Ivan Silayev

Silayev was born on 21 October 1930,[3] in Baktyzino, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. He graduated from the Kazan Aviation Institute in 1954 as a mechanical engineer. In 1959 Silayev became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). During his tenure at the Gorky Aviation Plant (Gorky is now Nizhny Novgorod), where he started in 1954, he advanced from the lowest level to become the plant's foreman from 1971 to 1974.[4]

Following this, Silayev served as Deputy Minister of Aviation Industry, and was later appointed Minister of Aviation Industry in 1981 in Nikolai Tikhonov's first government. He served briefly as Minister of Machine-Tool and Tool Building Industry of the Soviet Union from 1980 to 1981.[5] At the 26th Congress Silayev was elected to the Central Committee (CPSU).[4] In 1985, during Mikhail Gorbachev's rule, Silayev was appointed deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and chairman of the Machine-Building Bureau of the Council of Ministers in Nikolai Ryzhkov's first and second governments. He served in these posts until he was appointed Premier of the Russian SFSR in 1990. In 1986, he served as head of a government commission into the Chernobyl Disaster.[5]

The State Committee for the State of Emergency failed to arrest Silayev or any other high-standing Russian state officials during the August Coup.[15] Silayev was one of several leading Russian SFSR politicians who flew to Gorbachev's summer house in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup.[14] On 24 August the Russian SFSR Council of Ministers issued a decree transferring central government authority over economic and communications ministries to the RSFSR Government, and took control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and KGB archives. With the central government's authority greatly weakened, Gorbachev[16] established a four-man committee, led by Silayev, that included Grigory Yavlinsky, Arkady Volsky, and Yuri Luzhkov, to elect a new Cabinet of Ministers.[17] This committee was later transformed into the Committee on the Operational Management of the Soviet economy (COMSE), also chaired by Silayev, to manage the Soviet economy.[18]

On 28 August 1991, a Supreme Soviet temporarily gave the COMSE the same authority as the Cabinet of Ministers,[19] and Silayev became the Soviet Union's de facto Premier.[20] The Russian-dominated COMSE was quickly surpassed in authority by the Inter-republican Economic Committee (IEC), which was better thought to work between the different member republics, as its function was to coordinate economic policy across the Soviet Union, and was created by law on 5 September, but members were not immediately selected. Silayev finally also became IEC's chairman on 20 September (while other members were different from COMSE), formally strengthening his position in the union, but he presided over a quickly disintegrating Soviet Union and was dismissed as Russian Premier only a few days later.[21] Further disintegration of the USSR, with several republics becoming independent states, led to the transformation of the IEC into the Interstate Economic Committee of the Economic Community[20] on 14 November, which was to coordinate relations between the union republics and the republics that seceded from the USSR.[22] Silayev remained Chairman of the new IEC and was considered "Prime Minister of the Economic Community",[23] although the office and the community had no future, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union coming only weeks later.

When he first took office, holding the Russian premiership under Boris Yeltsin at the same time, Silayev had wanted to reduce the powers of the central government and give more powers to the Soviet Republics. As he, however, saw Yeltsin's rapid actions to undermine the institutions of the Soviet Union, his view changed[21] and he demanded that Yeltsin give back much of the authority of the central government which he had usurped following the August Coup. In this he failed, and his position as Russian SFSR Premier was severely weakened as a result, with him being replaced only a month after his accession to the Soviet premiership. Oleg Lobov, Silayev's First Deputy Premier, led the anti-Silayev faction in the Russian SFSR Council of Ministers and managed to oust him on 26 September 1991; Lobov succeeded him as acting Premier of the Russian SFSR.[21] Silayev, as overseer of the economy, was given the task of initiating economic reforms in the Soviet Union in a way that suited both the central government and the Soviet republics.[24] Silayev tried to maintain an integrated economy while initiating the marketisation of the economy.[25] On 19 December 1991, Yeltsin declared the COMSE committee, which served as the Soviet Union's last government, dissolved, and Silayev retired from his post, one day after he had been appointed to his new position as a diplomat for Russia.[20] The legality of the dissolution was unclear, as Gorbachev had not concurred with it, and so most members remained in office and continued their work. Оn 25 December 1991 Gorbachev announced his resignation from the post of President of the USSR in connection with the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States,[26] meaning that the union government ceased to exist.[27]

On 18 December 1991, Silayev was appointed by Yeltsin as the Permanent Representative of Russia to the European Community in Brussels;[28] he resigned from this post on 7 February 1994. In late 1994 Silayev became the President of the Machine-Building Association of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which consisted of more than a hundred civilian and military enterprises and associations, mostly of Russian origin. He became a member of the Ecological Movement "Cedar" in 1995. From 1998, he was President of Industrial Machine, an industrial and financial group; he simultaneously headed the National Committee, which promotes economic cooperation with Latin America. On 26 September 2002, Silayev became Chairman of the Russian Union of Mechanical Engineers.[4] During the 2007 legislative election Silayev ran as a candidate for the Agrarian Party, but failed to get elected.[4]

Silayev died on 8 February 2023 at the age of 92 in Nizhny Novgorod.[29][30] He was buried on February 11, 2023 at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow next to his wife, who died on 18 March 2006.[31] The farewell ceremony was attended by 30 to 40 people.

Silayev was awarded an Order of Lenin on two different occasions—once in 1971, and another during a closed session of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1975, when he was also awarded a Hero of Socialist Labour. He was awarded a Lenin Prize in 1972. In 1981 he was awarded the Order of the October Revolution and in 2002 the National Prize of Peter the Great. On 19 October 2000 and on 21 October 2005 Silayev was awarded the Diploma of the Government of the Russian Federation.[4]

• Shevchenko, Iulia (2004). The Central Government of Russia: From Gorbachev to Putin. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7546-3982-4.

• Media related to Ivan Silayev at Wikimedia Commons