Copyright 1998 ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Kaleidoscope
COUNTRY:
Russia
PERSON: Gennadi Yanayev
HEADLINE: Biographies
Gennadi Ivanovich Yanayev is a former vice president of the Soviet Union who
led the failed coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991.
Yanayev was born in 1937 in Russia. He received degrees in law and agriculture
and spent most of his career
in the union movement. In 1989 he was elected to the Congress of People's
Deputies as the head of the Central Council of Trade Unions. He later became a
member of the Supreme Soviet as well as the Central Committee and Politburo of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He became vice president of the
Soviet Union in
1990, having been proposed by Gorbachev and elected by the Congress of People's
Deputies. Analysts viewed Yanayev as a compromise selection chosen to placate
hard-liners in the CPSU. His nomination prompted resistance from reformists.
Prior to his elevation, Yanayev had been viewed as a minor party apparatchik
(loyal functionary).
In 1991 he was a leader, if not the leader, of the attempted coup against
Gorbachev that was designed to negate the reform process Gorbachev had
initiated. Yanayev and seven other officials declared the creation of the State
Committee for the State of Emergency and claimed that they were taking over the
governing of the nation. When the coup failed, largely
due to public disdain, he was arrested and charged with treason. The trial of
Yanayev and 11 others was postponed in May 1993 amid allegations that it had
been compromised by pretrial publicity. In February 1994 the legislature, which
is dominated by nationalists and hard-liners, granted an amnesty for all the
alleged conspirators.
[Sources: Encyclopedia of Russian History; Facts on File World News Digest;
The Soviet Union: A Biographical Dictionary]
LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1998
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1998 LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
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