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.
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