Alexi Inauri

Alexi Inauri

Alexi Inauri (Georgian: ალექსი ინაური; Russian: Алексей Николаевич Инаури, Aleksey Nikolayevich Inauri) (April 20, 1908 – June 23, 1993) was a Soviet Georgian commander who headed the Georgian KGB (Committee for State Security) for over 30 years (1954-1986) and made it one of the most effective of the KGB's regional Soviet branches. He ended his career as a colonel general and the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Born in Gori (then under the Russian Empire), Inauri volunteered in the Red Army in 1927 and graduated from a school of cavalry officers for the North Caucasian mountainous nationalities in 1931. In 1932, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Prior to and at the outbreak of Soviet-German hostilities during World War II, he was a regimental commander in Ukraine, and then headed a cavalry division in the course of the war. Having graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1948, he was in charge of various military units until being appointed Minister of Interior of the Georgian SSR in 1953. In an unprecedented display of military presence, Inauri, together with the commander of the Transcaucasian Military District Antonov, joined the Georgian Central Committee chaired by Vasil Mzhavanadze, himself an army officer.

In 1954, Inauri was made head of the Georgian KGB, a post that he retained until 1986. His tenure coincided with a series of upheavals and rise in anti-Soviet dissident movements in Georgia to which Inauri was able to respond vigorously due largely to a strict discipline imposed by him within the KGB and a large web of espionage through which Inauri's agents infiltrated dissident groups and even the Georgian Orthodox Church. He played a role in a palace coup against Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964, escorting the Soviet leader from his datcha at Pitsunda to a special meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee in Moscow where Khrushchev was to be ousted. Inauri was promoted to the rank of colonel-general in 1967 and awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1985, shortly before his retirement later in 1986. From 1984 to 1989, Inauri was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.