Valentin Pavlov (27 September 1937-30 March 2003) was Prime Minister of the Soviet Union from 14 January to 22 August 1991, succeeding Nikolai Ryzhkov and preceding Ivan Silayev.
Biography[]
Valentin Pavlov was born in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union in 1937, and he started his bureaucratic career as a government economist in 1959. He became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1972, and he went on to head the financial department of the State Planning Committee during Leonid Brezhnev's era and the State Committee on Prices during Mikhail Gorbachev's era. Under Nikolai Ryzhkov, he served as Finance Minister, and he went on to succeed Ryzhkov as head of government of the USSR in January 1991, serving as the USSR's first Prime Minister. He initiated the 1991 Soviet monetary reform, halting the flow of Soviet roubles transportet to the USSR from abroad. In June of that year, he attempted to force President Mikhail Gorbachev to transfer the Presidency's powers to the Prime Minister and the cabinet ministers, and, when this failed, he joined the State Committee on the State of Emergency and took part in the failed "August Coup". He later went into the banking sector, and he died in 2003.