The operator who ran Soviet machine-building and organized post-Soviet capital
During the August 1991 coup, Volsky got through to Gorbachev under house arrest and then told the world that the plotters' claim — that the Soviet leader was too ill to govern — was a lie.
He was the Central Committee Machine-Building Department head, economic aide to Andropov and Chernenko, and the figure who personified the transition from late-Soviet industrial management to post-Soviet business lobbying. As founder and 15-year president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), he turned the 'red directors' into an organized lobbying force that shaped the terms of Russia's market transition. During the August 1991 coup, he contacted Gorbachev under house arrest and publicly contradicted the plotters' claim that the Soviet leader was incapacitated by illness. He also served as Moscow's special administrator in Nagorno-Karabakh (1988–1990), deputy head of the Chechen peace mission (1995), and spent three months at Chernobyl in 1986 directing the industrial side of the disaster response.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1955–1969ZIL auto plant: assistant foreman → head of foundry → party committee secretary
- 1969–1983CC Machine-Building Dept: auto sector head → deputy head → first deputy head
- 1983–1984Economic aide to General Secretary Andropov
- 1984–1985Economic aide to General Secretary Chernenko
- 1985–1990Head of CC Machine-Building Department
- 1988–1990Chairman, Special Administration Committee for Nagorno-Karabakh
- 1990–2005President, Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP)
- 1991.8–12Deputy PM of the USSR (industry and military complex)
Related historical events
- 1985–1991Perestroika and Glasnostmechanical engineering reform and transition to market
- 1986The Chernobyl DisasterIndustrial-response directorHe directed the industrial response at Chernobyl for three months in 1986.
- 1988–1991The Nationalities Crisis and the Collapse of Central AuthorityHead of the Special Administration Committee for Nagorno-Karabakh
- 1991The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSRPublicly contradicted the coup plottersDuring the August 1991 coup, he publicly said the claim that Gorbachev was ill was a lie.
The RSPP and the politics of big business
Volsky never ran a business of his own. After 1991 he left the Communist Party and turned to organizing the managers of state industry into a collective bargaining force. In 1990, with Yevgeny Velikhov of the USSR Academy of Sciences, he founded the Scientific-Industrial Union, later renamed the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), which he led as president from 1990 to 2005; the Independent dated the union's founding to 1992. The paper described it as the country's most powerful lobby group, representing big business and drawing in the leading oligarchs, meeting Vladimir Putin regularly at the Kremlin and helping to reshape the economy.
The RSPP gave the 'red directors' a permanent institutional voice and made them political actors in their own right. Volsky headed the union and stood at the top of its political vehicles: he led the Civic Union bloc's list in the 1993 Duma election and placed third on the list of 'Trade Unions - Industrialists of Russia - Union of Labour' in 1995, but neither bloc cleared the threshold. In 1995 he helped found the Russian United Industrial Party as the union's political wing. In 1999 he headed the Fatherland - All Russia list in the Tomsk-Omsk group, and again failed to win a seat.
His break with the Kremlin came over Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Volsky regarded the fraud and tax-evasion charges against Russia's then richest man as politically motivated and said so publicly, incurring the Kremlin's anger; in September 2005 he was replaced as RSPP president by a more Kremlin-friendly figure and given the honorary title instead. He died in September 2006 after a long illness (acute leukemia); Putin's telegram credited him with doing much to build the new Russian economy and consolidate its entrepreneurs.