The last reform-era Procurator General of the USSR, who oversaw the legal rehabilitation of Stalin's victims during perestroika
"Prosecutors must be closer to the life of the people," Sukharev declared after becoming Procurator General in 1988, as his office processed the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of victims of political repression.
Born into a peasant family in Voronezh, he worked as a lathe operator at an aircraft factory as a teenager before going to the front at 18. As a signals officer he advanced from Moscow to the Vistula, earning four combat orders, and was severely wounded crossing the Narew River in Poland in 1944. After demobilisation he rose through the Komsomol and the CPSU Central Committee apparatus specialising in procuracy and justice, becoming first deputy minister of the re-established USSR Ministry of Justice in 1970. Appointed Procurator General by Gorbachev in 1988, he pushed forward the mass legal rehabilitation of victims of Stalinist repression. After retiring in 1990 he directed the research institute under the Russian procuracy, devoting his remaining decades to strengthening legality and criminal justice reform.
Activities and affiliations
- 1970–1990 Law and justice · Soviet Union
Career Timeline
- 1941–1944Signals Platoon Commander, Company Commander, Regimental Signals Chief, 69th Rifle Division; Captain
- 1947–1950Secretary, Komsomol Railway District Committee; Department Head, Voronezh Oblast Komsomol Committee
- 1950–1959Instructor, Deputy Head, then Head of International Department, Komsomol Central Committee
- 1959–1966Instructor, then Deputy Head for RSFSR, Administrative Organs Department, CPSU Central Committee
- 1966–1970Head of Procuracy, Court and Justice Sector, Administrative Organs Department, CPSU Central Committee
- 1970–1984First Deputy Minister of Justice of the USSR
- 1984–1988Minister of Justice of the RSFSR
- 1988.2–1988.5First Deputy Procurator General of the USSR
- 1988–1990Procurator General of the USSR
- 1991–2006Deputy Director, Director, then Chief Researcher, Institute for Problems of Strengthening Legality and Legal Order, Russian Federation Procuracy
Related historical events
Rebuilding Procurator's Supervision and Defending the Institution
Sukharev took office as Procurator General in May 1988 and was charged with reorganising the procuracy in the reform years. He argued that supervision should move away from a "hold and don't let go" posture toward prevention and the protection of rights, holding that where the law operates there must be supervision of legality, and that the procuracy is not an administrative organ but the highest supervisory authority over compliance with law.
Immediately on taking office he had to confront rights violations inside the procuracy itself. Prosecutors had upheld the confiscation of a believer's Bible as lawful, left standing a conviction for possessing literary works that were already widely published and staged, and treated demonstrators as troublemakers. Sukharev demanded that, on anything touching human rights, prosecutors move closer to the life of the people, and sought to correct these practices.
Inter-ethnic conflict and a surge in crime also defined his tenure. He publicly acknowledged that the procuracy had failed to foresee the signs of nationalist conflict and dismissed some prosecutors; with registered crime in the first half of 1989 exceeding one million for the first time in twenty years, a third above the same period of 1988, he stressed a response to violent crime. At the same time he had to defend the institution against parliamentary forces seeking to weaken it.