MOISEYEV, MIKHAIL ALEXEYEVICH

(b. 1939), Army General Chief of the Soviet General Staff from 1988 to 1991.

Mikhail Moiseyev, born January 2, 1939, in Amur Oblast, was raised in the Soviet Far East and attended the Blagoveshchensk Armor School. He joined the Soviet Armed Forces in 1961 and served with tank units. Moiseyev attended the Frunze Military Academy from 1969 to 1972 and rose rapidly to the Rank of General-Major in the late 1970s. He graduated from the Voroshilov Military Academy of the General Staff as a gold medalist in 1982.

Moiseyev enjoyed the patronage of several senior officers in the advancement of his career, including General E. F. Ivanovsky, I. M. Tretyak, and Dmitri Yazov. In the 1980s Moiseyev commanded a combined arms army and then the Far East Military District. With the resignation of Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev in December 1988, Moiseyev was appointed chief of the Soviet General Staff, a post he held until August 22, 1991, when he was removed because of his support for the hardliners' coup. His tenure saw the culmination of intense arms control negotiations, including the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty; the deestablishment of the Warsaw Treaty Organization; and increased military activism in domestic politics. In 1992 Moiseyev defended his dissertation, "The Armed Forces Command Structure," at the Center for Military-Strategic Studies of the General Staff. He served as a military consultant to the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1992.

Following his retirement, Moiseyev joined the board of the Technological and Intellectual Development of Russia Joint-Stock Company. In December 2000 he founded a new political party, Union, which was supposed to attract the support of active and returned military and security officers under the slogan, "law, order, and the rule of law." President Vladimir Putin appointed Moiseyev to the governmental commission on the social protection of the military. In this capacity he has been involved in programs to provide assistance to retiring military personnel.

See also: arms control; august 1991 putsch; military, soviet and post-soviet

bibliography

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Golts, Aleksandr. (2002). "Trend Could Hatch Dozens of Pinochets." The Russian Journal 40 (83).

Green, William C., and Karasik, Theodore, eds. (1990). Gorbachev and His Generals: The Reform of Soviet Military Doctrine. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Odom, William E. (1998). The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Jacob W. Kipp