General Anatol Alexis Gogol is the head of the erstwhile USSR’s KGB in the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill and is retired by the time of The Living Daylights. General Gogol is portrayed throughout by Walter Gotell.

Walter Gotell as General Alexis Gogol.

Despite the popular assumption about the James Bond series’ cold war focus, Gogol is never depicted as a true villain. At his most hostile, he is a respectful competitor and more often is an ally against the common foes of peace.

In his first appearance in The Spy Who Loved Me, he is seen sending Agent XXX to recover the 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 US mission to destroy Drax’s space station fails, the Soviet Union would step in to take action.

In For Your Eyes Only, Gogol wants to buy the ATAC communicator from Aristotle Kristatos. When Bond throws it off the cliff, he is dismayed but keeps his guard from shooting Bond and is not bothered after the ATAC smashes as it maintains the relatively peaceful status quo of the nations.

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 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 requests 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 does not, 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 the Order of Lenin, with him 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.

The assistant of General Gogol is Rubelvitch, a wordplay on the name Moneypenny.

See also:

• Bond allies