Last KGB chief, who was unable to overcome vested interests
VADIM BAKATIN, who has died aged 84, was the last chairman of the Soviet KGB. A former Soviet interior minister who had been dismissed by President Mikhail Gorbachev the previous year after conservatives objected to his attempts to reform the police, Bakatin was appointed on August 29 1991, days after the failed coup which left the Soviet president dependent on the support of Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic.
At Yeltsin’s bidding Gorbachev appointed Bakatin to replace Leonid Shebarshin, who had become acting head of the KGB after the arrest of the organisation’s former head, Vladimir Kryuchkov, one of the coup plotters.
Bakatin was given a mandate to clean up the organisation, and over the next few months there were serious attempts to depoliticise the KGB. Several independent organisations, dealing with foreign intelligence, internal security and government communications, were created from the previously unified “super-departmental agency”.
The purely political police directorates were abolished and the remains of the KGB were merged into an organisation that would eventually become the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB).
But with the end of the Soviet Union, within five months Bakatin had lost his job. “My recommendations were not popular with the KGB,” Bakatin told The Observer drily in 1995.
Over the next few years the FSB became, in effect, a reincarnated KGB, the main differences being that instead of upholding communist political structures, it seeks to preserve the president’s personal power and, unlike the KGB, it can intervene in the economy at great profit to itself.
Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin was born on November 6 1937 at Kiselyovsk, an industrial town in central Russia, and worked as a civil engineer.
He joined the Communist Party in 1964, serving from 1986 to 1990 as a member of the party’s Central Committee. Seen as a liberal reformist, Bakatin was appointed Minister of the Interior in 1988, responsible for policing.
During his two years in the job, the USSR was admitted to Interpol in 1990. He became popular with reformers who supported independence movements in the Soviet republics but a hate figure for hardliners when he put a tighter rein on riot police after 19 peaceful demonstrators were killed in 1989.
Though he was dismissed in December 1990 and replaced by Boris Pugo, a KGB general who would become one of the coup plotters, he remained an adviser to Gorbachev, and in June 1991, claiming to represent “the interests of ordinary hard-working people”, he ran as a candidate in the Russian presidential election, coming last out of six candidates.
During his few months at the helm of the KGB Bakatin handed over to the US ambassador a KGB listeners’ map showing where they had planted their bugs in the new US embassy during construction. The Americans had already come across several devices and had refused to move in before the rest were removed.
Bakatin also indicated that he was open in principle to the idea of opening up KGB archives, including files on individual Soviet citizens, and to shed light on unsolved mysteries such as the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy. However he never had time to implement such a programme.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, in 1992 Bakatin was appointed vice-president of Reforma, an international fund addressing social and economic issues. From 1997 he was a director and advisor of Baring Vostok, an independent private equity firm focused on investments in Russia.
Vadim Bakatin was reportedly married to Lyudmila and to have had two sons. A grandson, also Vadim Bakatin, was a footballer who played for Monaco’s under-19s side.