Filipp Bobkov’s last day as first deputy chairman of the KGB was January 29 1991. The Soviet Union was already crumbling, and its end would come 11 months later, when the hammer and sickle was lowered from the Kremlin mast for the last time, on December 25.
From the window of his office in the KGB’s massive headquarters, known as the Lubyanka, Bobkov gazed out at the wintry streets and his eyes fixed on, of all things, the Children’s World department store across Dzerzhinsky Square.
“Through the massive windows it was possible to see the crowds of people walking from floor to floor, counter to counter. They would look at something, discuss it, try it out, buy it,” he wrote in the closing chapter of his 1995 autobiography, KGB and Power.
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