General Gogol

General Anatol Gogol
In-universe information
Gender	Male
Affiliation	KGB

General Anatol Alexis Gogol is a fictional character in the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, and The Living Daylights. In the films, he is the head of the KGB. In his final appearance in The Living Daylights, he has transferred from the KGB to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. General Gogol is portrayed by Walter Gotell; in addition to his appearances as General Gogol, he appeared in From Russia With Love (1963) as Morzeny.

Despite the popular assumption about the James Bond series' Cold War focus, Gogol is never depicted as a true villain (the closest exception being in For Your Eyes Only although even then he never directly opposes Bond). At his most hostile, he is a respectful competitor and more often is an ally against the common foes of peace.

His surname is a nod to the realist Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. The literary theme would be reprised with his successor, General Pushkin.

Overview

He makes his first appearance in The Spy Who Loved Me, where he is seen sending Anya Amasova to recover an important roll of microfilm. Later in the film Gogol and Bond's boss, M, form an alliance, which is the start of the Anglo-Soviet relationship.

Gogol is seen next in Moonraker, talking to a US official about Hugo Drax's space station. He warns them that should the U.S. mission to destroy Drax's space station fail, the Soviet Union would step in to take action.

In For Your Eyes Only, Gogol acts as one of the film's minor villains as he wants to buy an ATAC communicator from Aristotle Kristatos. When Bond throws it off a cliff (by which time Kristatos has been killed by Milos Columbo), Gogol is dismayed but keeps his guard from shooting Bond. When Bond rationalises that the machine's destruction maintains the policy of détente and relatively peaceful status quo of the nations, Gogol laughs and leaves without saying another word. The assistant of General Gogol, appearing briefly in For Your Eyes Only, is called Rubelvitch, a wordplay on the name Moneypenny.

In Octopussy, when General Orlov proposes invading the West, Gogol is the loudest voice opposing the reckless plan, asserting both the danger of provoking a nuclear war and that the USSR wants peace, not war. Gogol's investigations of Orlov's scheme to weaken NATO's defense runs parallel to Bond's, but the fatal shooting (which he witnesses) of the traitor at the hands of East German border guards prevents him from learning the full details of his plot and warning NATO. He does, however, discover Orlov's plot to smuggle priceless Russian jewellery for personal profit. He requested that Bond return the Romanov star stolen by Orlov.

In A View to A Kill, Gogol tries to stop Max Zorin, an erstwhile KGB agent, from destroying Silicon Valley. When Zorin defies the order to stop his plan, Gogol sends KGB agent Pola Ivanova to see what Zorin is up to. When Pola meets Bond, she tries to take the tape from him and give it to Gogol. Gogol is embarrassed that Pola got the wrong tape. At the end of the film Gogol awards Bond (who ultimately prevented the destruction of Silicon Valley) the Order of Lenin, stating that Bond was the first non-Soviet citizen to receive it.

In The Living Daylights, Gogol is only seen in the end, as a diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. He attends Kara Milovy's concert with M, offering Milovy a visa which would allow her to leave the Eastern bloc at will as he introduces himself to Kamran Shah as he arrives after the concert, saying admiring words to him. Originally, Gogol was going to be the head of the KGB still and be the person named by Koskov as behind the 'plot' to assassinate spies in the West, but due to Walter Gotell's age and poor health at the time, no company would insure him on set, so General Pushkin was created to take over this position.