Last chairman of KGB dies in Moscow at age 84

Vadim Bakatin, the last chairman of the KGB, died at age 84. During his chairmanship, the committee was reorganized, and the administration of the department was divided into independent special services.

Vadim Bakatin will be buried at the Troekurovsky cemetery in Moscow.

According to the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Bakatin died on July 31 in Moscow. The cause of his death was not specified.

Vadim Bakatin was born on November 6, 1937 in Kiselevsk in the Novosibirsk (now Kemerovo) region. He graduated from the Novosibirsk Engineering and Construction Institute named after V. V. Kuibyshev. He also studied at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU.

From 1985 to 1987, Bakatin served as first secretary of the Kirov regional committee of the CPSU. In 1988, at the suggestion of Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he took the post of the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, which he took for two years. According to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Bakatin resigned from the post due to his "too soft position and refusal to use force in dispersing demonstrations in the union republics."

In 1991, Bakatin was a candidate in the presidential elections of the RSFSR, where he scored the lowest result — 3.42%. In his election program, he advocated the preservation of the Soviet Union.

Bakatin did not support the August 1991 coup and condemned the creation of the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP). After the failed coup attempt, he headed the KGB. During his service, the committee was divided into a number of independent structures such as, in particular, foreign intelligence and state security departments.

As the head of the KGB, in December 1991, Bakatin handed over to US Ambassador Robert Strauss the layout of wiretapping devices in the building of the US embassy in Moscow.

"The issue to hand over the scheme to the ambassador had been coordinated with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The Americans got what they already knew," he said in 2001.

After the liquidation of the KGB, he headed the committee's successor, the Inter-Republican Security Service, which was abolished in December 1991. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia's first President Boris Yeltsin offered Bakatin to engage in diplomatic activities, but he refused.