Vadim Bakatin, the last head of the KGB, dies at 84
Russian state media reported on Monday that Vadim Bakatin, a liberal politician who briefly headed the KGB in the months leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 84.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Bakatin to head the apparatus after its former boss, Vladimir Kryuchkov, played a major role in a failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991.
In a televised interview with a former dissident that aired several weeks later, Bakatin said he had already found a security file about his grandfather, who was executed under Joseph Stalin in 1937 after being denounced by an informant.
He also said he accepted in principle the idea of opening the KGB records to shed light on unsolved mysteries such as the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
"You are right about one thing," Bakatin told former dissident Vladimir Bukowski. "Records of riddles in which the discovery of the truth is of great importance to humanity must be opened."
But Bakatin, who is also a former interior minister of the Soviet Union, did not have time to make good on that pledge, as the Soviet Union collapsed within months.
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