People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1938–2025 → Defected 1985, death sentence in absentia

The highest-ranking KGB officer to defect, and the key source on the 1983 war scare

My colleagues in the PR Line regarded RYAN with some skepticism, yet none wanted to lose face at the Centre by contradicting the First Chief Directorate's assessment.

The highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect to the West, a colonel of the First Chief Directorate who for eleven years from 1974 doubled as MI6 agent "Ovation". As London rezident he was the key source who relayed Operation RYAN and the Soviet leadership's alarm over Able Archer 83 to British and American intelligence, testimony widely credited with easing the nuclear danger of 1983. Betrayed by CIA mole Aldrich Ames, he was recalled to Moscow, drugged and interrogated, then smuggled out in the boot of a diplomatic car in 1985 and sentenced to death in absentia for treason.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1939–2017 ○ Pneumonia

Soviet Air Defence Forces lieutenant colonel who correctly dismissed the Oko false alarm and prevented nuclear war

The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word 'launch' on it.

A Soviet Air Defence Forces lieutenant colonel. On 26 September 1983, while on duty at the Serpukhov-15 early-warning command centre, the Oko satellite system reported five US ICBMs had been launched, but Petrov judged that a first strike would involve hundreds of missiles, not five, and ground radar showed no confirmation, so he reported a system malfunction rather than an incoming attack. His decision prevented what could have become a Soviet retaliatory nuclear strike and earned him the title 'the man who saved the world.' He received neither disgrace nor reward for his actions, retired early in 1984, and lived in obscurity in a Moscow suburb until his death from pneumonia in 2017.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1942–2014 ○ Died

The air-defense general who ordered KAL 007 shot down, later commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force

"I will always be convinced that I gave the right order": Kornukov on the KAL 007 shootdown.

Born the son of a Donetsk miner in the Ukrainian SSR, Anatoly Kornukov rose through the Soviet air-defence forces to become the general who, on 1 September 1983, ordered the shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 as it crossed Sakhalin. When his superiors refused to take responsibility, he directed the interceptor pilot Major Osipovich to destroy the target on his own authority, maintaining to his death that the order was justified under Soviet and international law. Neither rewarded nor punished for the incident, he kept rising and in 1998 became the first commander-in-chief of the unified Russian Air Force. The decision cost 269 civilian lives, and he later declared he would 'always be convinced that I gave the right order.'

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1944–2015 ○ Died

The Soviet air-defence interceptor pilot who shot down KAL 007

"I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing": Osipovich's 1991 Izvestia recollection.

A Su-15 interceptor pilot of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, Gennady Osipovich shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747, over Sakhalin on 1 September 1983. He fired warning bursts, but his fighter was loaded with armour-piercing rather than tracer rounds, so the flight crew never saw them, and although he glimpsed two rows of windows and knew he was chasing a civilian airliner, he launched his missiles without positively identifying the target, killing all 269 people aboard. In a 1991 Izvestia interview he admitted that the official claim of tracer fire was untrue, and he spent his later years in quiet retirement in Maykop.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1949–2019 ○ Natural causes

Full cavalier of the Order of Labour Glory, collective-farm mechanizer

Viktor Baklanov arrived from his native Siberian village at the Gigant collective farm in Ukraine as an eighteen-year-old mechanizer in 1967, and over 37 years on the same farm earned all three classes of the Order of Labour Glory to become a full cavalier.

Soviet agricultural worker and state figure who spent his career as a mechanizer at the Gigant collective farm in Dnepropetrovsk Oblast, distinguishing himself in all-Union and republic-level harvest competitions. He became a full cavalier of the Order of Labour Glory, 3rd class (1975), 2nd class (1982), and 1st class (1987), and was elected a People's Deputy of the USSR (1989–1991) on the collective-farm quota during perestroika.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1951–1986 ✕ Killed in explosion

The first victim of Chernobyl, standing in the pump hall when the reactor exploded, his body never recovered

Seconds before the explosion, he called a fellow pump operator: "I need to recharge the lower feed for 22… Okay, come on. So it's shortened, one sec…" Those were his last words.

Born in Kropyvnia, Kyiv Oblast, he began working at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1973 and became a senior operator of the main circulation pumps (GCN) in the reactor shop of Unit 4. On the night of 26 April 1986, during a safety test, he was in the northern GCN pump hall when two explosions ripped through the reactor building; he was killed instantly, buried under the debris. His body was never recovered and is presumed entombed inside the Sarcophagus; a memorial plaque marks the dividing wall between Units 3 and 4.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism

The chief designer of the Volga inflatable airlock that made Leonov's spacewalk possible

On 18 March 1965, Alexei Leonov opened the hatch of the Volga airlock after it had inflated in orbit and stepped into space.

Boris Mikhailov was the chief designer at Engineering Plant 918 (later NPO Zvezda) in Tomilino near Moscow, where in mid-1964 he led the team that designed, built, and tested the Volga inflatable airlock in just nine months. A metal airlock would not fit the Voskhod spacecraft, so his flexible structure, folded for launch and inflated on orbit, was the only solution. On 18 March 1965, Alexei Leonov walked into space through this airlock in humanity's first spacewalk.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism ?–? ○ Natural causes

KGB security officer who commanded border troops under Andropov

After the 1969 Sino-Soviet border clashes, Soviet border troop strength nearly doubled within three years — an expansion Kozlovsky oversaw.

A Soviet KGB official who supervised the Chief Directorate of Border Troops (GUPV) under Yuri Andropov, playing a key role in tightening border enforcement and internal control during the Brezhnev era. His career embodies the institutionalised security function of the KGB in the late Soviet period.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1904/1905–1964 ✕ Air crash

Marshal who helped plan the liberation of the Balkans, then commanded the Strategic Rocket Forces

On 19 October 1964 an Il-18 of the Soviet Air Force carrying Biryuzov's delegation to the 20th anniversary of Belgrade's liberation strayed from its landing course and struck Mount Avala, killing 18 people, 11 crew and 7 delegation members; his ashes were placed in the Kremlin wall.

Biryuzov was born in Skopin, in Ryazan Governorate; the official Russian biography records a merchant's family, while other accounts describe a working-class family of Russian ethnicity. He enlisted in the Red Army on 15 September 1922, graduated from the VTsIK Combined Military School in 1926 and the Frunze Academy in 1937, then commanded the 132nd Rifle Division from 1939. Wounded five times in the first year of the German invasion, he was later chief of staff of the 2nd Guards Army and of the Southern, 4th Ukrainian, and 3rd Ukrainian fronts, helping plan the liberation of the Donbass and Crimea and the Jassy-Kishinev and Belgrade offensives. He commanded the Air Defence Forces and then the Strategic Rocket Forces and became Chief of the General Staff in March 1963, dying in a plane crash on Mount Avala on 19 October 1964.