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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
The Sumgait mission and the central response
Kharchenko was a junior official in the Central Committee delegation sent in early 1988 to respond to protests by Armenians in Nagorny Karabakh demanding transfer to Armenia. He spent most of 1988 and 1989 in the Caucasus. Recalling a rally in Stepanakert, he said that he had appealed to demonstrators through legal procedures and the prospect of central deliberation, but could not turn them from the chant “Miatsum” (“Unity”). His account captures the gap between Moscow's procedural approach and the demands voiced in the streets.
On the evening of 28 February 1988, Kharchenko and Filipp Bobkov, deputy head of the Soviet KGB, were the first Soviet central officials to travel from Baku to Sumgait. They saw burned trolleybuses and cars and crowds still roaming the streets. Kharchenko testified that he personally saw mutilated bodies of pogrom victims and said he later destroyed the photographs. He and Bobkov concluded that troops were needed to restore order, but several hours passed before Interior Ministry troops and cadets from the Baku military academy arrived. The soldiers had orders to fire blanks rather than live ammunition; rioters attacked them with Molotov cocktails and sharpened pieces of factory metal, wounding about one hundred soldiers. Kharchenko disputed Gorbachev's claim that the troop deployment was three hours late, saying that it was a day late because the authorities had waited a whole day for the deployment decision. That assessment is Kharchenko's retrospective account; his eyewitness testimony, the delayed arrival of troops, and the Politburo's subsequent discussion document the slow initial response.