Valentin Sergeyevich Pavlov

Valentin Pavlov, born in Moscow in 1937, was a finance official out of the Moscow Finance Institute. Starting as a junior inspector in the finance ministry, he rose through the budget directorate and the finance side of Gosplan to chair the State Price Committee in 1986 and become finance minister in 1989. He was that rare case of a man reaching the top on a purely fiscal career, neither party nor army, and few knew the tangled interior of the Soviet price system as he did.

For that very reason he saw the catastrophe earlier than most. He knew in figures how the anti-alcohol campaign's lost revenue, the partial reform that freed wages while freezing prices, and the swelling subsidies were eating the budget. Yet the conclusion he drew was not marketisation but the restoration of control. In his eyes the radical reformers were agitators ignorant of economics, and Western advice a stratagem to dismantle the Soviet Union.

In January 1991 Gorbachev made him head of government in Ryzhkov's place, the title changed from chairman of the Council of Ministers to prime minister. The first and last man in Soviet history to bear that title had eight months left.

Appointed premier on 14 January 1991, Pavlov waited just eight days before dropping a bombshell: on the evening of 22 January he ordered all 50- and 100-ruble notes withdrawn and exchanged for new bills within three days. Only days earlier he had publicly promised that no monetary reform was coming. The exchange window ran from 23 to 25 January: a mere three days. Individuals could swap only up to 1,000 rubles immediately; any excess had to go before special commissions, with decisions promised by the end of March. The government claimed it was targeting 'shadow capital' and ruble hoards stashed abroad, but the reality hit ordinary citizens hardest: wages had just been paid in the very notes now being demonetised. Panic swept the country: citizens besieged savings banks, and elderly people were especially terrified of missing the deadline. By 26 January only about 40 billion of the 48 billion rubles in circulation had been surrendered. Meanwhile fresh emissions soon outpaced the recalled sum, and the attempt to stabilise the consumer market collapsed. A second wave followed on 2 April, when Pavlov's cabinet raised most retail prices two- to threefold.

In April 1991 Pavlov raised retail prices by an average of more than 60 percent, the first sweeping official increase since 1961; compensating payments halved its fiscal effect, and only the public's trust was lost. In June he went before the Supreme Soviet to demand emergency powers letting the government legislate past the president, and in closed session Kryuchkov, Yazov and Pugo backed him. The affair, dubbed an attempted constitutional coup, was voted down, but it announced to the world the fissure in the leadership and the hardliners' resolve.

In August Pavlov put his name to the State Committee for the State of Emergency. From the coup's second day, however, he effectively dropped out with a hypertensive crisis; several accounts say heavy drinking. The premier who had joined emergency rule to avert fiscal catastrophe could not endure even its three days.

After arrest and the 1994 amnesty he lived as a private bank president and economic consultant, dying in 2003 at sixty-five. In his memoir he asked whether the chance had been lost, insisting his prescription had been right. Economic historians mostly judge the opposite: his currency confiscation and price rises destroyed savings and trust, hastening the very collapse he meant to prevent.