,300 miles east of Moscow. His father, Viktor, was a mine surveyor, and his mother, Nina (Kulikova) Bakatin, was a surgeon.
He graduated from the Novosibirsk Civil Engineering Institute in 1960. From 1961-73, he worked as a foreman on largescale construction projects around his hometown, a region rich in natural resources and busy with mining activity.
He joined the Communist Party in 1964 and nine years later went to work for the party full time. He rose steadily in the ranks, but by the early 1980s, he seemed destined to remain a regional bureaucrat.
His career took a sudden turn in 1986, when Gorbachev pulled him to Moscow to serve in the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Two years later, he was named interior minister.
After leaving the government, Mr. Bakatin became vice president of Reforma, a civic organization, and an adviser to Baring Vostok Capital Partners, an investment firm.
His survivors include his sons, Alexander and Dmitri Bakatin, and at least one grandchild.
Although his success at the KGB was limited, Mr. Bakatin made at least one discovery that may have made all his efforts personally worthwhile. Among the agency’s hoard of secret documents, he discovered that its predecessor, the NKVD, had executed his grandfather, a teacher, in 1937, just two months before Mr. Bakatin was born.