People of the Revolution and the USSR

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.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1940–

A politician who moved from Soviet party leadership to Moldova's presidency

In the 1996 runoff, backed by left and centrist forces, he defeated Mircea Snegur to win the presidency.

Pyotr Luchinsky rose through the party apparatus of the Moldavian Soviet republic and became a link between late Soviet republican politics and the making of the independent Moldovan state. He became first secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova's Central Committee in 1989 and served on the CPSU Politburo from 1990 to 1991. After independence, he was ambassador to Russia and speaker of parliament before winning the 1996 presidential election and serving as Moldova's second president from 1997 to 2001. His career shows how Soviet institutional continuity and the adjustment of a new state's sovereignty and foreign orientation could converge in one politician.

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 1941–2018 ○ Natural causes

An Estonian communist leader who chose to preserve the Soviet Union

In 1991, as Estonian independence approached, he joined the Politburo while backing the Soviet Union.

Lembit Annus was a Moscow-aligned Estonian communist leader who stood at the centre of the late Soviet conflict over national independence and preserving the Union. From December 1990 until the party was banned in August 1991, he was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Estonia on the CPSU platform, and in 1991 he joined the CPSU Politburo. After the party's dissolution, he remained active in communist politics as a Pravda correspondent and Tallinn municipal councillor.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1941–2020 ○ Natural causes

The last Soviet culture minister

In his diploma performance as Hitler, Gubenko poured all his hatred for the man who killed his parents into the role. Lyubimov saw it and immediately brought him to the Taganka Theatre.

An actor and film director who rose from war orphan to People's Artist of the RSFSR. He was the first working arts professional to become Soviet Minister of Culture (1989–1991) since Anatoly Lunacharsky. After the USSR collapsed, he entered left-wing politics, serving as chair of the Duma's Culture Committee and deputy speaker of the Moscow City Duma, where he defended Soviet cultural heritage. Following the Taganka Theatre split, he founded and led the Sodruzhestvo Aktyorov Taganki until his death in 2020.

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 1942–2020 ○ Natural causes

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.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1942–2021 ○ COVID-19

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.

Soviet communism 1943–

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.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1943–

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.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1943–1992 ○ Cancer

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.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1944–

The last Soviet-aligned communist leader of Estonia amid a party split

When the party split in 1990, Sillari became first secretary of the faction that retained its link to the CPSU.

Enn-Arno Sillari rose from factory engineering into the city and central structures of the Estonian Communist Party. When the party split in 1990 between a majority seeking Estonian sovereignty and a faction remaining with the CPSU, he led the latter, attempting to preserve both the Soviet institutional link and an organized communist movement in Estonia. As a CPSU Central Committee Politburo member and first secretary of the CPSU-aligned Estonian Communist Party in 1990–91, his authority was tied to a union whose political basis was collapsing. He continued to lead the party after Estonia restored independence, but resigned after its defeat in the 1992 parliamentary elections and later worked in business.

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.