1. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov was a Soviet lawyer, diplomat, and head of the KGB, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
21 Facts About Vladimir Kryuchkov
1. 2.
From 1974 until 1988, Vladimir Kryuchkov headed the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB, the First Chief Directorate.
3.
From 1988 until 1991, Vladimir Kryuchkov served as the 7th Chairman of the KGB.
4.
Vladimir Kryuchkov was born in February 1924 in Tsaritsyn, to a working-class family.
5.
Vladimir Kryuchkov joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1944 and became a full-time employee of the Communist Youth League.
6.
Vladimir Kryuchkov then joined the Soviet diplomatic service, stationed in Hungary until 1959.
7.
Vladimir Kryuchkov next worked for the Communist Party Central Committee for eight years, before joining the KGB in 1967 together with his patron Yuri Andropov.
8.
Vladimir Kryuchkov was appointed head of the First Chief Directorate in the summer of 1971, upon the order of Andropov, and deputy chairman in 1978.
9.
Vladimir Kryuchkov opposed Gorbachev's reforms, and in his memoirs defended Stalinism and condemned most reforms to the Soviet political system since the rule of Nikita Khrushchev.
10.
Vladimir Kryuchkov had been recommended by Gorbachev's predecessor and mentor Andropov and his reformist colleague Alexander Yakovlev.
11.
Vladimir Kryuchkov notably mobilized the Alpha Group to arrest Yeltsin but then refused to give it the order to do so.
12.
Vladimir Kryuchkov had allowed the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to assume control of domestic KGB activity under its jurisdiction after Chairman Yeltsin's Declaration of State Sovereignty of Russia.
13.
Vladimir Kryuchkov was replaced as chairman of the KGB by Vadim Bakatin, released on recognizance not to leave in January 1993.
14.
Immediately after the collapse of the coup Vladimir Kryuchkov unsuccessfully requested a pardon for himself and his co-conspirators on the basis of their old age.
15.
On 3 July 1992, Vladimir Kryuchkov appealed to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, accusing him of laying the blame for the dissolution of the Soviet Union on members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency.
16.
Vladimir Kryuchkov was finally freed in 1994 with a pardon by the State Duma.
17.
Vladimir Kryuchkov subsequently returned to public life with writings condemning Gorbachev's rule.
18.
Vladimir Kryuchkov's writings improved his reputation with the Russian public, with a 2007 Levada Center poll revealing that only 12 percent of respondents would have actively opposed his coup.
19.
Vladimir Kryuchkov's son was a resident of Switzerland in the 1990s where very large sums were transiting during the 1990s looting of Russia.
20.
Vladimir Kryuchkov died at the age of 83 on 23 November 2007.
21.
Vladimir Kryuchkov's body was buried at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.