People

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–2003 ↓ Arrested 1991

The last Soviet premier and an August coup participant

Eight days after taking office, on the evening of 22 January 1991, Pavlov ordered 50- and 100-ruble notes exchanged for new bills within three days, with only 1,000 rubles per person swapped immediately. Days earlier he had publicly promised that no monetary reform would take place.

He graduated from the Moscow Finance Institute in 1958 and worked in the finance ministries of the RSFSR and the USSR, joining the CPSU in 1962 and heading Gosplan's finance, cost and price department from 1979 to 1986. He chaired the USSR State Committee on Prices from 1986 to 1989 and served as Minister of Finance until 14 January 1991, when Gorbachev appointed him premier as the Council of Ministers became the Cabinet of Ministers and its head was retitled Prime Minister. In August 1991 he was one of the organizers of the State Committee on the State of Emergency; on 22 August Gorbachev relieved him of the premiership, and he was arrested on 23 August and held at Matrosskaya Tishina prison, with the Supreme Soviet confirming his resignation on 28 August.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–2022 ○ Natural causes

Central banker of the Soviet collapse and Russian transition

On "Black Tuesday," October 11, 1994, the ruble crashed 27% in a single day on the Moscow exchange. Three days later Gerashchenko's Central Bank drove the rate back almost to where it started, crushing the speculators. As a fellow banker put it: "The banks realized the Central Bank could show its teeth."

The only person in Russian history to head the country's main bank four times: twice as Gosbank chairman and twice as Bank of Russia chairman. Appointed Gosbank chairman in 1989, he managed the monetary system through the Soviet collapse. As the Bank of Russia's first chairman in 1992, he carried out the 1993 currency reform. Recalled during the 1998 financial crisis, he negotiated with the IMF and stabilized the ruble, serving into the early Putin presidency. After retiring, he served as a State Duma deputy for the Rodina bloc and ran for president.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–2025 ○ Natural causes

The last chairman of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, who went on to serve the security services of three states: USSR, Ukraine, and Russia

Like the title of his memoir, he served in the special services of three states — the USSR, Ukraine, and Russia. In 1994 he refused Yeltsin's demand to block the amnesty for the October 1993 prisoners, resigned, and said he had kept his oath as a Russian officer to the people.

Nikolai Golushko was a Soviet state security officer who rose through the KGB's Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideological counterintelligence and the suppression of dissent, to become the last chairman of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR (1987–1991). After the dissolution of the USSR, he briefly headed Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) before moving to Russia, where he served as Minister of Security and Director of the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK), making him one of the rare figures to have led security agencies in three states. He resigned as Russia's security minister in early 1994 after clashing with President Yeltsin over the amnesty for participants in the October 1993 crisis, and later published a memoir titled In the Special Services of Three States.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–

Technocrat who ran Soviet heavy machine-building in its late decades

When Ustinov ordered mortar production at his plant, his minister Afanasyev warned: 'Make one and I hand you to the prosecutor.' Velichko organized a 'heroic storm,' delivered them, and recalled it as 'nervous, not to say absurd, conditions.'

A technocrat who rose from lathe operator to director of Leningrad's Bolshevik plant, Velichko served as minister for energy, heavy, and transport machine-building (1975–1991) and First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers (1991). His ministries built the Atommash nuclear complex, reactor systems for over a dozen nuclear plants, ICBM ground equipment, and the Buran shuttle launch complex. When other industrial ministries faltered in the late 1980s, his proved resilient enough that the government twice consolidated troubled ministries under his leadership. After the Soviet collapse he remained an industrial elder, chairing Tyazhenergomash and advising on Russian industrial policy.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–2010 ↓ Dismissed 1991 · illness

The last Gosplan generation

Amid the 1998 financial crisis, Yeltsin offered him the premiership. Maslyukov refused: "I'm ready to work as Primakov's first deputy." The last steward of the Soviet planned economy chose the work he could do over the power he could seize.

Born in Leninabad, Tajikistan, he trained as an engineer and rose through Izhevsk defense plants to become a core technocrat of Soviet military industry. As Gosplan chairman (1988–1991) and Politburo member (1989–1990), he was the last steward of the planned economy. After the USSR's collapse, he served as First Deputy Prime Minister under Yevgeny Primakov (1998–1999), managing the response to the 1998 financial crisis, and later as a Communist Party deputy in the State Duma until his death in 2010, a rare figure who bridged the Soviet planning elite and post-Soviet industrial politics.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1937–2014 ○ Natural causes

An economist who carried price theory into the transition to a market economy

Through the 500 Days programme, he pushed his research on price formation toward a plan for transforming the Soviet economy into a market.

Nikolai Petrakov was a Soviet economist who used mathematical analysis to study price formation and the balancing of costs, output, and incomes in a planned economy. He pursued market mechanisms and price reform, and in 1990 joined Stanislav Shatalin and Grigory Yavlinsky as a co-author of the 500 Days programme. The programme sought to move the Soviet economy toward a market through privatization, price liberalization, and a transfer of authority to the republics, placing Petrakov’s research and policy work at the junction of economic modelling and urgent political choice. He later founded the Institute for Market Problems and led research on market transition and economic policy.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–2022 ○ Natural causes

The last KGB chairman, appointed to dismantle it

"The traditions of chekism must be eradicated, must cease to exist as an ideology" — the last chairman of the KGB, in his 1992 memoir Deliverance from the KGB.

A construction engineer turned Gorbachev loyalist, Bakatin served as Soviet interior minister (1988–1990) and, after the failed August 1991 coup, as the last chairman of the KGB. Appointed to succeed coup-plotter Vladimir Kryuchkov, he stripped foreign intelligence, communications, and border troops from the agency and restructured the remainder into a smaller presidential security service. His handover of KGB listening-device blueprints from the US embassy in Moscow to American officials in December 1991 brought furious charges of treason from Russian conservatives.

Soviet Union state institutions 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).

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1938–2010 ○ Natural causes

Last Soviet gas minister who turned his ministry into Gazprom

When the Orsk party committee sought to pull him from the factory floor into the apparatus, Chernomyrdin later recalled: 'I felt I was a production man and wanted to stay at my native factory. But life decided otherwise.' He considered himself a production man, not a party functionary, all his life.

Born into an Orenburg Cossack family, Chernomyrdin rose from mechanic at the Orsk oil refinery to director of the Orenburg gas-processing plant, and in 1985 became the Soviet Union's Minister of the Gas Industry. While minister he also served on the CPSU Central Committee (1986–1990) and as a deputy in both the USSR and RSFSR Supreme Soviets, emerging as a central figure in late-Soviet energy administration. In 1989 he abolished his own ministry and transformed it into Gazprom, the state gas concern that would become the world's largest gas monopoly, a pioneering conversion of a Soviet planned-economy ministry into a state-owned corporation that became the cornerstone of Russia's post-Soviet economy.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1938–2017 ○ Renal failure

First Secretary of the Baku Party Committee who blocked buses from entering Baku, shifting the violence to Sumgait

“I realized that it was a pogrom. I ordered all roads to the city blocked from these settlements. The order was executed. The buses went to Sumgait.”

A Soviet and Azerbaijani party and state official who rose through the construction sector to become First Secretary of the Baku City Party Committee in 1983. In February 1988, as buses carrying Azerbaijani refugees expelled from Armenia converged on Baku, he ordered the city's access roads blocked; the measure kept violence out of Baku but diverted the bus convoys to Sumgait, where the pogrom erupted days later. After the dissolution of the USSR, he served as the first president of independent Azerbaijan's football association (1992–2003), steering the country into UEFA and FIFA membership.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1938–2020 ○ Natural causes

The Leningrad chemistry lecturer whose 'I Cannot Forsake My Principles' became the manifesto of anti-perestroika forces

"Our media are lying about Stalin now. They are blackening our history."

A Leningrad chemist and CPSU member who, on 13 March 1988, published 'I Cannot Forsake My Principles' in Sovetskaya Rossiya, a full-throated defense of Stalin and an attack on perestroika. The article, drafted with the backing of Central Committee secretary Yegor Ligachev, was denounced by Pravda as the 'manifesto of anti-perestroika forces' and became the shock that drove Gorbachev to radicalize political reform ahead of the 19th Party Conference. After 1991 she founded the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPB) and served as its general secretary, but neither she nor her party ever gained significant traction in post-Soviet Russia.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1938–2022

The last Soviet leader caught between a renewed union and independence

He supported a new union treaty from the view that the federation should exist for the republics.

Ayaz Mutalibov was a politician who rose from the Soviet Azerbaijani bureaucracy to become the republic’s last Communist leader and its first president. At the 1991 Novo-Ogaryovo 9+1 talks, he supported a renewed union that would guarantee republican sovereignty, arguing that the federation should exist for the republics, and he took an active position on the status of autonomous republics. His government confronted the Nagorno-Karabakh war and mounting domestic struggles, which ultimately destroyed its political base. Ousted in 1992, he lived in exile in Moscow, returned to Azerbaijan in 2012, and died in Baku in 2022.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1939–2000 ✕ Suicide

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.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1939–

The Georgian First Secretary who asked Moscow for troops, then resigned after 21 died

Patiashvili later recalled: 'Gorbachev phoned and said, in a tone that left no room for argument: The square must be cleared immediately, and the army will handle it. I understood he knew about the plan and supported it.'

He succeeded Shevardnadze as First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party in 1985, but dismantled most of his predecessor's reform experiments and drove the opposition underground. In April 1989, facing independence protests sparked by the Abkhaz autonomy dispute, he asked Moscow to send troops and on 8 April convened the republic's Defence Council, which decided to disperse the demonstrators by force. Before dawn the next day, Soviet troops armed with sapper shovels and poison gas descended on unarmed civilians, killing 21; Patiashvili accepted responsibility and resigned within two weeks. He remained in Georgian politics, twice ran for president against Shevardnadze, and supported the 2003 Rose Revolution, though he later criticized Saakashvili.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1939–2012 ○ Died

The highest-ranking general who sided with Yeltsin during the August coup, commanding the White House defense

"The army will not go against the people" (at a press conference during the August 1991 coup)

As chief of the Soviet Signal Troops and Deputy Chief of the General Staff, he also took part in the Chernobyl disaster response. During the August 1991 coup, he was the highest-ranking active-duty general to break with the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) and side with Boris Yeltsin, organizing the White House defense headquarters in Moscow; he was appointed RSFSR Defence Minister on 20 August and promoted to Army General on 24 August. In an ironic turn, he helped storm the same White House he had defended during the October 1993 constitutional crisis, and in 1997 was arrested and convicted on corruption charges.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1939–

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.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1939–2022 ○ Natural causes

The last Soviet Chief of General Staff, undone by the August coup

On 22 August 1991, with the GKChP coup collapsing and Yazov under arrest, Moiseyev became acting Soviet Defence Minister for a single day. The next day, he too was dismissed.

The last Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces (1988–1991). A protégé of Dmitry Yazov who rose through the Far Eastern Military District to the military's second-highest post, Moiseyev directed the Afghanistan withdrawal and took part in arms control negotiations, but backed Yazov in the August 1991 coup and was dismissed after its collapse.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1940–2022 ○ Natural causes

Ideology secretary of the pro-Moscow Lithuanian Communist Party who proclaimed the 'National Salvation Committee' in the Vilnius crackdown

On 13 January 1991, his recorded voice boomed from the loudspeakers of Soviet BMPs advancing on the Vilnius TV tower: 'Brother Lithuanians! The nationalist and separatist government, which confronted the people, has been overthrown!'

A farmer's son from southern Lithuania, Jermalavičius studied at Vilnius University and the Leningrad Higher Party School, then spent two decades as a researcher at the Party History Institute, publishing on atheism and religion. In 1990 he became ideology secretary of the pro-Moscow Lithuanian Communist Party (CPSU platform), fiercely opposing independence, and on 11 January 1991 he announced the creation of the 'National Salvation Committee of the Lithuanian SSR', which claimed to be the sole legitimate government, providing the political pretext for the Soviet military operation that killed 14 civilians two days later. Convicted in 1999 of anti-state organization and incitement to violently overthrow the government, he served eight years, then moved to Russia where he continued writing in defence of the Soviet system until his death.