Dmitri Timofejewitsch Yasov

Dmitri Yasov (2015)

Dmitri Timofejewitsch Jasow ( Russian Дмитрий Тимофеевич Язов ; born  November 8, 1924 in Jasowo in Okoneschnikowo district , Omsk governorate , today in Omsk Oblast ; † February 25, 2020 in Moscow ) was a marshal of the Soviet Union . Yasov was Soviet Defense Minister from 1987 and was deposed and imprisoned after his participation in the August coup in Moscow in 1991 against Gorbachev . He was the last surviving Marshal of the Soviet Union.

Life

Dmitri Yasov, 1941

Second World War

Yasov came from a peasant family. In November 1941 he was drafted into the Red Army . He had pretended to be a year older than that to be able to take part in the German-Soviet war . Yasov was assigned to the Moscow military school for infantrymen, which was then evacuated to the Novosibirsk area . In July 1942 he came to the front with the rank of lieutenant . He was a platoon leader on the Volkhov Front and was seriously wounded in August of the same year. After a long stay in a military hospital, he returned to the fighting force and became company commander . In January 1943 he was wounded again. Jasow ended the war at the end of 1944 as a company commander in the Riga area . In the same year he joined the Communist Party (then WKP (B)) .

Professional officer career and Cuba

After the war, Yasov remained in the army with the rank of deputy battalion commander . In the spring of 1953, when Yasov reached the rank of major , he made up his secondary school diploma and was a listener at the military academy "MW Frunze" , which he graduated in 1956 with honors. He was battalion commander in the 63rd Guards Rifle Division and, from 1958, a senior officer for issues relating to military preparation at the headquarters of the Leningrad Military District . From 1960 he was in command of a motorized rifle regiment and had the rank of colonel .

On September 10, 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis , he came to Cuba with his regiment as part of Operation Anadyr . It was supposed to protect Soviet missile positions there. At the same time he was head of a training center for the Cuban armed forces . Yasov returned to the USSR on October 24, 1963.

Promotion to the General Staff

From the summer of 1964 he was head of the First Department at the Leningrad Military District Staff. From 1965 to 1967 he graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR . In September 1967 he became the command of a division in Transbaikalia . Since March 1971 he was the commander of the 32nd Army Corps in the Crimea . In December 1972 he was promoted to lieutenant general and sent to Baku as chief of the 4th Army . From the beginning of 1975 he was head of the first department of the main administration for cadre questions at the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union, since November 1976 first deputy commander of the Far Eastern Military District. In November 1977 he was appointed Colonel-General conveyed. 1979/80 Yasov led the central group of the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia .

From 1980 to 1984, Yasov was the commanding officer of the Central Asian Military District. He regularly visited the Soviet troops that were in Afghanistan and insisted that Soviet soldiers and officers should be better prepared for their duties in that country. From 1981 to 1987 he was a candidate for the Central Committee of the CPSU . Since 1984 he has headed the Far Eastern Military District, where he met the newly elected General Secretary of the Communist Party Gorbachev during his visit in 1986 .

Defense Minister

Dmitri Yasov during an official visit to the USA in 1989

In January 1987, Yasov was first appointed Deputy Defense Minister of the USSR for cadre issues and on May 30, Defense Minister of the Soviet Union. The appointment took place directly in the departure hall of the government airport Vnukovo 2 , where the members of the Politburo were waiting for Gorbachev, who was returning from a trip abroad. The Soviet party leader took the German Mathias Rust's flight over Red Square on May 28, 1987 and the subsequent landing as an opportunity to dismiss the Defense Minister, Marshal Sergei Sokolow , and a number of other high-ranking soldiers. Yasov continued this and within a few days dismissed over 120 generals , the majority of whom were unrelated to the Rust incident.

Yasov was characterized as an easily influenced and obedient minister who was unprepared for the role that suddenly fell to him. It was visibly difficult for him to find his way around issues of disarmament , where he did not represent any independent positions and, unlike his predecessor, came completely under the influence of the then Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze . From 1987 Yasov was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU and from June 26, 1987 to July 13, 1990 a candidate for the Politburo of the CPSU . Thus he was one of the most important Soviet politicians of the perestroika era . In April 1990 he became Marshal of the Soviet Union and, after Gorbachev's election as Soviet President, he became a member of its newly created Presidential Council.

When there were considerable disputes between Gorbachev and reform-oriented politicians on the one hand and the representatives of the old communist ideas on the other over the signing of the so-called Union Treaty, which was supposed to replace the results of the nationwide referendum of March 17, 1991 with other principles, Yasov was always among the reformers viewed more as a "block on the leg". During the meeting between Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev in Novo-Ogaryovo on July 17, it was agreed to replace Yasov after the signing of the Union Treaty. This did not happen, however, as the August coup took place in Moscow a few days before this ceremony .

Participation in the August coup

Yasov was a co-initiator of the August coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and a member of the putschist group State Committee for the State of Emergency .

Among the rebels were Interior Minister Boris Pugo , Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov , KGB boss Vladimir Kryuchkov , Vice President Gennady Yanayev , the chairman of the Supreme Soviet Anatoly Lukyanov and the Central Committee Secretaries Valery Boldin , Oleg Shenin , and Oleg Baklanov . On August 19, 1991, the Soviet news agency TASS reported that Janayev had taken over the office because of an illness Mikhail Gorbachev. At 5 a.m. on August 19, 1991, Yasov gave the order to march into Moscow with more than 400 tanks and 3,000 soldiers , to occupy key positions in the capital and to isolate the democracy supporters who were in the building of the Russian parliament. In connection with this, the saying "That nobody shoots me at people!" Is attributed to him.

After the failure of the coup on August 21, 1991, Yasov was arrested along with other participants and expelled from the Communist Party on August 23 by the Central Control Commission of the CPSU for "organizing a coup ". Until 25 January 1993, he was sitting in the Moscow prison sailors calm one. On that day he was transferred to a hospital of the Russian Interior Ministry due to deterioration in his health and was released on February 11th. He did not return to prison, as after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia all interest in the legal prosecution of himself and the other coup plotters died out. On May 6, 1994, the State Duma decided to close the investigation and prohibit all further investigative measures. By Decree No. 250 of February 7, 1994 of the President of the Russian Federation , Yasov retired.

Later work

Putin and Yasov on the occasion of his 90th birthday (2014)

From 1998 he was an advisor at the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation on issues of international military cooperation. In 2003 he was fully rehabilitated and received by Russian President Putin on his 80th birthday . In remarks from 2001, Yasov regretted the formation of the State Committee for a State of Emergency in the USSR, but not the coup .

In 2019, Yasov was sentenced in absentia by a Lithuanian court to a 10-year prison term for participating in Vilnius Bloody Sunday .

Honors

Yasov was awarded numerous orders and medals during his career, including the Order of the Red Banner , the Order of the Red Star , the Order "For Service to the Fatherland in the Armed Forces of the USSR" 3rd stage, the Order of the Great Patriotic War 1st class and the Order of Lenin . He was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the 10th and 11th session.

literature

• Nikolai Zen'kovic. Elita. Samye zakrytye l'udi. 2nd Edition. Moscow, 2004 (Russian).
• I condemn this adventure . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1991, pp. 198 ff . ( online ).
• Dimitrij T. Jasow , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 17/1992 from April 13, 1992, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Dmitry Timofeyevich Yazov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Dmitri Timofejewitsch Jasow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography on peoples.ru (Russian)
• Report on the 80th birthday and interview in the Rossiskaya Gazeta (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ex-putschist and last marshal of the Soviet Union died. February 25, 2020, accessed February 25, 2020 . 
2. ↑ LRT from September 15, 2019