Oleg Borisovich Lopatin was a Soviet cosmonaut, chemist, and KGB agent assigned to the Tsiolkovsky, the Soviet space shuttle which visited Minerva in 1989. While the majority of his crew had a cautious interest in cooperating with the American astronauts of the space shuttle Athena, Lopatin remained deeply distrustful of the Americans. As a KGB agent, he openly spied on all of his crewmates. Even the mission's commander, Colonel Sergei Tolmasov, was frequently forced to defer to Lopatin because the KGB had reasserted its political power since the death of Mikhail Gorbachev.