Dmitry Timofeyevich Yazov

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.

On 13 January 1991, Soviet security forces assaulted the Vilnius TV tower and television headquarters as Lithuania sought to break away from the USSR. According to the findings of the Lithuanian prosecution and courts, 14 civilians were killed and more than 700 wounded, with the deaths occurring mostly during the storming of the television headquarters and the TV tower, by gunfire from Soviet soldiers or under armoured vehicles.

The Lithuanian proceedings did not begin in 2019. According to ru.wikipedia, on 19 December 1991 Yazov was convicted in absentia under article 88 part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Lithuanian SSR (attempted coup d'état). That article provided for up to 15 years' imprisonment or execution, but there is no evidence that a death sentence was passed on him. In January 2016, at the trial of the '13 January case', the Prosecutor General's Office of Lithuania charged him in absentia, alleging that he had created 'an organized group of 160 military and political figures with the aim of returning Lithuania to the USSR'. This is the Lithuanian prosecution's charge. Yazov himself denied the guilt of Soviet soldiers in the deaths at the Vilnius television centre.

On 27 March 2019, in a three-year trial of 67 former Soviet military and KGB officials, the Vilnius District Court found Yazov guilty in absentia and sentenced him to 10 years' imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Then 95, he was the highest-ranking defendant in the case. All 67 were convicted, with sentences between four and 14 years, and only two of the accused appeared in court: the former Soviet tank officer Yuriy Mel and the munitions officer Gennady Ivanov. The rest were tried in absentia. Most of the convicted were believed to be in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus, and Lithuania issued international arrest warrants for those sentenced.

As to the penalty, the court imposed 10 years, while the Lithuanian prosecution had demanded life imprisonment for him. The sources record this distinction explicitly.

Russia did not recognise the verdict. It refused to cooperate with the Lithuanian trial, called the proceedings politically motivated and illegal, and refused to extradite Yazov and his co-defendant Mikhail Golovatov. The Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against the judges of the Vilnius District Court. In November 2016 the Russian State Duma adopted a statement on the Vilnius trial, calling it 'a political process in the worst traditions of punitive justice', unconnected to the protection of human rights, contrary to international law and 'markedly anti-Russian in character'. TASS reports that the Duma statement of 9 November 2016 described the process as a 'politically motivated show trial'.

Sources conflict over Russia's counter-case. ru.wikipedia cites article 305 part 2 of the Russian criminal code, TASS cites article 299 part 2, and the year likewise differs between ru.wikipedia and TASS ('2018'). On the date of Lithuania's first in-absentia conviction, ru.wikipedia records 19 December 1991, while en.wikipedia and the existing entries refer only to the 2019 verdict. Both accounts are set out here rather than resolved in one direction.

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.'

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.