Boris Karlovich Pugo

Boris Pugo was born in 1937 in Kalinin (Tver). His father was a Latvian Bolshevik of the revolution and civil war, of the emigre line of Latvian communists who stayed in the Soviet Union while Latvia was independent. After the war the family returned to Soviet Latvia, and Pugo studied engineering in Riga before climbing the Komsomol ladder to first secretary of the Latvian Komsomol.

In 1977 his career bent from party to security organs. Moving to the KGB, he chaired the Latvian KGB from 1980 to 1984, a post for watching nationalism and dissent, its object his father's homeland and his own nation. In 1984 he became first secretary of the Latvian Communist Party, the republic's supreme power.

To be a Latvian holding Latvia inside the Soviet Union: the paradox running through his whole career was less a personal choice than a family inheritance. To the Latvian Bolsheviks the Soviet Union was not the homeland's betrayal but its fulfilment, and Pugo was the last generation of that faith.

Pugo's years as Latvian first secretary, 1984 to 1988, coincide exactly with the republic's awakening. In the space glasnost opened, the memory of the 1940 annexation revived and the environmental movement grew into a national one. He tried to win back trust for the system with anti-corruption drives and economic results, but the current was already beyond such remedies. The Latvian Popular Front formed just after he moved to Moscow in 1988.

There he chaired the party's Central Control Committee, keeper of discipline and censure, and in December 1990, in Gorbachev's turn to the right, replaced the reformer Bakatin as interior minister. West and reformers alike read the appointment as the clearest signal of the hard turn. When the interior ministry's OMON special police, the Black Berets, shed blood in Riga in January 1991, at the top of the chain of command stood a Latvian minister.

When the Baltic movements spoke of the annexation's illegality, Pugo was a man who had lived the world the annexation made. To him the union's dissolution was not the defeat of a political line but the collapse of the ground of his existence. The choice of August 1991, and its ending, cannot be explained without this.

Gorbachev's dismissal of the reformist Vadim Bakatin and appointment of Pugo as USSR interior minister in December 1990 was widely seen as a turn to the right. Pugo pursued a hard line on law and order amid soaring crime and ethnic conflict, and in March 1991 was named to the Security Council.

On 18 August 1991, Pugo met Yazov and Kryuchkov at the Defence Ministry and was briefed on the coup plan. Immediately afterward, in his own office, he informed deputy ministers Shilov and Dubinyak that a state of emergency was imminent and ordered the internal troops and police system to stand ready. He then sent them to a meeting chaired by KGB first deputy chairman Grushko to coordinate the reinforcement of television centres, communications facilities, railway stations, and airports.

Returning from the Kremlin in the early hours of 19 August, Pugo ordered the deployment of 15–20 traffic-police (GAI) escort vehicles for the army columns entering Moscow. At 9:00 a.m. he convened the ministry's senior staff, demanded unconditional compliance with GKChP decisions, and signed Order No. 066 placing the entire internal-affairs system on a heightened service regime along with Order No. 067 establishing an operational headquarters. That afternoon Cypher Telegram No. 922 went out to every regional branch of the MVD with instructions for emergency-rule operations.

Pugo also moved aggressively to control the media. On 20 August at 3:30 p.m. he cabled all MVD offices ordering them to tighten security at broadcast facilities and to report immediately any violation of GKChP Resolution No. 3 on information control. The same day he personally drafted a GKChP decree annulling Yeltsin's Russian presidential edicts and forwarded it to Boldin, and issued a cypher telegram forbidding the movement of Russian MVD cadet units summoned to Moscow. The official indictment later concluded that Pugo, "using his official position, did everything in his power to implement the GKChP's decisions and strengthen its position."

After the coup collapsed on 21 August, arrest warrants were issued for all GKChP members. The next morning Russian KGB chairman Ivanenko telephoned Pugo's apartment. Pugo answered, listened to the request for a meeting, and said calmly, "Come." He then shot his wife Valentina and placed the revolver in his own mouth. When officers entered the apartment fifteen minutes later, both were still breathing. Pugo died en route to hospital; his wife, who never regained consciousness, died the following day.

Pugo's suicide note was found at the scene: "I have committed a completely unexpected mistake, equal to a crime. Yes, it is a mistake, not a conviction. I now know I was deceived in the people I trusted deeply." Prosecutors closed the case against Pugo on account of his death. The couple's ashes were interred at Moscow's Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in February 1992.