Organizational-Party Work deputy chief who witnessed Sumgait, and said 'we were a day late'
Gorbachev says we were three hours late: nothing of the sort. We were a day late! Because we waited a whole day for the decision to send in troops.
A railway engineer who rose through the party apparatus to become deputy head of the CPSU Central Committee Organizational-Party Work Department (1987–1988) under Gorbachev. On the night of February 28, 1988, he and KGB deputy chairman Filipp Bobkov arrived in Sumgait, where he witnessed the mutilated corpses of the pogrom and later testified that Moscow's response was 'a day late, not three hours.' He later served as First Secretary of the Zaporizhzhia obkom (1988–1990) and Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and Politburo member (1990–1991), before working in Moscow as vice-president of the Russian Union of Commodity Producers after the USSR dissolved.
Career Timeline
- 1959Graduated Moscow Railway Engineering Institute; worked at Zaporizhzhia Electric Locomotive Repair Plant
- 1960–1967Komsomol secretary → First Secretary, Zaporizhzhia Oblast Komsomol
- 1967–1974First Secretary, Lenin District Party Committee → Mayor of Zaporizhzhia
- 1974–1986Secretary for industry → Second Secretary, Zaporizhzhia Obkom CPU
- 1987–1988Deputy Head, CC Organizational-Party Work Department
- 1988.02Joined Volsky's group, dispatched to Sumgait
- 1988–1990First Secretary, Zaporizhzhia Obkom CPU
- 1990–1991Second Secretary and Politburo member, CC CPU