The MVD general who turned the Internal Troops into a mobile strike force and sealed Chernobyl
West of Kyiv in late 1943, Yakovlev's anti-tank battalion and two anti-tank rifle platoons ambushed fifty enemy tanks in a fire trap — destroying seventeen and stopping the assault cold.
Army General Ivan Yakovlev led the Soviet MVD Internal Troops for eighteen years, from 1968 to 1986. Born to a Cossack family in Stavropol, he joined the Red Army in 1939 and rose from lieutenant to major in the Great Patriotic War, earning six combat orders and surviving three wounds. As Internal Troops chief he transformed them from territorial paramilitaries into a mobile modern force with air and naval arms, special motorized police units, and regional commands, reforms that readied the force for the ethnic conflicts ahead. He personally directed over 15,000 troops sealing the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 1986. That December, after two MVD conscripts hijacked a Tu-134 in Ufa and killed several people, Yakovlev was dismissed and moved to the Group of General Inspectors, though he stayed active as a consultant to the Internal Troops command until his death.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1939–1940Graduated Kemerovo Mortar-Artillery School; fought in Soviet-Finnish War (wounded)
- 1941–1945Great Patriotic War: platoon to battalion commander, lt.→major, 6 combat orders, 3 wounds
- 1949–1958Stalin Armored Academy & General Staff Academy; tank regt. (GSFG), mech. div. (Romania)
- 1958–1965Staff posts: Military Education Directorate, Ground Forces HQ, Combat Training Directorate
- 1965–1968Deputy Commander for combat training, Moscow Military District
- 1968–1986Chief of Internal Troops, USSR MVD (promoted Army General 1980)
- 1986–1992Military inspector-adviser, Group of General Inspectors, USSR MoD
- 1996–2002Consultant to C-in-C, Russian Internal Troops; Veterans' Council
Related historical events
- 1939.11–1940.03The Winter Warserved
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic Warplatoon leader to battalion commander, six combat awards, wounded thrice
- 1986The Chernobyl DisasterCommander of the exclusion-zone operationDuring the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, he mobilized over 15,000 troops and personally directed the operation to seal the exclusion zone.
From tank officer to Internal Troops chief: the postwar Ground Forces years, 1945-1968
After the war Yakovlev commanded an artillery battalion for a year, then turned to staff education. He graduated from the Stalin Armored and Mechanized Forces Academy in 1949, became deputy commander and then, in 1950, commander of the 37th Tank Regiment in the Group of Soviet Occupation Forces in Germany. From 1952 he moved up to divisional command, leading the 25th Guards Mechanized Krivoy Rog Red Banner Division at Braila, Romania, from July 1954 to November 1956 - a field division on the south-western strategic axis at the moment the Hungarian crisis and the Suez war shook Eastern Europe. After graduating from the General Staff Academy in 1958 he shifted into the training and education apparatus, heading a department in the Defence Ministry's military education directorate, then a department in the Ground Forces main staff, then the programme and regulations directorate of the Ground Forces combat training headquarters, until in December 1965 he became deputy commander for combat training of the Moscow Military District. Those two decades of field command and training administration were the background to his May 1968 appointment, as a lieutenant general of tank troops, to head the Internal Troops. He came from the Cossack stanitsa of Chernolesskaya in the Stavropol region, finished a seven-year school and the Terek agricultural technicum at Prokhladny, worked as a livestock specialist on a state farm in Voronezh oblast, and was called up in September 1939. Graduating from the Kemerovo mortar-artillery school in 1940, he fought in the Soviet-Finnish War as a platoon commander in the 81st Rifle Regiment of the 123rd Independent Rifle Brigade and was wounded there - the starting point of the road that led him to tank and mechanized command.