Gennady Gudkov

Gennady Vladimirovich Gudkov (; born 15 August 1956) is a Russian politician and businessman. The Moscow Times described him in 2012 as "one of parliament's most vocal and charismatic critics" of President Vladimir Putin. Background Gudkov received a degree in languages, an English specialist, from Kolomna State Pedagogical Institute in 1978. He speaks both English and German. After graduation, he served in the Soviet Army from 1978 until 1980 and during his enlistment, he joined the Communist Party. After his service in the Soviet Army, he returned to Kolomna and worked with the Kolomna city Communist Party as an instructor in Komsomol and later as the head of operational and defense-mass work department. He joined the KGB, the Soviet Union's national security agency, in 1981, working there for the next decade and finishing at the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was KGB for Kolomna city until 1989 when he worked in the Office of Counterintelligence Operations for KGB at Moscow city and Moscow oblast (region). In 1989, he graduated from the Red Banner Institute. Yu. V. Andropov. In 1992, after he resigned from the Russian Bureau of Criminal Procedure in Moscow and the Moscow Region as a major working as an operative officer, he formed his Oskord security company employing many siloviki. From 1997 until 2001, he held a post in the Federal Security Service on an advisory board with other heads of private security companies. He was active with UNESCO and was elected to vice-president of the Moscow International Fund for the Promotion of UNESCO in 1999. Duma career Gudkov was first elected to the State Duma in a by-election of the Kolomna 106th District on 18 March 2001, joining the People's Party of the Russian Federation. Gudkov won the seat again in the 2003 and 2007 legislative elections. Gudkov was serving as deputy chairman of the parliamentary Committee on Security during the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, in which 40-50 Chechen Islamist separatists took over a theater holding 850 people. He blamed the failure of security forces to prevent the attack on a systematic destruction of state security institutions following the fall of the Soviet Union.