The defence minister of the August coup
On why he accepted the amnesty while his deputy Varennikov refused it: "Otherwise I would have been convicted for damaging the asphalt on Moscow's streets with tanks."
A teenage volunteer in the Great Patriotic War who went on to command Soviet forces in Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, Yazov was appointed Defence Minister in 1987 after the Matthias Rust affair. He resisted Gorbachev's arms reductions and military reforms, becoming the face of military discontent, and in 1990 was promoted as the last Marshal of the Soviet Union. He oversaw the withdrawal from Afghanistan and joined the 1991 August coup's State Emergency Committee, but his refusal to order the storming of Yeltsin's White House sealed the coup's failure. Arrested and imprisoned, he was later amnestied; Lithuania convicted him in absentia for the January 1991 Vilnius crackdown.
Career Timeline
- 1941–1945Serves as a young officer in the German-Soviet war
- 1960s–1970sRises through commands in Far Eastern and Central Asian military districts
- 1987–1991Defense minister representing military discontent during perestroika
- 1991.8Joins the State Emergency Committee but fails to move the army decisively
- 1991–1994Arrested and imprisoned, then amnestied
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarFought on the German front as a young officer
- 1979–1989The Soviet-Afghan WarDefense minister, co-signed withdrawal memoAs defense minister (from 1987), he co-signed the January 23, 1989 memo on five withdrawal options and visited Kabul after the January 25 Politburo decision to finalize the complete withdrawal.
- 1985–1991Perestroika and GlasnostDefense minister, coup participant
- 1985–1989The New Thinking and the End of the Cold WarDefence MinisterAs Defence Minister, resisted the unilateral cuts right up to the UN speech; the military brass were so opposed that the specific figures were kept secret even from other Politburo members until Gorbachev's departure.
- 1988–1991The Nationalities Crisis and the Collapse of Central AuthorityDefence minister, who supplied the troopsHe stood at the top of the chain for the troops used at Baku and at Vilnius.
- 1987–1991The Baltic Independence Movement and the Baltic WayStood atop the chain of command of the January 1991 operations.
- 1991The Novo-Ogaryovo Process and the New Union TreatyPavlov's backerBacked Pavlov's emergency-powers demand at the 17 June Supreme Soviet session, and was among the four names Popov slipped to Matlock.
- 1991The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSRCoup defense ministerAs defense minister, he mobilized the army for the coup.
A veteran at seventeen, made minister by a Cessna on Red Square
Dmitry Yazov was born in 1924 in the village of Yazovo near Omsk. In 1941, at seventeen, he lied about his age to enlist, fought as a platoon leader on the Leningrad front and was twice wounded; when the war ended he was a company commander of twenty-one. He became a career soldier of the field army. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 he commanded a regiment deployed to Cuba under Operation Anadyr, and went on through the Central Asian and Far Eastern commands.
In May 1987 the young West German Mathias Rust flew a light plane through the air defences and landed on Red Square. Gorbachev seized on the international embarrassment to sweep out defence minister Sokolov and hundreds of generals, and reached down past the hierarchy to make Yazov, then deputy minister for cadres, minister of defence, calculating that he would cooperate with military reform and troop cuts.
Yazov did carry out the Afghan withdrawal and the unilateral cut of half a million men. But before the loss of Eastern Europe, the army's fallen prestige and a shrinking budget, the field soldier's patience wore through. In April 1990 he was made Marshal of the Soviet Union, the last man ever to receive the title.
The August 1991 Coup
On 18 August 1991, Yazov joined the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) as a founding member. On 19 August, on his orders, tanks and heavy military equipment entered central Moscow. Yet Yazov never gave the order to storm the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin was rallying resistance. On 21 August, he ordered all troops withdrawn from the capital and flew to Foros to see Gorbachev, who was under house arrest at his Crimean dacha. Returning to Moscow in the early hours of 22 August, Yazov was arrested at Vnukovo-2 airport. That same day, in a video message to Gorbachev, he called himself 'an old fool' and said he regretted participating in 'this adventure.' He spent 498 days in Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina prison and was freed in 1994 by a State Duma amnesty. In later memoirs, Yazov insisted there had been 'no conspiracy' and dismissed the GKChP's actions as 'stupidity.'
An old fool's confession: the last marshal's later years
In footage shot just after his arrest, Yazov called himself an old fool and showed remorse for taking part. He is in fact counted the most reluctant man inside the emergency committee. When it became plain that storming the White House would mean bloodshed, he refused suppression and ordered the army out of Moscow, a decision widely judged decisive in ending the coup without slaughter. When the side with the tanks declined to shoot, the conspiracy was over.
He too went free without trial in the amnesty of 1994. He spent his later years as a defence-ministry adviser and in veterans' work, his standing restored in the Putin era with state decorations on his birthdays. The last marshal the Soviet Union ever made died in 2020 at ninety-five and was buried to an honour guard's salute.
His life compresses the century of the Soviet soldier: begun in the trenches before Leningrad, passing through the Cuban jungle and the Afghan mountains, and ending with tanks sent into his own capital. To the end he believed he had acted to protect his country, and that very act hastened its dissolution.