People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1926–2017 ↓ Left office 1989

First chairman of Gosagroprom

In October 1985 Gorbachev unveiled Gosagroprom, merging six agricultural ministries, confessing he had "carried this idea for many years." A month later Murakhovsky was named its chairman — yet within six months he conceded the reform had failed.

A wartime veteran who joined the Red Army at 15 and fought in the defense of Novorossiysk and the Manchurian operation. As Mikhail Gorbachev's handpicked successor as First Secretary of Stavropol Krai (1978–1985), he drove agricultural and industrial growth that earned him the title Hero of Socialist Labor. When Gorbachev became General Secretary, he brought Murakhovsky to Moscow as First Deputy Premier and the inaugural chairman of Gosagroprom, merging six agricultural ministries into a single super-agency. The bureaucratic behemoth proved inefficient, and the agency was abolished in 1989 along with Murakhovsky's departure.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1929–1993 ↓ Dismissed 1989

Gorbachev's agriculture successor who became his last internal critic

At a January 1989 Politburo session he snapped at Gorbachev: "I'm sick of these reorganizations of agriculture. If farming doesn't get priority, the program will fail. Isn't this clear to the Council of Ministers, the Politburo, and to you, Mikhail Sergeyevich?"»

An agronomist who served twelve years as First Secretary of the Mari ASSR, he inherited Gorbachev's agriculture portfolio as Central Committee Secretary in 1985. He fleshed out the farm revival program conceived under Andropov and backed Gosagroprom, the merger of six agricultural ministries. But he turned sharply critical when bureaucratic consolidation failed to fix production. After repeated Politburo confrontations with Gorbachev, he was removed from both the Politburo and Secretariat in September 1989 at age sixty.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1930–2018 ○ Natural causes

A chairman caught between preserving the Union and Belarusian sovereignty

“The Union would never have fallen apart if I had been in power.”

Nikolai Dementey was a Soviet and Belarusian politician who rose from agricultural administration through the Communist Party of Byelorussia to preside over its parliament. He chaired the adoption of the Byelorussian SSR’s Declaration of State Sovereignty in 1990 while continuing to support a reformed Union rather than its dissolution. After openly backing the August 1991 coup attempt, he resigned, becoming a representative figure of the Soviet order’s final crisis.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1933–2014 ○ Natural causes

The last Communist Party first secretary of Soviet Armenia

He left the CPSU Politburo because the Nagorno-Karabakh question remained unresolved.

Vladimir Movsisyan was a politician who rose through the agricultural and party administration of Soviet Armenia. In 1990 he became first secretary of the republic’s Communist Party and a member of the CPSU Politburo, but left the Politburo after the Nagorno-Karabakh question remained unresolved. After the Soviet collapse, he remained involved in refugee administration, defence, and agricultural policy, helping shape the institutions of independent Armenia.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1937–

Gorbachev's last agriculture Politburo member: operational chief of perestroika farm policy

In August 1991, when the GKChP was formed, Stroev refused to recognise it — one of the few perestroika-era Politburo members who did not side with the coup.

Stroev began as a collective-farm shepherd in the Oryol countryside and graduated from the Michurinsk Horticultural Institute, a classic Soviet agricultural technocrat. Over three decades he rose through the Oryol party apparatus to become oblast first secretary in 1985, and in 1989 Gorbachev brought him to Moscow as Central Committee Secretary for Agriculture, adding Politburo membership in 1990. As the operational chief of perestroika farm policy, he oversaw the reorganisation of the agro-industrial complex and the response to a deepening food crisis, and he refused to endorse the GKChP during the August 1991 coup. After the Soviet collapse he reinvented himself as a post-Soviet regional heavyweight, serving as governor of Oryol Oblast (1993–2009) and chairman of the Federation Council (1996–2001).