Anatoly Ivanovich Lukyanov

Anatoly Lukyanov was born in Smolensk in 1930 and studied in the Moscow University law faculty in the same years as Gorbachev; the tie between them would run forty years. Starting as a scholar of state law, he took his doctorate on the principles of the Soviet state apparatus and in 1977 joined the drafting of the Brezhnev constitution. That document, the legal self-portrait of developed socialism, was his worldview itself: the Soviet system was an order clothed in legal form, and guarding that form was his vocation.

In the party apparatus he grew into a master of documents and procedure, rising to head the Central Committee's General Department, the post that since Stalin's day controlled the paper flow of power and carried far more weight than it appeared to.

He had another face: a lyric poet who published under the pen name Osenev. The lyricism harboured by this man of procedure foreshadowed the old man who would one day write poems in prison.

In the new parliament born of the political reform, Lukyanov held the gavel first as Gorbachev's first deputy and from March 1990 as chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet. He governed thousands of deputies new to parliamentary politics with the craft of procedure. Holding the order of speakers, the modes of voting and the agenda, he was to supporters the master speaker who turned chaos into order, to critics the gatekeeper who shut reform bills in a maze of procedure.

With time he leaned toward the second face. In the dread of the union's dissolution he became the conservatives' stronghold within parliament. It was he who chaired the closed session where Pavlov demanded emergency powers in June 1991, and he whose statement that the union treaty eroded the constitution ran in the newspapers on the morning the coup began.

For the three days his friend of forty years was held at Foros, Lukyanov, never formally joining the coup, delayed convening parliament and watched. That very ambiguity became his share of the responsibility.

A week after the coup failed, Lukyanov was arrested as its ideologue. In his Matrosskaya Tishina cell he wrote poems, later published as a prison collection. That he, whose name was absent from the emergency committee's roster, was treated as a ringleader he protested to the end: he was feared, he said, not for conspiracy but because the parliament he could convene might have legalised the coup.

Freed by the 1994 amnesty, he was elected three times to the State Duma as a communist and led its committee on constitutional legislation, an old age spent polishing the laws of the Russian Federation with the hand that had written the Soviet constitution. He died in 2019, at eighty-eight.

To legal scholars Lukyanov remains a case study: what happens when devotion to the form of law parts ways with the question of what law is meant to serve. He was the last guardian of Soviet legality, and the one thing he could never accept as legal was that legality dismantling itself.