Amangeldy Gumirovich "Aman" Tuleyev (13 May 1944-20 November 2023) was Governor of Kemerovo Oblast from 1 July 1997 to 1 April 2018, succeeding Mikhail Kislyuk and preceding Sergey Tsivilyov.
Biography[]
Amangeldy Gumirovich Tuleyev was born in Krasnovodsk, Turkmen SSR, Soviet Union (now Turkmenbasy, Turkmenistan) in 1944, the son of a Kazakh father and a Bashkir-Tatar mother. He worked as a railway engineer in Siberia before becoming a station chief in Mezhdurechensk in 1973; by 1989, he became head of the Kemerovo Oblast Railway System. He became a member of the Russian SFSR soviet in 1990 and became chairman of the regional soviet in 1990, and he became a prominent CPRF politician in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Tuleyev supported the August Coup in 1991 and sided with Parliament against Boris Yeltsin during the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, and he went on to create the Tuleyev Block political movement and run for president in 1991, 1996, and 2000 (placing fourth in his first and last bids). While he was an atheist, it was rumored that he was baptized an Orthodox Christian in 1999, causing the Islamic Shura of Chechnya to condemn Tuleyev to death for apostasy. In 2003, he led the electoral list of United Russia in Kuzbass, becoming one of the last regional governors to join the party in 2005. He ran an authoritarian regime in Kemerovo Oblast until his resignation in the aftermath of a devastating 2018 mall fire that killed at least 60 people. He died in 2023.