Tudor Botnaru

Tudor Botnaru was born on December 27, 1935 in the village of Lipceni (today in the Rezina District). He graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the State University of Moldova in 1959. After graduating from the faculty, he worked as a guide and chief interpreter at the "Intourist" Hotel in Chișinău (1959-1962). He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, joining in 1965. He graduated from the Higher KGB Courses in Minsk (School No. 302).^{[citation needed]}

In 1963 he was employed by the Committee for State Security of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (KGB of the Moldavian SSR), working in the counterintelligence services, and from 1966 – in the foreign intelligence services. He became a colonel. Between 1978 and 1982, he was the advisor to the rector of the Chișinău State University. As a foreign intelligence officer, he had diplomatic coverage of the Soviet Union, working at the USSR embassies in Romania and France. Within the KGB of the Moldavian SSR, he served in turn as chief operational inspector and later bureau head.

Tudor Botnaru worked at the State Security Committee of Moldova, then he was in the Union Committee, then he was a security officer at the Soviet Embassy in Bucharest.

In July 1990, at the initiative of the Republic's leadership, Botnaru was brought from Bucharest and appointed as Chairman of the State Security Committee (head of the KGB) of the Moldavian SSR, being promoted to the rank of Major General. He was the first foreign intelligence officer to become Chairman of the KGB of the Moldavian SSR.^[2]

In April 1990, the Botnaru's Ministry of National Security, under the pretext that there was a danger that the KGB premises of the MSSR would be attacked by the "extremists" of the Popular Front of Moldova, decided to transport the KGB Archive of the MSSR from Chișinău to Tiraspol, where it is still located today. He was also the author of the proposal to reorganize the KGB of the Moldavian SSR into an intelligence service, a proposal that was not taken up at that time.

Tudor Botnaru served as Chairman of the State Security Committee of the Moldavian SSR until August 29, 1991, after the August Coup that resulted in the dissolution of the USSR.^[3] Accused of collaborating with the coup plotters, Botnaru was dismissed from office immediately after the proclamation of the Republic of Moldova's independence. In a 2001 interview, he claimed that he knew nothing about the organization of the coup, although he had been in Moscow shortly before, at the meeting of the KGB Collegium, but no one said anything about the organization of a coup, the organizers planning their actions in complete secrecy, intending to involve only the Securitate officers who were directly subordinate to the KGB Central Office in Moscow.

He ran in the parliamentary elections of February 25, 2001 for the position of deputy on the lists of the Social-Political Movement "For Order and Justice". In 2004, he published, together with Colonel Alexandru Ganenco, the work Istoria Serviciilor Secrete. [Breviary], at the Museum Publishing House in Chișinău, this being the first attempt to present the history of the Soviet Moldovan secret services, through the biographies of their heads.^[6]

Tudor Botnaru was married and has a child. He died on December 30, 2017 in Chișinău.^[7]