Activities and affiliations

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1923–1992 ○ Natural causes

The top Yak ace of the war who rose to command the Air Defence Forces, and fell after a teenager landed on Red Square

On 7 November 1944 over Niš, Yugoslavia, American P-38s mistakenly strafed a Soviet column. Captain Koldunov took off, flew his Yak-9 alongside the American lead, and waggled his wings to show the red star. The only direct US-Soviet combat of WWII ended on that signal.

The highest-scoring Yak fighter ace of the German-Soviet war with 412 sorties and 46 solo victories, he was twice awarded Hero of the Soviet Union. During the November 1944 Niš incident he led Soviet fighters against American P-38s mistakenly attacking a Red Army column, then broke off the only direct US-Soviet combat of WWII by displaying his red-star markings. Rising through the Air Defence Forces, he became Commander-in-Chief in 1978 and received the rare rank of Chief Marshal of Aviation in 1984. Dismissed in June 1987 after Mathias Rust's Cessna landed on Red Square, he died in 1992 and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1923–1997 ○ Natural causes

The last supreme commander of the Warsaw Pact forces

"As it historically happened, Army General Lushev proved to be the last Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact Joint Armed Forces" — a post created in 1955 that quietly expired with him 36 years later.

Born to a peasant family in Arkhangelsk, he entered combat in 1942 as a rifle platoon commander on the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts, was wounded twice during the Sinyavin offensive, and forged his command experience in the crucible of the Great Patriotic War. After the war he transitioned to armoured forces and built the core of his career in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, rising to become its commander-in-chief in 1985 under Gorbachev. Appointed First Deputy Minister of Defence in 1986 and Supreme Commander of the Warsaw Pact Joint Armed Forces in 1989, he became the last officer to hold that post when the alliance dissolved in 1991. He was decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union (1983), held the rank of Army General (1981), and served on the CPSU Central Committee and in the Supreme Soviet.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1923–1999 ↓ Dismissed 1988

KGB chairman from late stagnation into perestroika

In a Russian television interview a year before his death, Chebrikov defended his KGB service: "I'm against a frozen view of the past."

A combat officer wounded three times in World War II, rising to battalion commander, he became a Dnipropetrovsk party cadre before Andropov brought him into the KGB in 1967. As KGB chairman from 1982 to 1988, he simultaneously directed an intelligence war against the US, exploiting Aldrich Ames's intel to dismantle CIA networks, and the high-profile anti-corruption investigation into the Uzbek leadership. He entered the Politburo as a full member in 1985 but sided with Yegor Ligachyov against the pace of perestroika and was dismissed in 1988.

Science and technology Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2000 ○ Natural causes

Father of the SS-18 'Satan' and architect of the late Cold War nuclear balance

At Baikonur in 1966, de Gaulle watched an ICBM erupt from its silo and could only repeat: 'Colossal! Colossal!' Utkin later recalled: 'Better this never becomes a real combat launch.'

Succeeded Mikhail Yangel as chief designer of KB Yuzhnoye (1971–1990), carrying forward Yangel's storable-propellant rocket lineage. Under his leadership Yuzhnoye fielded the R-36M (NATO: SS-18 'Satan'), the most powerful ICBM ever deployed, along with the railway-mobile RT-23 Molodets solid-fuel missile and the Zenit medium-lift launch vehicle. Twice Hero of Socialist Labor, Lenin Prize and State Prize laureate, full member of both the USSR and Ukrainian academies of science, and a CPSU Central Committee member (1976–1990). His designs formed the backbone of the late-Cold War Strategic Rocket Forces and underpinned the US-Soviet nuclear balance.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2002 ○ Natural causes

The party functionary who ran Soviet cinema as a state Hollywood: blockbusters, Oscars, and ideological control

When Andropov called after watching 'Siberiade' and demanded, 'Isn't this an anti-Soviet film?', Yermash replied, 'I'm a Siberian myself — that's how it was,' and the film stood.

Filipp Yermash chaired the USSR State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) from 1972 to 1986, controlling all Soviet film production, distribution, and censorship throughout the Brezhnev stagnation era. Born to a Siberian peasant family and a decorated WWII sapper, he rose through the Komsomol and Sverdlovsk party apparatus to become cinema sector head at the Central Committee's culture department in 1962. As Goskino chairman, he pursued mass-audience blockbusters like 'Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears' and 'Air Crew' alongside auteur works by Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky, restructuring the industry around profitability in a bid to build a Soviet Hollywood. Removed after fierce criticism at the 1986 filmmakers' congress, his tenure nonetheless saw Soviet cinema win two Oscars.

Industry and production Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2002 ↓ Removed 1990

The technocrat who rose from defense-plant apprentice to Politburo overseer of the military-industrial complex

During the Great Patriotic War, the eighteen-year-old Zaikov, working twelve-hour shifts in a defense plant, ran away to the front three times. Each time he was sent back to the factory — and so his path as a defense-industry man began.

A factory-floor technocrat who rose from apprentice die-maker in Leningrad's defense plants to Politburo member and CC Secretary (1985–1990) overseeing the entire Soviet military-industrial complex. Inheriting the defense portfolio from Grigory Romanov, he chaired the Politburo commission on nuclear and conventional arms reduction and was one of a handful of senior officials fully aware of the Soviet Union's prohibited biological weapons programme. After Boris Yeltsin's ouster in 1987 he concurrently served as First Secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee. Awarded Hero of Socialist Labour (1971) for directing the defense electronics enterprises Novator and Leninets, he embodied the pragmatist industrial manager elevated to the highest party ranks.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2003 ○ Natural causes

The KGB general who rose from Baku to the Kremlin and founded independent Azerbaijan

F. D. Bobkov, first deputy KGB chairman, asked him after three years: "What have you managed to achieve?" Aliyev replied: "I can guarantee only one thing — in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, no one takes bribes."

An Azerbaijani who served 28 years in Soviet state security, Aliyev rose from KGB chairman to First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party in 1969. Under Brezhnev, he drove rapid economic growth in the republic, expanding grape, oil, and cotton production, and became one of the few non-Slavs to reach the post of First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and full Politburo member in 1982. Returning to Azerbaijan as it descended into civil war after the Soviet collapse, he became president in 1993, stabilized the country, and signed the 'Contract of the Century' for Caspian oil development, securing his legacy as the founder of independent Azerbaijan.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2004 ○ Natural causes

Brezhnev-era chief of all Soviet publishing and censorship

Rebuking publishers who dared print positive reviews of Bulgakov's work, he declared: 'I don't understand why we should publish a writer who never accepted Soviet power.'

As chairman of Goskomizdat for twelve years under Brezhnev, he controlled the entire Soviet publishing apparatus, all books, newspapers, and magazines, making him the de facto chief of censorship. A journalist by training, he rose from regional newspaper editor to deputy editor of Pravda before taking the helm of the State Committee for Publishing in 1970. Under his watch, the USSR led the world in per-capita book production and undertook ambitious projects like the 200-volume Library of World Literature, yet he remained an ideological hardliner who publicly attacked publishers for issuing positive reviews of Bulgakov, a writer who 'never accepted Soviet power.' After Andropov came to power, he was promoted to head of the CC Propaganda Department, but Gorbachev sidelined him to the ambassadorship in Hungary.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1923–2005 ○ Natural causes

The architect of glasnost: the ideology chief who dismantled the ideology

May 19, 1983, on Eugene Whelan's farm in Amherstburg, Ontario. Walking a lane between corn and soybean fields, Yakovlev later said he "threw caution to the wind" and told Gorbachev what he considered utter stupidities in foreign affairs. By the end of that walk the two were comrades in reform.

Born 2 December 1923 in the village of Korolyovo, Yaroslavl province, into a peasant family. Called up in 1941, he commanded a marine infantry platoon on the Volkhov Front, was gravely wounded in the legs in August 1942, and was demobilised in February 1943. He joined the party in 1944, moved to the Central Committee apparatus in 1953, and studied at Columbia University in 1958–59 as an exchange student. In November 1972 an article against great-power chauvinism pushed him out of the party apparatus; from 1973 he spent ten years as ambassador to Canada. He became director of IMEMO in August 1983, then propaganda chief in 1985 and a full Politburo member in 1987, driving glasnost and the re-examination of history. In 1989 he chaired the inquiry that confirmed the secret protocols. He died in Moscow on 18 October 2005 after a long illness.

Economy, finance and planning Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2007 ○ Natural causes

Brezhnev's personal pilot who became Chief Marshal and the head of Soviet civil aviation

When a hijacked French fighter fired on Brezhnev's Il-18 over the Mediterranean in 1961, Bugayev — at the controls — threw the plane into evasive turns and escaped. Brezhnev told him afterward: "I owe you my life."

Handpicked as Leonid Brezhnev's personal pilot, he served 17 years as Minister of Civil Aviation from 1970, transforming Aeroflot into a global jet-age carrier. Promoted to Chief Marshal of Aviation in 1977, he became the last holder of any Soviet marshal rank across all service branches.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2007 ○ Natural causes

Soviet air defence chief who ordered the KAL 007 shootdown

On 1 September 1983, Far Eastern Military District commander Tretyak received the order from the General Staff to 'destroy' the intruding airliner and passed it down the chain of command without hesitation.

A Soviet Army General (1976) and Hero of the Soviet Union (1945) who commanded a regiment at age 21 during the Great Patriotic War. After serving as commander of the Belorussian Military District (1967–1976) and the Far Eastern Military District (1976–1984), he became Deputy Minister of Defence (1986–1991) and Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Defence Forces (1987–1991). On 1 September 1983, as commander of the Far Eastern Military District, he relayed the order from the General Staff to destroy Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it entered Soviet airspace, resulting in the deaths of all 269 people on board. Also named a Hero of Socialist Labour (1982), he embodied the arc of the late Soviet military elite and was dismissed immediately after the August 1991 coup attempt.

Social movements and organizing Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1923–2008 ↓ Forced retirement 1985

From Leningrad to Moscow: the successor halted one step short

«Nobody seriously considered Gorbachev. But by the time we arrived in Moscow the very next day, he had already done it, without waiting for us as Politburo rules demanded. That fast! He'd already cut the deal in secret with all of them.» — recalling the succession after Chernenko's death in March 1985.

A Leningrad shipbuilding engineer by training, he served 13 years as First Secretary of the Leningrad Oblast (1970–1983), reshaping the city with mass housing, metro expansion, the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, and the flood barrier project. He rose to CC Secretary for the military-industrial complex and full Politburo member. Both Brezhnev and Andropov saw him as the next General Secretary. His loss to Gorbachev in the 1985 succession after Chernenko's death was a defining fork in late Soviet history.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2009 ○ Natural causes

GSFG Commander-in-Chief and Army General who oversaw Soviet operations in Afghanistan

Tank Army commander Rybalko visited the wounded Captain Zaitsev in hospital: 'You've got a long, long war ahead of you, son.' He pinned on the Order of the Red Banner on his own authority. The Hero of the Soviet Union star followed forty years later.

A volunteer in the Great Patriotic War who fought as a tank corps staff officer from Kursk to Prague, Zaitsev rose through armoured commands and the Belorussian Military District to become Commander-in-Chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (1980–1985). On the Warsaw Pact's front line he reformed training to stress junior-officer initiative and was made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1983. Transferred in 1985 to command the Southern Strategic Direction, he oversaw Soviet operations in Afghanistan and personally pushed the Kremlin to rush the BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle, whose elevated cannon suited mountain warfare, into mass production. A towering figure of nearly two metres, he earned the nickname 'polygon general' and left a distinct mark on late Soviet ground-forces doctrine and equipment modernization.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2009 ○ Died of illness, Moscow

General who received the Victory Banner and stood alone in the coup dock

In June 1945 Captain Varennikov, as chief of the honour guard, received the Victory Banner when it arrived at Moscow's central airfield; hours later that banner led the Victory Parade across Red Square.

Soviet and Russian general of the army, veteran of the Great Patriotic War and the Afghan War. He received the Victory Banner at the head of the honour guard in 1945 and, from 1984 to 1989, headed the Defence Ministry control group in Afghanistan, where the Hero of the Soviet Union title came for commanding Operation Magistral in 1988, not for the withdrawal. Not a member of the State Committee on the State of Emergency, he supported the August 1991 coup as its military representative; in 1994 he alone refused amnesty, and the Supreme Court acquitted him for acting on a superior's order. Prominent in the KAL 007 shoot-down order and the January 1991 events in Vilnius. State Duma deputy from 1995, later an inspector general of the defence ministry. Died in Moscow in 2009.

Social movements and organizing Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1923–2010 ○ Natural causes

The longest-serving regional party secretary in Soviet history, who led Omsk for 26 years

In October 1961 in Bolsherechye, early in the morning, a man in a blue tracksuit was doing calisthenics in the square by the district party committee — that was the new First Secretary of Omsk Oblast, the 39-year-old Manyakin.

The longest-serving regional party first secretary in Soviet history, who led the Omsk Oblast Committee of the CPSU for 26 years from 1961 to 1987. Appointed personally by Khrushchev in response to the agricultural crisis, he oversaw Omsk's transformation into a major Siberian industrial city with oil refining, heavy industry, and a modern agro-industrial complex. In 1987 Gorbachev appointed him Chairman of the USSR People's Control Committee, where he led the reform-era state watchdog institution, and he subsequently served as First Deputy Chairman of the Party Control Committee. A member of the CPSU Central Committee for 29 years (1961–1990), he embodied the classic Brezhnev-era regional party boss whose career spanned three Soviet leadership eras.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2012 ○ Heart attack

Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Il-2 assault ace who rose to command the Soviet Air Force at its zenith

On 31 August 2012, upon hearing that his lifelong friend Marshal Sergei Sokolov had died, Yefimov suffered a fatal heart attack. The two old soldiers departed the same day.

The Soviet Air Force's greatest Il-2 assault ace of the Great Patriotic War, Yefimov flew 222 combat sorties, destroying 85 enemy aircraft on the ground and 7 in the air, and received the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union twice by the age of twenty-one. As First Deputy C-in-C of the Air Force from 1969, he was the driving force behind the Su-25 ground-attack aircraft, and as Commander-in-Chief from 1984 he directed Soviet air operations in Afghanistan, presiding over the force at its quantitative peak of over 13,000 aircraft. In retirement he remained an influential figure as chairman of the Russian Committee of War Veterans.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2019 ○ Natural causes

A staff general who turned wartime experience into military theory

After the 1989 withdrawal, he remained in Kabul to advise Najibullah’s government on conducting the war.

Makhmut Gareev was a senior commander and military theorist who shaped Soviet approaches to operations and training through the combined perspective of wartime experience and staff work. In the General Staff’s scientific and operational institutions, he developed a practical method for analysing war and preparing forces. After the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, he remained as chief military adviser to President Mohammad Najibullah, linking continuing Soviet aid with the Afghan government’s military planning and operations. In memoirs and studies, he interpreted the Afghan war and Soviet wartime experience as military and political lessons.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2021 ○ Natural causes

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.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1923–2022 ○ Natural causes

First Secretary of the Estonian Communist Party (1978–1988) who resisted perestroika and pushed Russification until Moscow replaced him.

He spoke almost no Estonian and what he did speak came out in a thick Russian accent, earning him the nickname 'Yestonian.'

Born in Tomsk, Siberia, to Estonian Bolshevik parents, he was a native Russian speaker who spoke Estonian with a thick accent. In 1978 he replaced Johannes Käbin, who had led Estonia for 28 years, as First Secretary and became an extreme Russificator; he survived an assassination attempt in 1979. After the Hirvepark rally of 1987 he mobilised the entire party apparatus in a furious counter-campaign, branding the demonstration anti-Soviet nationalism, but in June 1988 Moscow forced his resignation and replaced him with Vaino Väljas.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1924–1979 ✕ Suicide

A Soviet European who excavated dialectical logic from Marx's Capital

“Idealism is not the elementary error of a naive schoolboy imagining a ghost. Idealism is a speculative interpretation of the objectivity of the ideal form — the fact of its existence in the space of human culture, independent of the will and consciousness of individuals.” — Dialectics of the Ideal, 1976

The most original thinker in Soviet Marxist philosophy. He formalized the dialectical method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete as the core logic of Marx's Capital, and argued in his landmark 1962 article 'The Ideal' that ideal forms exist objectively in culture, language and signs, not as products of individual brains, igniting a lasting philosophical controversy. His ideas provided the foundation for V.V. Davydov's developmental education theory and for Meshcheryakov's Zagorsk experiment in deaf-blind education. His magnum opus Dialectical Logic (1974) expanded Marxist dialectics from epistemology into a philosophy of culture and mind.

Science and technology Soviet Union state institutions 1924–1985 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Soviet naval strategic rocketry, the man the CIA called 'the Ural Dragon'

In 1955, Korolev offered the 30-year-old Makeyev a post as deputy chief designer of the Urals branch. Makeyev replied: "I'll go to the Urals only as a chief designer. I won't go as a deputy." Korolev was stunned by the audacity — but appointed him chief designer of SKB-385.

A draftsman at an aviation plant who caught Korolev's eye and became chief designer of SKB-385 at 31. Over three decades leading a single design bureau, he developed three generations of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, achieving underwater launch, factory fueling, intercontinental range, and MIRV capability in succession, completing the strategic balance of Cold War naval nuclear deterrence. Western intelligence, ignorant of his identity, called him 'the Ural Dragon'; his R-17 became globally known under its NATO code name: Scud.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Union state institutions 1924–1993 ↓ Removed 1964

Khrushchev's son-in-law and the editor who turned Izvestia into the most-read Soviet newspaper of the thaw

“Don't have a hundred roubles, marry like Adzhubei” — the Moscow joke of the 1950s that captured how thoroughly his rise was entwined with being Khrushchev's son-in-law.

Alexei Adzhubey was the face of Soviet journalism during the Khrushchev thaw. As editor-in-chief of Izvestia from 1959 to 1964, he transformed the staid government organ into a lively, widely read daily, quadrupling its circulation from 1.6 million to over 6 million. He spearheaded the creation of the Union of Journalists of the USSR in 1959, co-authored the Lenin Prize-winning Face to Face with America (1960) about Khrushchev's US visit, and secured an exclusive interview with President John F. Kennedy in 1961. His bold decision to publish Aleksandr Tvardovsky's banned satirical poem Tyorkin in the Other World in Izvestia in 1963 showed he was more than just Khrushchev's son-in-law: he was a genuine editorial innovator who pushed the boundaries of permissible speech.

Science and technology Soviet Union state institutions 1924–1996 ○ Natural causes

The chief designer who built a Soviet satellite empire in the Siberian taiga

Baikonur, 1987. Gorbachev surveyed the satellites and asked: "You do all this in Siberia?" Reshetnev answered: "In Siberia. But we work with Moscow, Leningrad, and 200 other cities."

A rocket engineer who began as Korolev's deputy, in 1961 he founded the independent design bureau OKB-10 in the closed Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk-26. He delivered the Molniya, Strela, Raduga, and Ekran communications and broadcasting satellite families, expanded into geodesy, rescue, and navigation, and in 1982 launched the GLONASS global satellite navigation system. The enterprise he built, NPO PM (Applied Mechanics Science-Production Association), produced more than 30 space systems and over 1,000 satellites, accounting for two-thirds of all Soviet satellites; it survives today as ISS Reshetnev and remains the backbone of Russian satellite manufacturing. Hero of Socialist Labor, Lenin Prize laureate, and full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Industry and production Soviet Union state institutions 1924–2001 ○ Natural causes

The gas and oil minister who made the USSR the world's largest gas producer

Reassigned from Gas to Oil Minister in 1985, he told a colleague: "All the same, in my soul I'm a gas man. Nothing to be done about it."

Born into an ethnic Bulgarian peasant family, Dinkov served as a reconnaissance scout in the Great Patriotic War and afterwards chaired a kolkhoz in Krasnodar. Graduating from the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute, he rose from oilfield engineer to Minister of the Gas Industry in 1981. He tripled gas output and completed the Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhgorod transcontinental pipeline (4,450 km), linking Siberian fields to Western Europe. Shifted to Oil Industry Minister in 1985, he oversaw the USSR's peak crude production of 624 million tons in 1988, still the highest annual output of any single country. After retirement he served on the Gazprom board, guiding the gas industry through its market transition.