The last deputy general secretary before dissolution
On the morning of 21 August 1991, with the coup clearly collapsing, Ivashko telephoned Vice President Yanayev from the Central Committee building and requested a plane to see Gorbachev. Refused, he was forced to board the flight to Foros alongside the very putschists — Yazov, Lukyanov and others — whose coup he had refused to endorse.
A mining engineer and economist from Kharkiv, he spent two decades in the Ukrainian party apparatus before succeeding Shcherbitsky as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1989. In 1990 Gorbachev created the post of Deputy General Secretary for him, the only person ever to hold it. After the August 1991 coup, Gorbachev's resignation made Ivashko the final leader of the CPSU, but within five days the party's activity was suspended, and Soviet communism ended with him.
Career Timeline
- 1989–90First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party
- 1990–91Deputy General Secretary of the CPSU
- 1991.8Briefly acting party leader after Gorbachev resigned
Related historical events
August 1991: Between the Coup and the Party from a Hospital Bed
On 4 August 1991, when Gorbachev departed for his holiday at the Foros dacha, party affairs were left to Secretary Oleg Shenin, not Ivashko, who was recovering from surgery at a sanatorium outside Moscow. When the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP) emerged on 19 August, Ivashko learned that Shenin was pushing to convene a Central Committee plenum. Ivashko blocked it, judging that a plenum without the General Secretary would amount to a party coup. Shenin sent a ciphered telegram to regional party organisations instructing them to assist the GKChP under the Secretariat's name, a document signed by neither Gorbachev nor Ivashko. Ivashko later maintained he had been deliberately kept in the dark.
On the evening of 20 August, Secretary Dzasokhov visited the sanatorium and the two agreed to issue a brief statement that the Deputy General Secretary had requested a meeting with Gorbachev. On the morning of 21 August, with the GKChP clearly failing, Ivashko headed to the Central Committee building in Moscow. He telephoned Vice President Yanayev to request a plane to see Gorbachev, was refused, and ultimately boarded the flight to Foros alongside the very putschists he had refused to endorse, Yazov, Lukyanov and others.
On 22 August, Ivashko signed a Secretariat statement pinning responsibility on individual members who had acted 'in secret from the party leadership'. Shenin was arrested that day. On 24 August Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, making Ivashko acting leader. But on 29 August the Supreme Soviet suspended party activity, and on 6 November Yeltsin's decree banned the party outright.