The Soviet banker who testified about reform's hidden origins
He later recalled that the 1991 reform had originated with the KGB and Kryuchkov.
Arnold Voylukov was a senior Soviet banker who experienced the inner workings of late Soviet monetary administration. He matters not only as an official in the institution that carried out the January 1991 currency reform, but also as a memoirist who later said that the idea came from the KGB and Vladimir Kryuchkov rather than from the Finance Ministry or Valentin Pavlov. His account illuminates the institutional tensions around the reform and how a covertly prepared measure damaged public trust.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1955Graduated from the Moscow Financial Institute
- 1955–1960년대Worked in regional institutions of the State Bank
- 1960년대–1970년대Headed cash circulation and cashier operations at the Krasnoyarsk regional State Bank office
- 1980년대Senior official in the central apparatus of the USSR State Bank
- 1990–1991Deputy chairman of the board of the USSR State Bank
- 1992–1994First deputy chairman of the Central Bank of Russia
Related historical events
First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of Russia and the falsified avizo affair
After serving as deputy chairman of the board of the USSR State Bank, Voylukov became first deputy chairman and a board member of the Central Bank of Russia from 1992, remaining until his retirement in 2005 after nearly fifty years in the State Bank and the Central Bank. At the Central Bank he was responsible for cash circulation and note-issue and cashier operations, and he was described as the author and developer of Russia's monetary measures. The 1993 exchange of 1961–1992 notes and the 1997 redenomination proceeded with his involvement, and his last project was the issue of upgraded 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 rouble notes.
One of the main problems he faced at the Central Bank was the falsified avizo, the theft of funds through forged payment documents. This fraud became possible during the restructuring of the banking system and the creation of settlement and cash centres (RKC), and more than 600 billion roubles were reported stolen from the Central Bank in 1992 alone. From June 1992 the Central Bank tightened the rules for verifying incoming avizo and banned settlements with Chechen banking institutions, while the Interior Ministry investigated. Recalling the response, Voylukov testified that forged documents were at first handed to the investigating agencies case by case, and that the way the flow was handled later changed.
The affair exposes where one institution's authority and responsibility ended. A parliamentary commission criticised the Central Bank, saying that the structure of settlement and cash centres it organised severed the link between the actual sender of funds and the recipient, creating a kind of 'black hole', and technical countermeasures such as the introduction of cryptographic systems were pursued in parallel. Voylukov himself was also named in the 1999 prosecutor's investigation of the Central Bank's dealings with its offshore subsidiary FIMACO, over the purchase of a building on Zhitnaya Street at a clearly inflated price, but he kept his post. This episode shows how late-Soviet monetary administration carried over into Russia's early banking system, and what questions of responsibility were raised in that transition.