Oleg Semyonovich Shenin

Shenin's political significance did not end with the failure of the August 1991 coup. He refused to treat the dissolution of the USSR as an unavoidable historical endpoint and became a politician devoted to rebuilding a union-wide communist organization and a renewed state unity. Elected founding chairman while still on trial in 1993, the Union of Communist Parties, Communist Party of the Soviet Union (UCP-CPSU), sought to bind the communist parties of the former Soviet republics within a common coordinating framework. Shenin used the organization to preserve international and federal links within the communist movement, including a 1997 visit to Pyongyang where he met Kim Jong Il.

This approach increasingly conflicted with the electoral orientation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In 2000, Shenin broke with Gennady Zyuganov over his proposal for a united communist party of Russia and Belarus, accusing the party leadership of retreating from socialism's ideological standards. The UCP-CPSU split in 2001, and the faction supporting Shenin reorganized itself as the CPSU in 2004. It did not restore Soviet power as an actual state authority, but the project traces how Shenin transferred the organizational experience of late Soviet politics into a post-Soviet campaign to reconstruct communism.

Shenin was not a member of the GKChP, but he was the Politburo member who openly supported it during the August events. On 17 August 1991 he took part in the meeting that made the final decision before the coup. According to Novaya Gazeta's reconstruction, the KGB's secret "ABC" facility on Akademika Varga Street brought together Defence Minister Yazov, cabinet head Pavlov, CC secretary Baklanov, presidential administration head Boldin, KGB deputy chairman Grushko and the generals Achalov and Varennikov, who agreed to fly to Foros to force Gorbachev to introduce a state of emergency. The next day Baklanov, Boldin, Shenin and Varennikov flew to Crimea and demanded that Gorbachev declare a state of emergency; he refused.

In April of the same year, at a party conference of the KGB apparatus and troops, Shenin said that "external Zionist centres" and "Zionist centres of the Soviet Union" supported certain political forces, linked Boris Yeltsin to them, and stated that without a state of emergency he saw no possibility of political and economic stabilisation. Novaya Gazeta adds that with deputy general secretary Ivashko ill, Shenin acted in his place, and that Gorbachev apparently did not realise that his organisational secretary was his principled ideological opponent.

At dawn on 19 August Shenin handed the GKChP documents to the chairman of the State Television and Radio Committee, Leonid Kravchenko, for broadcast, and at 10:50 the same day sent a cipher-telegram over his own signature to republican central committees and regional party committees ordering that communists be mobilised to assist the GKChP. On 22 August the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet consented to his prosecution and arrest; he was arrested the following day and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina prison, where he underwent three operations. He was released on 30 October 1992 on health grounds with the measure changed to an undertaking not to leave, and was amnestied in February 1994; the BBC Russian service puts his time in prison at about 13 months. The charge, as British and Russian records agree, was state treason arising from the August events.

Records from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation side, however, trace the arrest to the cipher-telegrams in support of the GKChP that went to the regions over his signature and give his time in custody as "more than a year", so the details diverge. On that account, unlike Yazov and Kryuchkov he wrote no letters of repentance to Gorbachev from Matrosskaya Tishina and never expressed the slightest regret for what was done, and in 1994 he testified as a witness at the trial of Valentin Varennikov, who had refused amnesty. These differing accounts should be attributed to their sources rather than reconciled into a single timeline.

In court Shenin left a political declaration instead of a denial of the charge. Asked by the prosecutor whether he had indeed been in a conspiracy, and if so with whom, he answered that he admitted having been in a conspiracy with members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from the moment of joining its ranks, with the single aim of serving the working people. Russian Wikipedia dates the amnesty to February 1994 and notes that he was amnestied but did not admit his guilt, an apparent tension with that declaration which should be reported as such. Separately, on 19 December 1991 he was found guilty in absentia under article 88 part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Lithuanian SSR for involvement in the January 1991 events in Vilnius. He was the only official outside the "Gang of Eight" whom the court named as a main conspirator.