The last Soviet defence minister and final Marshal of Aviation
On 25 December 1991, as Gorbachev's nuclear briefcase was transferred to Yeltsin, Shaposhnikov told the press: "The nuclear button is in reliable hands."
A career officer who rose from fighter pilot to Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force over three decades, Shaposhnikov played a decisive role in the August 1991 coup when, as air force chief, he proposed to Defence Minister Yazov that troops be withdrawn from Moscow and the Emergency Committee be dissolved. After the coup's collapse Gorbachev appointed him the Soviet Union's last Defence Minister, and on 26 August 1991 he was promoted Marshal of Aviation, the final person in Soviet history to receive a rank bearing the word 'marshal.' He oversaw the transfer of nuclear command from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, served as CIS Joint Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief and later as Secretary of Russia's Security Council, before heading Aeroflot and advising Sukhoi.
Career timeline
1963Graduates Kharkov Higher Military Aviation School, commissioned as fighter pilot
1969Graduates Gagarin Air Force Academy
1985–1987Commander, Air Forces of the Odessa Military District
1987–1988Commander, Air Forces of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany
1990–1991Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force and Deputy Minister of Defence
1991.08–1992.02Minister of Defence of the USSR (last)
The Soviet air force general who personally led 1,927 helicopter drops over the burning Chernobyl reactor
"Tons of graphite were burning inside the reactor. Firefighters were powerless. We decided to extinguish the hearth from helicopters."
Born to a Mokshan peasant family and trained at the Orenburg military aviation school, he flew reconnaissance missions in the 1968 Czechoslovakia invasion, the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, and over Afghanistan in 1979. As chief of staff of the Kyiv Military District Air Force, he received the call about the Chernobyl explosion on 26 April 1986, flew immediately to the site, and for ten days led helicopter crews dumping 4,925 tons of sand, lead, and boron into the burning reactor from 200 metres, personally flying over the crater. He continued serving until 1998 despite radiation exposure, then spent his final years as a United Russia deputy in the State Duma.
Career timeline
1965–1970Pilot and flight commander, reconnaissance aviation regiment
1973–1979Squadron commander then reconnaissance regiment commander, Odessa and Turkestan Military Districts
1980–1983Commander of Air Force, 20th Guards Army; then Central Group of Forces
1985–1988Chief of staff, Kyiv Military District Air Force; leads Chernobyl aerial operation
1988–1989Commander of Air Force, Central Asian Military District
1989–1993Commander of Air Force, Moscow Military District
1993–1997Commander of Frontal Aviation, Russian Air Force
2014–2021Deputy, State Duma of the Russian Federation (United Russia)
The Supreme Soviet chairman who stood with Yeltsin against the coup, then fell to Yeltsin's tanks
During the October 1993 siege of the White House, when Yeltsin offered safety guarantees, Khasbulatov replied: 'I need no guarantees, I can offer guarantees to Yeltsin myself.'
Ruslan Khasbulatov was a Chechen-born Soviet economist and Russian politician who became the last chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. On the day of the August 1991 coup, he was Yeltsin's closest ally: he personally drafted the appeal 'To the Citizens of Russia' and helped organize the defense of the White House. After the Soviet collapse, however, he turned the parliament into the center of opposition to Yeltsin's economic reforms and concentration of power, leading to the 1993 constitutional crisis in which he and Vice-President Rutskoy commanded the parliamentary resistance until tanks shelled the building and they were arrested. Amnestied in 1994, he left politics and returned to academia, teaching world economics at his alma mater.
Career timeline
1965Graduated from the Faculty of Law, Moscow State University
1970–1990Professor and head of the Department of International Economic Relations, Moscow Institute of National Economy (Plekhanov)
1990.03Elected RSFSR People's Deputy from the Grozny constituency
1990.06–1991.10First Deputy Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet
1991.07–10Acting Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet
1991.10–1993.10Chairman of the RSFSR/Russian Federation Supreme Soviet
1994–2023Head of the Department of World Economics, Plekhanov Russian University of Economics
The engineer who became the first person in Soviet history to run against a sitting General Secretary
At the First Congress in May 1989, he stood before the microphone and offered himself as a candidate against Gorbachev. 'To set a precedent,' he said. By 1,415 to 689, the assembly voted to keep his name off the ballot.
Born in Oryol in 1943, Obolensky was a geophysical engineer who spent twenty years at the Polar Geophysical Institute on the Kola Peninsula, where in 1987 he founded the first informal reform group in the region, the Voluntary Society for Assistance to Perestroika. Elected a People's Deputy of the USSR in 1989, he made history at the First Congress by putting forward his own candidacy for Chairman of the Supreme Soviet against Mikhail Gorbachev: the first alternative candidacy against a sitting General Secretary in Soviet history. After the August 1991 coup attempt, he was elected chairman of the parliamentary commission investigating it, and he opposed the dissolution of the USSR, regarding the Belovezha Accords as unconstitutional.
Career timeline
1960–1965Lathe operator in Oryol; Soviet Army service in East Germany
1971Graduated Leningrad Mining Institute, geophysical engineering
1971–1992Engineer and design engineer, Polar Geophysical Institute, Kola Science Centre
1987–1989Founded and chaired the Voluntary Society for Assistance to Perestroika (DOSP) in Apatity
1989–1992People's Deputy of the USSR (Leningrad Rural District No. 20)
1990–1994Co-chairman, later chairman, Social Democratic Party of Russia (SDPR)
1991Chairman, Parliamentary Commission investigating the August coup attempt
1993–1996President and editor-in-chief, TeleRadioCorporation Vostok, Oryol
The last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, the face of the Soviet withdrawal
On 15 February 1989, standing on the Friendship Bridge, he told a Soviet TV reporter: "There is not a single Soviet soldier left behind me."
A Soviet general who served three tours in the Soviet–Afghan War and, as the last commander of the 40th Army (1987–1989), directed the Soviet withdrawal. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1988 for Operation Magistral, which lifted the siege of Khost. On 15 February 1989 he crossed the Friendship Bridge on foot, the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, the symbolic end of the nine-year war. He went on to command the Kyiv Military District, served as First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, and as Deputy Minister of Defence of Russia. In 1991 he ran for vice-president alongside Nikolai Ryzhkov. In the post-Soviet era he served twelve years as governor of Moscow Oblast, embodying the political transition of the Soviet military elite.
Career timeline
1965–1969Motorized rifle platoon and company commander, Baltic Military District
1972–1978Battalion commander → regiment commander → chief of staff, 9th Motorized Rifle Division, North Caucasus MD
The 40th Army commander who halved Afghan losses, then Russia's first Chief of General Staff
Defence Minister Pavel Grachev came to his hospital ward in person to pin the General of the Army shoulder boards on him. Dubynin, already terminal with cancer, could not rise from the bed.
Soviet and Russian military commander. As commander of the 40th Army in Afghanistan (1986–87), he introduced large-scale helicopter assaults and computer-aided command, halving irrecoverable losses and becoming the first commander to challenge the concealment of casualty figures. As Northern Group of Forces commander (1989–92), he executed the orderly withdrawal of Soviet troops from Poland. Appointed first Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces in June 1992, he restrained President Yeltsin's ill-considered nuclear-force reforms and secured approval for the Topol-M, Borei-submarine, and Iskander programs that became the technical foundation of post-Soviet Russian defence. He received his General of the Army shoulder boards on his hospital deathbed and was posthumously named Hero of the Russian Federation.
Career timeline
1961–1964Graduates Far Eastern Tank School (Blagoveshchensk); enters Soviet Army
1964–1978Tank platoon, company, battalion commander; regimental chief of staff/deputy commander; regiment commander. Vystrel course (1973), Armoured Academy (1978)
1979–1984Commander 8th Guards Tank Division (Belorussia). General Staff Academy (1984); First Deputy Commander 32nd Army (Central Asia)
1984–1986First Deputy Commander, 40th Army (Afghanistan)
Economist who began with NEP studies and framed the Kosygin-reform debate
The reform stalled, the country entered a period of stagnation, and that stagnation ultimately predetermined the decline of the socialist economy in the USSR.
Yuri Goland is a Russian economist whose work began with the study of the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP) and monetary reform. After graduating from Moscow State University's physics faculty, he worked for decades in physical-sciences research before turning to economics in the 1990s, focusing on reconstructing the history of NEP-era policy debates. In 2010 he co-authored with Alexander Nekipelov 'The Kosygin Reform: A Missed Chance or a Mirage?', which crystallized the central question of post-Soviet historiography on the reform.
Career timeline
1967Graduated Physics Faculty, Moscow State University
1967–1995Researcher, Institute of Physical Problems, USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences
1991Published Crises That Destroyed the NEP
1995–2002Expert Institute, Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs
2002–2005Institute for International Economic and Political Studies, RAS
2005–Leading Researcher, Institute of Economics, RAS
2006Published Discussions on Economic Policy in the Years of Monetary Reform 1921–1924
2010Co-authored 'The Kosygin Reform: A Missed Chance or a Mirage?' with Nekipelov
A mathematical demographer who made mortality and life expectancy legible
His calculation that male life expectancy rose by 3.2 years to 65 in 1987 translated the policy debate into the language of mortality.
Evgeny Andreev is a demographer who combined mathematical rigor with practical statistical work to study mortality in Russia and the Soviet Union. His decomposition method made it possible to trace changes in life expectancy by age and cause of death, while his calculation of a 3.2-year rise in male life expectancy to 65 by 1987 became a key measure of the health outcome associated with the anti-alcohol campaign. His research on alcohol-related mortality placed policy effects within longer statistical and methodological contexts rather than reducing them to a simple political narrative.
Career timeline
1967Graduated in mathematics, Moscow State University
1970Received a PhD in physical and mathematical sciences, Moscow State University
1970–1975Senior researcher, Demography Division, USSR statistical institute
1975–2000Head of the population-information laboratory in the state statistical research system
2000–2005Head of the Mortality Analysis and Forecasting Laboratory, Institute of National Economic Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences
2005–2011Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
2017–presentHead of the International Laboratory for Population and Health, HSE University
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.
Career timeline
1963Entered Armavir Higher Military Aviation School
1967Graduated, commissioned lieutenant, posted to 530th Fighter Aviation Regiment
A historian who traces the Russian question through Soviet history
Over the years I became convinced that the Leningrad Affair cannot be understood in essence apart from the history of the 'Russian question' throughout the existence of Soviet Russia, from 1917 to this day.
Vladimir Dmitrievich Kuznechevsky is a Russian historian and Doctor of Historical Sciences who studies the political history of the Soviet Union and Russia. His writings examine Stalin-era power and the nationalities policy of the state, most notably interpreting the Leningrad Affair as a conflict over the status of the Russian republic and Russian leadership cadres. This approach treats the affair not simply as a struggle for office but as part of the unresolved “Russian question” within the Soviet system, making his work a significant and contested historiographical intervention.
Career timeline
1980sResearcher of Soviet and Russian political history
2013Published Leningrad Affair: Soviets versus Russians
2016Published Leningrad Affair with the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies
2017Published a revised and expanded edition of Leningrad Affair
presentContinues writing on Soviet history and the “Russian question”
The philosopher who proposed the one sentence that declared the Soviet Union dead at Belovezh
At the Belavezha hunting lodge, turning to Shushkevich and Kravchuk: 'Would you guys agree to sign a sentence which would state that the Soviet Union as the subject of international law is ceasing to exist?'
Yeltsin's closest aide and the intellectual architect of the Soviet dissolution. A Marxist philosophy teacher from the Urals, he rose through perestroika to become Yeltsin's right hand, and in September 1991 delivered the 'Burbulis Memorandum' (Gaidar's group's strategy document) to Yeltsin at his Black Sea retreat, setting Russia on a course of economic independence. That December in the Belavezha forest, he turned to Shushkevich and Kravchuk and asked, 'Would you agree to a sentence stating the USSR as a subject of international law is ceasing to exist?', and co-signed the accords that opened with those words. He became a lightning rod for criticism of the reforms and was removed by spring 1992, spending his later decades quietly as a Duma deputy and senator.
Career timeline
1973–1983Taught Marxist philosophy at Ural Polytechnic Institute
1987–1989Founded Sverdlovsk 'Discussion Podium' political club
1989–1990USSR People's Deputy; Inter-regional Deputies' Group
A party cadre who moved from army organization to the late Soviet Politburo
In April 1991, while responsible secretary of the All-Army Party Committee, he joined the late Soviet Politburo.
Mikhail Semyonovich Surkov was a Soviet party organizer and politician whose career developed within the armed forces' political apparatus. After working in party-control posts in the army, he entered the Politburo shortly before the Soviet Union's dissolution, embodying the late system's reliance on institutional cadres amid crisis. He later carried that experience into the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the State Duma, and the Accounts Chamber.
Career timeline
1960Began working as an apprentice fitter
1965–1977Served in the Soviet armed forces and graduated from the Lenin Military-Political Academy
1988–1990Head of the political department of a combined-arms army
1990–1991Secretary of the All-Army Party Committee and responsible secretary of the party commission under the Main Political Directorate
1991Member of the CPSU Central Committee and Politburo member
1995–1999State Duma deputy and deputy chair of the Defence Committee for the Communist faction
2000–2007Auditor of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation
The preeminent chronicler of Soviet memory politics who traced the Lenin cult and the Great Patriotic War myth
"People need to value what they have, and what Russians have always had is loss."
Born in 1945 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Nina Tumarkin is an American historian of Russia who has taught Soviet history and memory politics at Wellesley College since 1975. Her first book, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (1983), won the Wilson Prize, and her definitive study The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (1994) demonstrated how Stalin suppressed war memory, Brezhnev elevated it into a cult, and the cult was contested after 1985. One of six Soviet experts who briefed President Reagan before the 1985 Geneva Summit, she later learned that President Clinton read her book before his 1995 Moscow Victory Day visit and called it 'a great book.'
Career timeline
1975–Professor of History, Wellesley College
1983Published Lenin Lives!, awarded the Wilson Prize
1985Soviet advisor to President Reagan, briefed for the Geneva Summit
1994Published The Living and the Dead
2000s–Director, Russian Area Studies Program, Wellesley College
1970s–Center Associate, Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Soviet airborne forces commander and deputy defence minister in the August 1991 coup
On 19 August 1991, during the GKChP coup, Achalov coordinated the entry of airborne troops into Moscow and was tasked with blockading the Ostankino television centre.
Born on 13 November 1945 in the village of Atamash, Atninsky District, Tatar ASSR, and died in Moscow on 23 June 2011. He graduated from the Kazan Tank School (1966) and the Armoured Forces Academy (1973), commanded the 7th Guards Airborne Division (1978), the 8th Guards Army (1985–1987) and the Leningrad Military District as chief of staff (1987–1989), and became a major-general in 1980. He commanded the Soviet Airborne Forces from January 1989 to December 1990 and was Deputy Minister of Defence of the USSR from December 1990 to September 1991, becoming colonel-general in 1989. Named in the GKChP indictment among the deputy defence ministers who joined the conspiracy at the 17 August 1991 meeting, he sided with the Supreme Soviet in the 1993 crisis, was appointed Defence Minister by Alexander Rutskoy, arrested and amnestied in February 1994.
Career timeline
1966–1973Tank platoon and company commander, 8th Guards Army (GSFG)
1973–1975Deputy commander, 243rd Training Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment, 44th Training Airborne Division
Russian general-major and insider historian of the Afghan war
He wrote Tragedy and Valour of Afghanistan (1995) from his vantage point as closest aide in the Operational Group in Afghanistan, drawing on little-known and secret archival material and on the testimony of participants.
Aleksandr Lyakhovsky was a Russian military figure and military-historical writer, born in Tbilisi on 5 February 1946 and dead in Moscow on 3 February 2009. He graduated with the gold medal from the Baku Higher Combined-Arms Command School in 1968 and took part in the events in Czechoslovakia, then graduated with distinction from the Frunze Military Academy in 1977 and spent eight years at the General Staff Main Operations Directorate on military cooperation with African countries. From 1987 to 1989 he served in the USSR Defence Ministry Operational Group in Afghanistan as the closest aide to its head, Varennikov, until the withdrawal ended, and in 1990 became first deputy chief of the Operations Directorate of the Ground Forces Main Staff. He retired to the reserve in 2002 at the rank of general-mayor.
Career timeline
1968Graduated from the Baku Higher Combined-Arms Command School and entered Soviet service
1968Participated in the Soviet operation in Czechoslovakia
1977Graduated from the Frunze Military Academy and became a senior officer in the General Staff’s Main Operations Directorate
1985–1987Studied at the Voroshilov General Staff Academy
1987–1989Served with the Soviet Defense Ministry Operational Group in Afghanistan, becoming Varennikov’s principal aide
1990First deputy chief of the Soviet Ground Forces General Staff Operations Directorate
The KGB-veteran writer who published Yezhov's case file wrapped in novelistic reconstruction
While still on active duty, writing spy novels under the pseudonym 'Vasily Timofeyev', he unearthed Yezhov's interrogation records before their declassification and reproduced them verbatim in his biography.
A Russian writer who came out of the Soviet state-security service (KGB). Drawing on investigation files before their formal declassification, he wrote the biography Yezhov: The Story of the "Iron" Stalinist People's Commissar (2001, "Special Archive" series). The book was an early publication of Yezhov's interrogation records and trial file, but it splices novelistic reconstructions of the interrogation room between the documents, blurring the line between source and fiction.
Career timeline
1969Graduated from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute
1971Graduated from the KGB school
1970s–Served as a state-security intelligence officer (colonel); worked as a TASS correspondent in Thailand and India
Russia's only vice president: stood with Yeltsin against the coup, then fell to Yeltsin's tanks
During the shelling of the White House on 4 October 1993, Rutskoy shouted live on radio: "If the pilots can hear me, get your combat machines up! This gang has settled in the Kremlin.… Save the perishing democracy!"
One of the last Heroes of the Soviet Union and the only vice president Russia ever had. A combat pilot who flew 485 sorties in the Su-25 over Afghanistan, was shot down twice and captured, and received the Hero of the Soviet Union title in 1988. Elected RSFSR vice president in 1991 as Yeltsin's running mate, he helped organize the White House defense during the August coup, delivered a letter to Lukyanov demanding a medical examination of Gorbachev, and persuaded Patriarch Alexy II to declare the Church's support for Yeltsin. He later broke with Yeltsin over economic policy and power concentration, sided with the parliament, and was proclaimed acting president during the 1993 constitutional crisis before being arrested when tanks shelled the White House.
Career timeline
1971Graduated from Barnaul Higher Military Aviation School
1980Graduated from Gagarin Air Force Academy
1985–1988Afghanistan: commander, 378th Independent Attack Aviation Regiment; deputy commander, 40th Army Air Force
1988Awarded Hero of the Soviet Union
1990RSFSR People's Deputy, member of the Supreme Soviet
1990Graduated with distinction from the General Staff Academy
1991.07–1993.10Vice President of the RSFSR/Russian Federation
1993.09–10Proclaimed acting president by parliament; arrested
The airborne commander who held the coup's key and handed it to Yeltsin
'With a single airborne regiment I could restore order in two hours': Grachev's boast on the eve of the First Chechen War proved the prelude to disaster.
Pavel Grachev was an airborne general who earned the Hero of the Soviet Union title in Afghanistan for achieving objectives with minimal losses, rising to command all Soviet Airborne Forces in December 1990. On the first day of the August 1991 coup he obeyed Defence Minister Yazov's order and brought the 106th Guards Airborne Division into Moscow, but the next day he opposed the planned storming of the White House, switched his allegiance to Yeltsin, and sent troops to defend the parliament: the pivot that broke the coup's military spine. After the Soviet collapse he became Russia's first defence minister, backed Yeltsin during the 1993 constitutional crisis, and presided over the disastrous First Chechen War, leaving office in 1996 amid corruption allegations and the derisive nickname 'Pasha-Mercedes.'
Career timeline
1965–1969Ryazan Higher Airborne Command School (gold medal)
He recalled interpreting as searching for the threads connecting two languages.
Pavel Palazhchenko is an interpreter and writer whose work documents the decisive conversational spaces of late Soviet diplomacy. As the English interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, he took part in the US-Soviet summits at Geneva, Reykjavik, Malta and elsewhere. His memoir records not only leaders’ words but also the working processes of arms-control negotiations and the growth of trust, offering a Soviet-side account of the peaceful end of the Cold War. He later continued as an international-relations analyst and press official at the Gorbachev Foundation.
Career timeline
1966–1972Studied translation and interpreting at the Maurice Thorez Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages
1972–1974Completed the UN interpreter courses, then taught and interpreted at his institute
1974–1979Worked in the Russian section of the UN Secretariat interpretation service
1980–1985Worked in the USSR Foreign Ministry’s interpretation and US-Canada departments
1985–1991Chief English interpreter for Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, participating in US-Soviet summits
1991Worked in the office of the President of the USSR
1992–presentInternational-relations and press official and analyst at the Gorbachev Foundation
1997Published My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter
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.
Career timeline
1967–2004Mechanizer, Gigant collective farm, Dnepropetrovsk Oblast
1987–1989Deputy, Supreme Soviet of the USSR (11th convocation)
1989–1991People's Deputy of the USSR (Union of Collective Farms quota)
The last Gosplan chairman who presided over the dissolution of Soviet planning
On the end of the planned economy: "We proposed a mechanism to bring the vulnerable closer to public goods through the market. But nobody wanted to listen."
The last steward of Soviet central planning, he managed the transition from plan to market as First Deputy Prime Minister and inaugural Minister of Economy and Forecasting under the Pavlov government, when Gosplan was reorganized into the new ministry in May 1991. After the USSR's dissolution, he transformed into a successful post-Soviet industrial entrepreneur, founding the Avtotor auto assembly group.
Career timeline
1969–1974Engineer at VAZ construction site → Komsomol official in Tolyatti
1976–1982Deputy head then head of planning and economic department, VAZ
1982–1985Deputy general director for economics and planning, KAMAZ
1985–1988Department head at State Committee for Labor → Council of Ministers apparatus
1989–1991Chairman, USSR State Committee for Labor and Social Questions
1991.03–05Deputy Prime Minister of the USSR
1991.05–11First Deputy PM and Minister of Economy and Forecasting (Gosplan successor)
after 1991Founded International Privatization Fund → Chairman of Avtotor Holding
The airborne deputy commander who, sent against the White House, switched sides and helped break the August coup
On the night of 20 August 1991, with Grachev's consent, Lebed returned to the White House and secretly told the defenders: 'The assault will begin at 2:00 AM.'
Born into poverty in Novocherkassk, the son of a carpenter who had spent years in the Gulag, he witnessed the Novocherkassk massacre at age twelve and became a Soviet airborne forces general. He served as a battalion commander in Afghanistan and was appointed deputy commander of the Airborne Forces for combat training in February 1991. On the first day of the August coup he led Tula paratroopers to surround the White House on Pavel Grachev's orders, but switched to Yeltsin's side the next day and secretly informed the defenders of the planned 2:00 AM assault, a defection that helped break the coup. After retiring from the army he placed third in the 1996 presidential election, negotiated an end to the First Chechen War as Secretary of the Security Council, and was governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai when he died in a helicopter crash.
Career timeline
1969–1981Cadet → training officer (platoon & company commander), Ryazan Higher Airborne Command School
1981–1982Commander, 1st Battalion, 345th Separate Airborne Regiment, Afghanistan
The institutional economist who crystallized the 50-year debate over the Kosygin reform in a single book title
In 1977, when he defended his candidate's dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production,' the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, the official reviewer, submitted an evaluation whose essence was: 'This is not Marxism.'
An institutional economist of Tatar origin born in Moscow, he graduated with honours from the MSU economics faculty and taught political economy there, attracting attention with a controversial dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production' that the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee denounced as 'not Marxism.' In 1993 he helped Kuzminov found the Higher School of Economics (HSE), serving as its first department chair, first vice-rector, and first full professor, becoming a central architect of the Russian institutional-economics school. As editor of the 2017 collective monograph 'Missed Chance or Last Valve? On the 50th Anniversary of the Kosygin Reforms of 1965,' he crystallized the polarized historiographical debate: reform as a lost opportunity for the planned economy versus its last safety valve, in a single title.
Career timeline
1972Graduated MSU Economics Faculty with honours
1975–1993Associate professor of political economy, MSU
1993–1996First vice-rector & head of economic theory, HSE
1997–2013Ordained professor, head of institutional economics & economic analysis, HSE
2013–2017Head of economic theory, Financial University, Moscow
Architect of the 500 Days Program: perestroika economist who drafted a rapid transition from planned economy to market
During coal-mine research in the 1970s, a collapse trapped him and four workers waist-deep in ice water for ten hours. Three died in hospital after rescue. Yavlinsky later recalled: "We were saved, but three out of five died in hospital."
Soviet economist and politician from Lviv. After graduating from the Plekhanov Institute and researching coal-mine labour, he became head of the Joint Economic Department of the USSR Council of Ministers in 1989 under Leonid Abalkin. In 1990, with Mikhail Zadornov and Aleksei Mikhailov, he authored the 500 Days Program (a roadmap for transitioning from a planned to a market economy in under two years) and was appointed Deputy Chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers. When Gorbachev compromised with Nikolai Ryzhkov's alternative, Yavlinsky resigned in October 1990; he founded the EPICenter think tank and later launched Yabloko in 1993, becoming a fixture of Russia's liberal opposition.
Career timeline
1976–1980Researcher, All-Union Coal Industry Management Research Institute (VNIUUgol)
1980–1989Sector head for heavy industry → deputy head of consolidated department → head of social development and population, State Committee for Labour and Social Affairs
1989–1990Head, Joint Economic Department, USSR Council of Ministers
1990.07–11Deputy Chairman, RSFSR Council of Ministers; Chairman, State Commission for Economic Reform
1991.08–12Deputy Chairman, USSR Committee for Operational Management of the National Economy (vice-premier rank)
1991.10–12Member, Political Consultative Council under the President of the USSR
1990–1993Founder and director, EPICenter for Economic and Political Research
