A Belarusian party organizer who sought continuity as the Union dissolved
After the 1991 coup failed, he called the State Committee's formation “a crime against the party.”
Anatoly Malofeyev was a Soviet and Belarusian politician who rose from industrial work through party administration to republican leadership. In the final years of perestroika, he led Belarus's Communist Party with a record of regional administration and a union-preserving party line, and supported the State Committee on the State of Emergency in 1991. After the coup's defeat, he sought to preserve the party organization and later worked in the parliamentary politics of independent Belarus.
Also known as: Anatoliy Malofeyev · Anatoli Malofeev
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1933Born in Gomel
- 1949–1952Mechanic at railway-car repair plants in Gomel and Minsk
- 1952–1956Served in the Soviet Navy
- 1962–1975Worked in Gomel and Mozyr party organizations, becoming Mozyr city first secretary and a Gomel regional party secretary
- 1978–1985Chairman of the Gomel regional executive committee and first secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus regional committee
- 1985–1990First secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus Minsk regional committee
- 1990–1991First secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus Central Committee and member of the CPSU Politburo
- 1996–2000First chairman of the House of Representatives of Belarus's National Assembly
The Soviet Politburo
- Full member 1990.12–1991.08
served until the party ban of 1991.11
Related historical events
After the party ban: state institutions and parliament in independent Belarus
After the August 1991 coup failed and Communist Party activity was suspended in Belarus, Malofeyev left the party apparatus for administrative work. From 1992 to 1996 he was deputy head of the Main Directorate for State Material Reserves under the Council of Ministers of Belarus. He also remained the leader of the party's central committee through the suspension of its activity, until February 1993, and in April 1993 the Communist Party joined the Party of Communists of Belarus.
In 1995 he became a deputy of the twelfth Supreme Council and deputy chairman of its standing commission on economic policy and reforms. This was the period of the 1995-1996 constitutional crisis, a confrontation between President Lukashenko and an opposition-dominated Supreme Council. In the referendum of 24 November 1996 Lukashenko's constitutional amendments were approved, and a new House of Representatives was assembled under the amended constitution. At that chamber's first extraordinary session on 28 November 1996 Malofeyev was elected chairman by 84 votes to 17, serving from 30 November 1996 to 21 November 2000. The chamber was described as admitting only Lukashenko loyalists, while around sixty members of the Supreme Council who rejected the new constitution continued to sit and were recognised by the international community as the legitimate parliament. His speakership therefore carries a double character: a starting point of independent Belarusian parliamentarism and a product of the concentration of power.
As speaker he was ex officio first deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia, and later its deputy chairman. Elected in October 2000 to the second House of Representatives, on 24 November 2000 he became chairman of its standing commission on Commonwealth of Independent States affairs, serving to 2004. From 2004 to 2008 he sat in the upper chamber, the Council of the Republic, for the Gomel region, heading its standing commission on regional policy and local self-government.