The last RSFSR premier who tried not to break Russia away
October 1989, at the CC CPSU meeting on the RSFSR political system: "Creating a separate Russian Communist Party is the path to splitting the Soviet Union." He directly opposed Gorbachev's plan.
A Soviet institutional figure who rose from aviation plant engineer to first secretary of the Kuibyshev and Voronezh regions. Sidelined as ambassador to Cuba under late Brezhnev, he was politically revived when Andropov sent him to Krasnodar to purge corruption. In 1983 he became chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers and a full Politburo member, leading the Russian republic's government for five years; immediately after Chernobyl he served as deputy chairman of the government commission dealing with the disaster. In 1988 he moved to chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Presidium, but when Gorbachev pushed for a separate Russian Communist Party in the final years of perestroika, Vorotnikov openly opposed it, defending the RSFSR within the union framework to the end.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1942–60Kuibyshev aviation plant: engineer → party committee secretary
- 1961–67Kuibyshev region: party secretary → 2nd secretary → executive committee chair
- 1971–75First Secretary of Voronezh region
- 1975–79First Deputy Chairman, RSFSR Council of Ministers
- 1979–82Soviet Ambassador to Cuba
- 1982–83First Secretary of Krasnodar: anti-corruption purge
- 1983–88RSFSR Premier; full Politburo member
- 1988–90Chairman, RSFSR Supreme Soviet Presidium
The Soviet Politburo
- Candidate 1983.06–1983.12
- Full member 1983.12–1990.07
1990.07 not re-elected
Related historical events
First Secretary in Krasnodar Krai: the anti-corruption purge
In July 1982 Vorotnikov was hastily recalled from his ambassadorial post and, at Andropov's prompting, appointed first secretary of the Krasnodar Krai party committee. The man he replaced, Sergei Medunov, was a friend of Brezhnev who had led the krai since 1973 and presided over a structure of bribery and privilege along the Black Sea resort coast. Medunov was removed as first secretary on 23 July 1982 and moved to the post of deputy minister of fruit and vegetable farming of the USSR, and was subsequently dropped from the party's Central Committee.
The "Sochi-Krasnodar affair" is the collective name for a series of early-1980s criminal cases concerning bribery and abuse of office on the Black Sea coast. The investigation was initiated by the KGB under Yuri Andropov, and the inquiry into the Fisheries Ministry (the "Fishing case") spread to Sochi and expanded into the krai's wider networks of bribery. Medunov's people fell one after another. In Sochi in the spring of 1982 the restaurant proprietor Valentina Merzlaya and her husband Alexander, a local party official, were arrested and later sentenced to fifteen years each, while Nikolai Pogodin, first secretary of the Gelendzhik city party committee, disappeared without trace shortly after being interrogated. In the same town the head of the public catering administration, Bertha Borodkina, was sentenced to death and executed: the only woman executed for economic crimes in the post-Stalin USSR.
The scale of the purge is commonly given as more than 5,000 officials dismissed and expelled from the party, with some 1,500 convicted. Vorotnikov's own memoirs record that 152 people had been arrested in Sochi, Gelendzhik and Krasnodar, with 99 under investigation. The timing and scope of these figures, however, are described differently across sources: the same totals are sometimes presented as the affair's overall count and sometimes as figures for 1984-1986, after Vorotnikov had already left the krai. The corruption charges brought against Medunov were later dropped. Vorotnikov's tenure as first secretary ran from July 1982 to June 1983; on 24 June 1983 he was appointed chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers and returned to Moscow.