Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1923–2021
○ Natural causes
The last reform-era Procurator General of the USSR, who oversaw the legal rehabilitation of Stalin's victims during perestroika
"Prosecutors must be closer to the life of the people," Sukharev declared after becoming Procurator General in 1988, as his office processed the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of victims of political repression.
Born into a peasant family in Voronezh, he worked as a lathe operator at an aircraft factory as a teenager before going to the front at 18. As a signals officer he advanced from Moscow to the Vistula, earning four combat orders, and was severely wounded crossing the Narew River in Poland in 1944. After demobilisation he rose through the Komsomol and the CPSU Central Committee apparatus specialising in procuracy and justice, becoming first deputy minister of the re-established USSR Ministry of Justice in 1970. Appointed Procurator General by Gorbachev in 1988, he pushed forward the mass legal rehabilitation of victims of Stalinist repression. After retiring in 1990 he directed the research institute under the Russian procuracy, devoting his remaining decades to strengthening legality and criminal justice reform.
1947–1950Secretary, Komsomol Railway District Committee; Department Head, Voronezh Oblast Komsomol Committee
1950–1959Instructor, Deputy Head, then Head of International Department, Komsomol Central Committee
1959–1966Instructor, then Deputy Head for RSFSR, Administrative Organs Department, CPSU Central Committee
1966–1970Head of Procuracy, Court and Justice Sector, Administrative Organs Department, CPSU Central Committee
1970–1984First Deputy Minister of Justice of the USSR
1984–1988Minister of Justice of the RSFSR
1988.02–05First Deputy Procurator General of the USSR
1988–1990Procurator General of the USSR
1991–2006Deputy Director, Director, then Chief Researcher, Institute for Problems of Strengthening Legality and Legal Order, Russian Federation Procuracy
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1930–2019
↓ Natural causes
Gorbachev's classmate turned critic: the last speaker of the Soviet parliament
“Gorbachev and Yeltsin were afraid that if I conducted the V Congress of People's Deputies, the deputies might nullify all the results of the August victory of democracy.” — Lukyanov on why he was arrested.
Anatoly Lukyanov was a Soviet jurist and statesman who helped design the USSR's constitutional architecture and defended it to the end. A law-school contemporary of Mikhail Gorbachev, he co-drafted the 1977 Soviet Constitution, headed the General Department of the CPSU Central Committee, and became the last Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (1990–1991). An early Gorbachev ally, he grew alarmed at the union's unraveling and broke publicly with him at the June 1991 plenum. Arrested as a GKChP sympathizer, he spent fifteen months in prison before co-founding the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in 1993 and serving three terms in the Duma. A Doctor of Juridical Sciences who published poetry as Anatoly Osenev, he embodied the Soviet establishment intellectual who refused to accept the liquidation of the system he served.
Career timeline
1956–1961Senior consultant, Legal Commission of the USSR Council of Ministers
1961–1976Senior referent, then deputy department head, Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
1977–1983Chief of the Secretariat, Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
1983–1985First Deputy Head, General Department, CPSU Central Committee
1985–1987Head, General Department, CPSU Central Committee
1987–1988Secretary, CPSU Central Committee (legal and administrative affairs)
1988–1990Candidate member, CPSU Politburo
1990–1991Chairman, Supreme Soviet of the USSR
1993–2003Deputy, State Duma of the Russian Federation (CPRF)
Constitutional Assembly chairman and first elected mayor of Saint Petersburg
"Volodya, just don't turn to bronze" — last words to Putin, February 2000
Anatoly Sobchak was a legal scholar and democratic reformer who became the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg (1991–1996) and co-authored the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation as chairman of the Constitutional Assembly. A popular Leningrad State University law professor whose students included Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, he was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 and co-chaired the Inter-Regional Deputies Group alongside Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin. During the August 1991 coup he organized resistance in Leningrad, negotiating with the military commander to keep troops off the streets and rallying 200,000 citizens on Palace Square. Corruption allegations forced him into exile in Paris from 1997 until Putin, then prime minister, secured his return in 1999.
Career timeline
1989–1990USSR People's Deputy
1989–1990Co-chair, Inter-Regional Deputies Group (with Sakharov & Yeltsin)
The Deputy Prosecutor General whose TV broadcast lit the fuse of the Sumgait pogrom
On 27 February 1988, on Central Television, he named the two youths killed in the Askeran clash as Azerbaijanis; that night the Sumgait pogrom erupted.
A Soviet military jurist of Belorussian birth, Alexander Katusev was appointed Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR in 1987 and led high-profile corruption investigations in Uzbekistan. His name entered history on 27 February 1988, when he appeared on Central Television and named two Azerbaijani youths killed in a clash near Askeran, specifying their nationality; the broadcast became the immediate spark for the Sumgait pogrom that evening. As Chief Military Prosecutor (1989–1991), he investigated and debunked the Panfilov Twenty-Eight myth in his essay 'Another's Fame,' but was forced into retirement after the August coup.
Career timeline
1950sGraduated Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical School, worker at Dnieper Metallurgical Combine
1965Graduated Kharkov Law Institute
1966Investigator, garrison procuracy, Transbaikal Military District
1970s–1987Investigator, senior investigator, head of investigation departments, chief of Main Investigation Directorate, USSR Procuracy
1987–1989Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR
1989–1991Chief Military Prosecutor and Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR
The law professor who surrendered his Supreme Soviet seat to Yeltsin in a moment that captivated the nation
Years later Kazannik recalled his decision: "Five and a half million people voted for Yeltsin in Moscow, 1.7 million for me. I had not the slightest doubt that by any measure Yeltsin deserved the first seat in the Supreme Soviet."
Born into a large Ukrainian peasant family, Kazannik worked as a carpenter in Kazakhstan and served in the Soviet engineering corps before earning his law degree from Irkutsk State University; from 1975 he taught environmental and state law at Omsk State University. Elected a People's Deputy of the USSR in 1989, he became famous overnight on May 29 when, after Yeltsin failed to win a Supreme Soviet seat, Kazannik rose at the First Congress and surrendered his own seat to him. Appointed Prosecutor General of Russia by Yeltsin in October 1993, he resigned in February 1994 after refusing the president's demand to block the Duma's amnesty for the 1991 putschists and the October 1993 rebels, defending the constitution against the Kremlin. He later served as deputy governor of Omsk Oblast (1996–2003) and returned to teaching law until his death in 2019.
Career timeline
1959Carpenter, Temirtau (Kazakh SSR)
1960–1963Soviet Army, engineering corps
1963–1975Irkutsk State University: law degree, graduate school, assistant, senior lecturer
1975–1991Associate professor, Omsk State University (environmental and state law)
1989–1991People's Deputy of the USSR; member, Interregional Deputies Group
1993–1994Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation
1996–2003Deputy Governor of Omsk Oblast
2003–2019Professor, Omsk State University; first vice-rector, Omsk Law Institute (2003–07)
An Estonian legal scholar who challenged the Soviet official narrative in the language of law
On the Yakovlev commission, he argued that the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic was legally null and void.
Igor Gräzin is an Estonian legal scholar and politician whose work has ranged across legal theory, philosophy of law, and comparative jurisprudence. Elected to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union in 1989, he served on the Yakovlev commission examining the secret protocols and the legal meaning of the Baltic states' incorporation. His intervention brought legal expertise into the political struggle over sovereignty and historical memory during the Soviet Union's final crisis.
Career timeline
1952Born in Tartu
1975Graduated in law from Tartu State University
1979–1987Researched law at Soviet state and law institutions and earned a doctorate
1988–1989Headed the law department of the Estonian Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Law
1989–1991Member of the Congress of People's Deputies and the Yakovlev commission
1990–2000Professor and researcher at the University of Notre Dame
