"United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin....has died in New York. He was 64.
....News of his death was met with shock at UN headquarters where Churkin, who would have turned 65 on Tuesday, had been a towering presence for a decade....
Russian Deputy UN Ambassador Petr Iliichev said...."His whole life was dedicated to defending the interests of Russia," ....A career diplomat born in Moscow who studied English from a young age, Churkin had been UN ambassador since April 2006, after serving as Russian ambassador to Canada and to Belgium.
Churkin had served as foreign ministry spokesman in the early 1990s and also as special envoy to the former Yugoslavia.
Growing up in Moscow, he dabbled in acting in his early teens, notably in two films about Soviet founding father Vladimir Lenin.
He graduated from the prestigious Moscow Institute of International Relations and began his career at the foreign ministry as a translator before working at the Soviet embassy in Washington in the 1980s."
abridged from https://www.yahoo.com/news/russias-un-e ... 57441.html
Nearly every member of the Soviet Union's UN mission was a KGB officer. This fact has been established by many experts.
Surely Ambassador Vitaly Churkin was no exception : note his work in the Soviet embassy in Washington DC in the key period of the 1980s. Likewise, all staff of such an important mission were KGB or GRU officers or at least informers.
The highest ranking official ever to defect to the West was Arkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko, Under Secretary-General of the UN. After 3 years of passing Soviet secrets to Western intelligence agencies, he sought asylum in March 1978 in response to the infamous summons to return to Moscow for consultations. Knowing better than most what dire fate that meant, Shevchenko fled in the middle of the night, leaving a note for his wife. It was a shrewd move, as the wife notified the KGB instead of joining Arkady Nikolayevich !
I remember reading his autobiography, "Breaking with Moscow" when it came out in 1985. The book was a major sensation due to the defector's revelations of how the Soviet mission used their relative freedom as international diplomats to conduct espionage against the United Nations host country, the U.S.
I remember thinking that Shevchenko did not sound as sincere as most other Soviet defectors. Could he have been seeking a comfortable life in America as his deeper reason for defecting ? To me, Shevchenko did not come off the same way as the others whose books or biographies I avidly read. He was softer line than the rest in his denouncement of Communism and the Soviet system. Something left me a little uncomfortable about him. Nonetheless, his book made clear that ALL Soviet UN staff were KGB or answerable to the Soviet intelligence agency : no one would be given such a plum position in 'the decadent West' without being under strict KGB control.
One can be sure this system has changed little since then.
Back to Ambassador Churkin, it's not reassuring to read that his public career began by acting in 2 films about - lenin !
What the reports do not include is whether he attended an Orthodox Church, and if so, which one ? The MP's St Nicholas Cathedral, presumably. It would be interesting to find out.
Update : it is now reported that the Russian diplomat's repose was due to a heart attack.