But Bakatin’s story is much broader – from a Kemerovo builder of houses and roads to the head of the KGB and builder of liberal state security.
Vadim Bakatin was born into the family of a mining engineer (father) and a surgeon (mother). He loved to draw and entered the Novosibirsk Kuibyshev Construction Institute. For 13 years he worked by profession in his native Kemerovo region, making a career from a foreman to the chief engineer of a house-building plant. Then he began to move along the line of the CPSU, where he became entrenched in the team of Gorbachev, who in October 1988 appointed him Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and awarded him the rank of lieutenant general. A year later, Bakatin was investigating the mysterious story of how Yeltsin was kidnapped and thrown from a bridge into the river. As minister, Bakatin was outspoken, noted for various things, including advocating independence from the center of the republican departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and preventing the use of riot police to suppress popular unrest.
Two years later, Bakatin was removed. “An unexpected Minister of Internal Affairs, just as unexpectedly, but naturally removed by Gorbachev at the insistence of national patriots, the Politburo and the KGB,” he recalled his appointment and resignation in his memoirs.
After the putsch, Yeltsin and Gorbachev offered him a new position – chairman of the KGB.
“The organization that I was to lead in order to destroy not only had a persistent and well-deserved reputation as the merciless punishing sword of the Communist Party, but it itself could destroy anyone and anything,” Bakatin later recalled, giving his own definition, which does not lose its relevance with some amendments, “ Chekism”:
“This is the people’s usurped right to “protect” them in their name from their “enemies” against their will. Enemies are determined not by the people, but by the party. An enemy is always needed. Without it, the meaninglessness of the system will become clear. Therefore, “Chekism” is a constant search for the “enemy” according to a convenient formula: “Whoever is not with us is against us.” “Chekism” is a constant, unlimited investigation and violence against anyone who does not fit into the rigid scheme of the party’s ideology.”
In his new post, the general began a broad reform campaign, mass dismissals began, reassignments and granting independence to regional units, the withdrawal of some departments from the KGB into separate structures – this is how today’s FSO, for example, appeared.
As for treason, Bakatin considers it, or rather the story of wiretapping and microphones planted during the construction of the new US Embassy building in Moscow, to be one of the biggest failures in the history of the KGB.
The installation of special equipment with microphones was carried out during the construction of the embassy building complex in 1976–1982. At this time, Bakatin only held the position of secretary of the Kemerovo regional committee of the CPSU.
The Americans discovered these devices, froze the construction, and a scandal broke out. “For ten years the Soviet side lied that there was nothing there,” said Bakatin.
The issue of transferring to the Americans the scheme of an “already unviable and irreparable eavesdropping system” was agreed upon with Yeltsin and Gorbachev: “I did not take into account the main thing, that National Bolshevism needed such “unprecedented” facts to incite hatred, discredit the new government, fool the masses, and fight “ T. n. democrats”, “Judeo-Masons”, “foreign intelligence spies”, “proteges of world imperialism”… And who wants to expose themselves?”
So Bakatin became a traitor, the deputy was demanded to open a case under the article “Treason,” which then provided for the death penalty, and the Prosecutor General’s Office began an investigation.
The instilled opinion has taken hold among the masses to this day. Bakatin is dead, but the KGB continues to live and stay awake.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
