People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1936–2013 ○ Cancer

Last First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party on the eve of the Soviet dissolution

Addressing the Central Committee upon his election as First Secretary in June 1990: "We will never return to the days when the party monopolised power. But neither will we allow Ukraine to become a testing ground for political experiments."

A mechanical engineer by training, Gurenko rose from technologist to factory director at the Donetsk Machine-Building Plant before turning to party work in 1976. He served as secretary of the Donetsk Oblast Party Committee and deputy chairman of the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers, and took part in the disaster response as deputy chairman of the state commission after the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Backed by Gorbachev, he became First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee and a full member of the CPSU Politburo in June 1990, only to resign in August 1991 when party activity was banned after the failed coup. In independent Ukraine he returned to parliament and chaired the economic policy committee, helping reorganize the former communist political current.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1936–2014 ○ Natural causes

From Kiev regional party leader to Gorbachev's last chief of staff

The day Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he called Revenko in and joked, 'Want to see a Soviet millionaire?' The two then allocated the entire million-plus dollars to children's oncology centres and Chernobyl areas. When done, Gorbachev smiled: 'Well, no more millionaire.'

Ukrainian Soviet party and state official who rose to first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee, the capital region's top party post, then became Gorbachev's chief of staff as head of the USSR Presidential Apparatus in the union's final months. Moving up through Komsomol and party bodies, he became first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee in 1985 and was elected to the CPSU Central Committee in 1986. In 1990 he joined the Presidential Council, and in August 1991 Gorbachev made him head of the Presidential Apparatus, where he managed the shift from party to presidential rule. After the dissolution he was vice president of the Gorbachev Foundation before returning to Kiev.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1936–2014 ○ Died, prolonged illness

The general who gave the operational order to clear Rustaveli Avenue

'Not a single demonstrator died from a shovel. That was invented by Mr Sobchak together with the Georgian fascists.'

As commander of the Transcaucasus Military District, he gave the operational order to clear the independence rally on Tbilisi's Rustaveli Avenue on 9 April 1989, an action that left 21 civilians dead. The Sobchak commission named him, yet the chain of command ran upward to Defence Minister Yazov and the republican party leadership, and Rodionov became the only figure publicly held to account within that structure. He had previously commanded the 40th Army in Afghanistan (1985–86), and in 1996 Yeltsin made him Russia's Defence Minister, only to sack him ten months later when he refused to subordinate the army's budget to the government's reform plans.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1936–2020 ○ COVID-19

Belarus's first prime minister; co-signed the Belovezh Accords and later testified the Russian delegation alone arrived with a plan

'Neither I, nor Shushkevich, nor Kravchuk, nor Fokin knew such a document would be prepared and signed': Kebich insisted only the Russian delegation arrived with a plan for the Belovezh Accords.

A mechanical engineer from the Belarusian Polytechnic Institute, he rose through Minsk factories into the Belarusian Communist Party apparatus and became Chairman of the BSSR Council of Ministers in 1990. In December 1991 he co-signed the Belovezh Accords alongside Shushkevich, formally dissolving the USSR; he later testified that the Russian delegation alone arrived with a prepared plan while the Belarusian and Ukrainian sides did not know such a document would be drafted, revealing the tension between spontaneity and premeditation at the meeting. He lost the 1994 presidential election overwhelmingly to Alexander Lukashenko and thereafter served as a parliamentary deputy supporting Lukashenko's pro-Russian and constitutional-revision agenda.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–1991 ✕ Suicide, shooting order disputed

From Latvian KGB chief to USSR interior minister, a guardian of order shattered in the coup he backed

He took his own life with a pistol in his apartment on 22 August 1991, with an arrest warrant issued. The order of the shots is disputed: prosecutors held he fired first, while Yavlinsky's account and the later investigation concluded his wife fired last.

Born into a family of Latvian communists and a graduate of the Riga Polytechnical Institute, he rose through Komsomol and party work to chair the Latvian KGB in 1980–1984 and lead the Communist Party of Latvia in 1984–1989. As USSR interior minister from December 1990 he pursued a hard line on law and order, and in August 1991 joined the State Emergency Committee (GKChP), mobilizing the interior apparatus behind it. When the coup collapsed he took his own life with a pistol in his Moscow apartment on 22 August 1991.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–

Tereshkova's backup cosmonaut, the physically strongest candidate Kamanin judged too reserved for the spotlight

"We decided it was worth trying": after she and her fiancé, skydiving instructor Sergey Kiselev, discussed the secret-police recruitment offer at their favorite café until closing time.

A mechanical engineer and nationally ranked parachutist, she was one of five women selected in 1962 for the Soviet Union's first female cosmonaut group. She trained as Valentina Tereshkova's primary backup for the Vostok-6 flight; Nikolai Kamanin rated her the best physically among the candidates but judged her too introverted for the worldwide propaganda role the first woman in space would have to play. Later she prepared with Valentina Ponomaryova for what would have been the first all-female spacewalk on Voskhod, but the mission was cancelled; after the women's group disbanded in 1969, she spent her career as a researcher at the Cosmonaut Training Center and earned a Candidate of Psychological Sciences degree.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1937–

The chief engineer who refused to believe the reactor was destroyed and kept pumping water into its ruins

He smashed his glasses and cut his wrists with the shards, forcing the court to postpone his trial.

Nikolai Fomin was a Soviet nuclear engineer who joined the Chernobyl plant in 1972 and rose to chief engineer in 1981. Arriving at the plant shortly after the April 26, 1986 explosion, he refused to accept reports that the reactor was destroyed and ordered water to be pumped into the wreckage of Unit 4 for hours, while sending a subordinate on a reconnaissance mission that delivered a fatal radiation dose. Arrested after the disaster, he was sentenced to 10 years but was released early after a pre-trial suicide attempt and subsequent confinement in a psychiatric hospital; he later worked at the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant before retiring.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1937–1993 ✕ Assassinated, unsolved

A field enforcer of the Soviet Union's final crisis

After Black January, he personally led the Nagorno-Karabakh Organizing Committee as Moscow's man on the ground.

Viktor Polyanichko was a Soviet party organizer and political adviser who carried Moscow's policy into local power structures in Afghanistan and the South Caucasus. As Second Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party, he sought to restore Baku's authority after Black January and led the Nagorno-Karabakh Organizing Committee, combining party administration with coercive force. He is remembered both as an attempted broker in a collapsing federation and as Moscow's hard-line intermediary in a conflict that deepened beyond Soviet control. After the Soviet Union's collapse he became head of an interim administration at deputy-prime-minister rank in Russia, and was assassinated in North Ossetia in 1993.

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 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 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 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 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 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.