People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1937–2009 ○ Natural causes

The last Politburo member who tried to save the USSR and went to prison for it

Attributed to Shenin after the coup's defeat and reported according to media data, the GKChP members made the main mistake: having said 'A,' they did not say 'B' and all the rest of the alphabet.

Born in 1937 in Stalingrad Oblast, he was convicted in 1958 of violating safety rules after two workers died at his construction site, receiving a one-and-a-half-year sentence and being released early after nine and a half months. He joined the CPSU in 1962 and served as First Secretary of the Achinsk city committee (1974-1977), party adviser in Afghanistan (1977-1983), first secretary of the Krasnoyarsk kraikom (1987-1990). As CC secretary and Politburo member from 1990 he oversaw organizational-party work and was called the third man in the CPSU after Gorbachev and Ivashko, supported the GKChP and on 18 August 1991 flew to Gorbachev at Foros, and was arrested on 23 August 1991. Released on health grounds in October 1992 and amnestied in February 1994, he died aged 71 on 28 May 2009.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–2010 ↓ Arrested · amnestied 1994

First and only Vice President of the USSR and the face of the August 1991 coup

To KGB chairman Kryuchkov during the August 1991 coup: 'Understand my character—if even one person dies, I won't be able to live.'

After serving as First Secretary of the Gorky Oblast Komsomol and chairman of the USSR Committee of Youth Organizations (1968–1980), Yanayev became VTsSPS chairman, a Politburo member and CC Secretary in 1990. That December Gorbachev forced through his election as the USSR's first vice president. In August 1991, as the face of the GKChP, he declared himself acting president citing Gorbachev's 'illness'. The coup failed within three days and he was arrested. Amnestied in 1994, he published the memoir Last Battle for the USSR and spent his remaining years in academia.

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 Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1937–2017 ○ Natural causes

Architect of women's and family policy in the perestroika era, the fourth woman ever on the Politburo

“I simply refuse to be limited. I would not tolerate it for a minute.” — pushing back against being pigeonholed as the Politburo's 'woman's issues' token

Galina Semyonova was one of only four women in Soviet history to serve as a full member of the CPSU Politburo. As a Central Committee secretary in the late Gorbachev period, she was responsible for family, women's, and demographic policy. For a decade from 1981, she edited Krestyanka (Peasant Woman), transforming the magazine's content toward fashion, family, and culture and raising its circulation from 6 million to 22 million, connecting with the daily lives of millions of Soviet women. Elevated to the Politburo and Secretariat at the 28th Party Congress in 1990, she drove Central Committee resolutions to improve women's social standing and pushed for a new State Committee on Family and Women's Affairs. During the August 1991 coup, she was one of the few in the party leadership who refused to recognize the authority of the GKChP putschists.

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 Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1937–

The last-generation secretary who rebuilt the Russian Communist Party

On 25 October 1991 Kuptsov met Yeltsin at the Kremlin and urged him to rescind the ban on the Russian Communist Party. Yeltsin refused; Kuptsov then spent a year and a half as the underground First Secretary, steering the party to its reconstituting congress.

A metallurgical engineer who rose from a Vologda collective farm and steel mill through the party ranks, he served as First Secretary of the Vologda Regional Committee (1985–1990). In 1990 he was brought to Moscow as a CPSU Central Committee Secretary, heading the department for socio-political organizations and helping found the Communist Party of the RSFSR. Elected its First Secretary in August 1991 to replace the hardline Ivan Polozkov, he refused to endorse the GKChP coup but was nonetheless investigated for 'complicity.' After Yeltsin banned the party, Kuptsov kept its organizational skeleton alive underground and steered the February 1993 reconstituting congress that became the CPRF, then served eleven years as Zyuganov's first deputy chairman while the new Russian Communist Party consolidated.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–

The textile-worker 'Chaika,' first woman in space

At the launch pad: "Hey, sky! Take off your hat!" — quoting Mayakovsky, June 16, 1963.

The first woman to fly solo in space: aboard Vostok-6 in 1963, the textile-worker 'Chaika' orbited Earth 49 times over 71 hours alone, a symbol of proletarian women's liberation through science. Later became the first woman general in Russian military history.

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–

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–

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 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 1938–2025 → 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 1939–2000 ✕ 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 1939–2017 ○ 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 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 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 1941–

An insider witness to the collapse of reform

He recalled that his task had “extended the history of the Soviet state by one day.”

Andrei Grachev was a specialist in international affairs and a journalist who worked on the international meaning and domestic politics of Soviet reform. After the August 1991 coup, he became Mikhail Gorbachev’s aide and final presidential press secretary, observing at close range both negotiations to preserve the Union and the disintegration of its state institutions. His memoirs and deposited personal papers document the tension between perestroika’s promise of democratic renewal and the acceleration of the Union’s collapse.

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.'