Former Vice-President of the Soviet Union who was the public face of a bungled attempt to remove Mikhail Gorbachev from power
Gennady Yanayev was the man selected by KGB and army plotters to replace Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet president in a failed coup in August 1991. Announcing on Soviet television that he was taking over as president, Yanayev’s hands shook uncontrollably and he later admitted that he was drunk when he signed the decree elevating himself to the presidency. For his part in the coup, he was jailed for treason.
Gorbachev never forgave Yanayev. Commenting on his death, Gorbachev’s spokesman, Vladimir Polyakov, would say little except that: “He is a person who betrayed.” However, the Russian Communist party described Yanayev as “a dear and trustworthy leader” and Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Communist Party, said firmer action by the coup plotters in 1991 would have saved the Soviet Union.
Yanayev was a heavy drinker and largely unknown when Gorbachev picked him as Vice-President in the belief that he would be no challenge to his presidential power. The plotters, whose leaders were the KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov, named Yanayev as Gorbachev’s successor to give the conspiracy the air of legality — but he turned out to be a poor choice.
The coup leaders said later that they were trying to prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union whose constituent republics under Gorbachev’s presidency and perestroika policies were increasingly defying central control. However the coup’s collapse fatally weakened the already unravelling Soviet Union and it was dissolved four months later.
Gorbachev refused to resign when coup plotters visited him at his holiday home in the Crimea. He told them: “You are nothing but adventurists and traitors and you will pay for this.” Gorbachev and his family were confined to their villa, their telephone lines were cut and they feared for their lives. Gorbachev’s wife Raisa had a nervous breakdown.
Yanayev was one of the 12 members of the so-called State Emergency Committee that announced on August 19 that Gorbachev was being replaced. The leading conspirators began their plot to overthrow Gorbachev on August 6, but Yanayev was not informed of the plans until the day before the coup. Yanayev appeared before stunned television viewers to declare a state of emergency, announcing that he was taking over the country because Gorbachev, who was effectively under house arrest, was “resting” and “needs some time to get his health back”.
His trembling hands and shaky voice made viewers suspicious. “I was sitting before millions of people, before the whole world, and could not answer the question of what the president’s illness is, could not say anything,” he later admitted. He told a Russian newspaper in 1993 that he was drunk when he signed the decree but denied this affected his judgment. “My body is such that I remain sane even after drinking all my buddies under the table,” he said.
On the day of his television appearance, tanks rolled onto the streets of Moscow. The plotters believed this show of force would cow the population into submission. But they failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Soviet-era Russian republic, who gathered thousands of supporters at the White House, the Russian Parliament building, and denounced the coup from the roof of a tank.
One reason for the coup’s failure was that the authorities no longer had blanket control of communications. While the Soviet state television played Tchaikovsky’s music, CNN, recently arrived in Moscow, showed pictures of resistance to the coup around the White House. “The plotters made a big mistake when they did not shoot me in the morning,” Yeltsin said. Military support rapidly evaporated and Yanayev and his collaborators, who had held the Soviet leadership for three days, were arrested and jailed. Yanayev spent a year in prison and was later granted an amnesty.
Gennady Yanayev was born in August 1937 in the Perevoz region of the Gorky province of the USSR. He joined the Communist Party in 1962 and the following year started working with Komsomol, the party’s youth organisation, as a second secretary. From 1966 to 1968 he was first secretary of the Komsomol organisation in Gorky province and was then made Chairman of the Committee of Youth Organisations of the USSR.
In 1980 he became deputy chairman of the Soviet Associations of Friendship and Cultural Relations with foreign countries. In 1989 he was appointed Chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions.
In 1990 he was nominated by Gorbachev for the post of Vice-President, but he failed to win the first vote at the Congress of People’s Deputies. Since Gorbachev refused to nominate another candidate, he became Vice-President of the USSR.
Yanayev was viewed as an apparatchik and cipher in the Soviet bureaucracy. When named as Vice-President he replied publicly to a question about his health by saying that his wife was satisfied that he was “performing my marital duties quite well”. The reply shocked Russians, who expected more dignity from their leaders.
However, when the coup plotters of August 1991 needed a fig leaf of legality, they had no alternative but to select Yanayev, who under the constitution was the President’s legal successor.
He is survived by his wife and two children.
Gennady Yanayev, former Vice-President of the Soviet Union, was born on August 26, 1937. He died from lung cancer on September 24, 2010, aged 73
Ruthless and effective commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who was killed by government troops
The Colombian guerrilla commander known as “Mono Jojoy” was a charismatic and effective military leader who turned the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) into a formidable fighting force that controlled vast swaths of territory and tied down thousands of government troops over long periods. His death in an aerial assault on a FARC camp could signal the beginning of the end for Latin America’s last significant armed insurgency.
Mono Jojoy’s original name was either Víctor Julio Suárez Rojas or Jorge Briceño Suárez, but his soldiers called him Mono Jojoy after a jungle snake noted for its uncanny ability to slither out of tight corners. According to intelligence reports, he joined the guerrillas in 1975, aged 22. His own account was rather different: he said he had acted as a messenger boy, guide and lookout for the founders of the FARC when they were secretly setting up the communist-linked guerrilla organisation near his home in the mountainous Sumapaz region of central Colombia in the mid-1960s, when he was about 12. Within three years he was a fully-fledged guerrilla fighter.
From the outset, Mono Jojoy forged a close relationship with FARC’s legendary founder/commander, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, better known as Tirofijo (Crackshot), who moulded the FARC out of the remnants of rural self-defence groups that had formed during the period of endemic communal conflict in the 1940s and 50s known simply as La Violencia. When “peace” was eventually imposed by the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-57), many of the armed peasant bands refused to dissolve, and were hunted down. One casualty of the pacification campaigns was Mono Jojoy’s father, a small peasant farmer who had taken up arms.
Mono Jojoy rose rapidly through the ranks of the rapidly expanding FARC, winning the confidence of Marulanda and acting for some time as his chief bodyguard. By the early 1990s he was commander of the guerrillas’ main military unit, the Eastern Bloc, and was subsequently appointed to the “General Secretariat”, the FARC’s central committee, as overall military commander. At one time he had some 7,000 well-equipped and disciplined fighters under his direct command, and he earned a reputation as a ruthless and effective commander.
When President Andrés Pastrana agreed to enter into peace negotiations with the guerrillas in 2000, Mono Jojoy, with his black beret and bushy moustache, became a familiar sight on television screens, always at Marulanda’s side as talks with government negotiators dragged on in a demilitarised zone deep in the Colombian jungle.
When Alvaro Uribe was elected President in 2002, government policy towards the FARC changed abruptly, from conciliation to all-out confrontation. Uribe believed that the guerrillas had never intended to reach a peace agreement, and had merely been using the truce to regroup. From that moment the apparently inexorable advance of the guerrillas was gradually reversed and the initiative shifted to the Government, backed by Washington.
Over the next eight years Mono Jojoy became one of the principal targets of successive military campaigns against the guerrillas. The armed forces struck a succession of stunning blows against the FARC, culminating in the killing of the organisation’s second-in-command, Raúl Reyes, in an air raid on a FARC camp just across the border in Ecuador in March 2008. The death of Marulanda a few days later further weakened the FARC, but Mono Jojoy remained elusive and defiant. He never abandoned his conviction that the guerrillas would one day enter Bogotá in triumph, even as the net closed in on him and his forces dwindled in size and effectiveness.
By the early years of the 21st century the Colombian guerrillas had become an anachronism, in a country with stable, elected civilian government and a growing economy. Forced recruitment of children, attacks on civilian targets, indiscriminate laying of minefields and overt involvement in the lucrative drugs trade all undermined what little popular support the guerrillas still enjoyed. Mono Jojoy was blamed by the military for many of the FARC’s worst atrocities, including the bombing of a social club in Bogotá in 2003 in which 34 people were killed. Even the well-disposed left-wing President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, eventually concluded that armed struggle was futile in Colombia, and appealed to the insurgents to seek a negotiated settlement.
That may now happen. It was a surprise to many observers when Mono Jojoy did not succeed Marulanda as leader of the FARC. That job went to “Alfonso Cano”, Guillermo León Sáenz, who, unlike Jojoy or Marulanda, was an urban intellectual, an anthropology graduate with comparatively little military experience. His unexpected appointment did not lead to any immediate shift in policy towards political rather than purely military operations, but things have been changing recently: the guerrillas have put out feelers about possible talks with the new government of President Juan Manuel Santos, while still insisting that there must be no pre-conditions or cessation of military operations. Santos made clear he was not interested.
Mono Jojoy died in an elaborate combined operation involving more than 50 aircraft, the Colombian army, marines and police special forces against a guerrilla stronghold in the mountains of La Macarena, in southern Colombia.
Víctor Julio Suárez Rojas (Mono Jojoy), Colombian guerrilla commander, was born on February 5, 1953. He died on September 22, 2010, aged 57
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
