From Kiev regional party leader to Gorbachev's last chief of staff
The day Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he called Revenko in and joked, 'Want to see a Soviet millionaire?' The two then allocated the entire million-plus dollars to children's oncology centres and Chernobyl areas. When done, Gorbachev smiled: 'Well, no more millionaire.'
Ukrainian Soviet party and state official who rose to first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee, the capital region's top party post, then became Gorbachev's chief of staff as head of the USSR Presidential Apparatus in the union's final months. Moving up through Komsomol and party bodies, he became first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee in 1985 and was elected to the CPSU Central Committee in 1986. In 1990 he joined the Presidential Council, and in August 1991 Gorbachev made him head of the Presidential Apparatus, where he managed the shift from party to presidential rule. After the dissolution he was vice president of the Gorbachev Foundation before returning to Kiev.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1958–1961Engineer, Odessa Refrigeration Machinery Plant
- 1961–1972Komsomol leadership in Odessa, Secretary of the Ukrainian Komsomol CC
- 1972–1980Inspector of the CPU CC, Secretary and Second Secretary of Kiev Oblast Committee
- 1980–1984Presidium member of the Ukrainian SSR Supreme Soviet, Chairman of the CPU Auditing Commission
- 1984–1985Inspector of the CPSU CC, Deputy Head of the Organizational-Party Work Department
- 1985–1990First Secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee
- 1990–1991Member of the USSR Presidential Council
- 1991–1992Head of the Presidential Apparatus of the USSR
Related historical events
- 1985–1991Perestroika and GlasnostGorbachev's chief of staff
- 1986The Chernobyl DisasterKiev oblast official involved in Chernobyl responseAs first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Party Committee, he dealt directly with the accident’s regional consequences.
- 1991The Novo-Ogaryovo Process and the New Union TreatyLed the working group preparing the treaty.
First Secretary in Kiev and the Chernobyl Aftermath, 1985-1990
Revenko served as first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Party Committee from 1985 to 1990, and in that post dealt directly with the regional consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. After the April 1986 accident the Kiev oblast party organization handled evacuation, resettlement and the administration of radioactively contaminated territory. In an article he published in the party press on 30 April 1989, he wrote that the accident had cost Kiev Oblast 575 million rubles in fixed assets, 58,800 hectares of farmland and 1.5 million square metres of housing, that more than 90,000 people were moved and that over half of them were resettled within the oblast; the housing of evacuees was essentially completed only by the beginning of 1987.
In the same article he stated the oblast committee's and oblast executive committee's position that people must not live in the exclusion zone, and criticized both the more than a thousand people who had settled there and central media reports that 15 villages in the zone were safe to live in. The oblast committee's line on the plant itself was to secure safe operation first and to take reactor units out of service as their working life was exhausted. On the new town of Slavutych he criticized errors in building infrastructure and providing employment that were already eroding its attractiveness, and noted more than a thousand people queuing for housing and unresolved housing for construction workers. He repeatedly raised with the union and republican governments the failure to release financial and material resources for gas supply, schools and cultural facilities in the resettlement villages.
His conduct in this period left both evidence of initiative and acknowledged limits. Valery Tsybukh, then second secretary of the Ukrainian Komsomol, recalled that at Revenko's fiftieth-birthday gathering on 28 April 1986 Revenko challenged him to go and see the situation at Chernobyl himself; the same account records that in the first days after the accident party officials received little more information than ordinary citizens. Revenko accompanied Gorbachev on his visit to the Chernobyl plant on 23 February 1989.