A Moscow party organizer at the Soviet Union's end
His life, he later recalled, was divided into a before and after the Communist Party ban.
Yuri Prokofyev was a Soviet party cadre who rose through Moscow's party and administrative organizations. As first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee, he worked at the point where reform collided with the party's disintegration, and joined the Politburo in 1990. He was involved in the activity of the State Committee on the State of Emergency in 1991 without being a member, then turned to memoir writing and technology enterprises after the Soviet Union and the Communist Party were banned.
Also known as: Yury Prokofiev
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1957Pioneer leader at a Moscow school
- 1960Joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
- 1968Cadre in the Moscow City Party Committee's organizational work
- 1977–1985Secretary and first secretary of the Kuibyshev District Party Committee in Moscow
- 1986–1988Secretary of the Moscow City Executive Committee
- 1988–1989Secretary and second secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee
- 1989–1991First secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee
- 1990–1991Member of the CPSU Central Committee and Politburo
The Soviet Politburo
- Full member 1990.07–1991.08
served until the party ban of 1991.11
Related historical events
Memoir and his reading of the August events
What keeps Prokofyev visible in history is less his party posts than the testimony he left afterward. In 2005 he published Before and After the CPSU Ban: A First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee Remembers, and in 2011 How the Party Was Killed: Testimony of a First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee. The core claim of both books is that the August 1991 events were not a seizure of power but a 'provocation' prepared in advance to close the Communist Party and change the system. Within three days of the putsch he told the BBC that it resembled the 1933 Reichstag fire, and he held to that position ever after. He saw the preparations as the work of 'a few KGB generals', and cited Ruslan Khasbulatov's later conclusion that neither state nor party officials had organized it.
On his reading, the Soviet collapse had three causes: the betrayal and incompetence of the party, state, scientific-technical and creative elites; the West's systematic undermining (falling oil prices, the 'Star Wars' scenario, and more); and the organizing of a 'fifth column' among the domestic elite. In the same memoir he restated his opposition to the founding of the Communist Party of the RSFSR in 1990, arguing that Russia's regional organizations had to stay directly subordinate to the CPSU Central Committee if the Union's unity was to hold. Shaped by his own standpoint, this testimony nonetheless stands as a first-hand account by a senior figure of the era and is used as a primary source in research on August 1991.