Arkady Volsky

Arkady Volsky (; 15 May 1932 – 9 September 2006) was a Soviet politician and businessman. He served as a senior aide to three Soviet General Secretaries, including Mikhail Gorbachev, and was one of three Deputy Prime Ministers in the last government of the Soviet Union between August and December 1991. He was founder and the first head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP).

Early life and education Volsky was born in Dobrush (now Belarus), on 15 May 1932. He was raised in an orphanage. and graduated with an engineering degree in 1955.

Career After graduation, Volsky started his career as an assistant foreman at Likhachyov car plant in Moscow. His first post of advisor was in 1983 for the Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov concerning economic affairs. He continued to serve as an assistant on economic affairs to the next General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko. His official title was "representative of the central committee and supreme Soviet" in Karabakh. On 12 January 1989, Gorbachev appointed him head of an eight-member committee of special administration for Nagorno-Karabakh. The commission was incapable of settling the dispute. After bloody conflict on 20 January 1990, Volsky and his team left the region. On 24 August 1991, following the August Coup, Volsky was appointed by Gorbachev as deputy prime minister in the cabinet headed by Prime Minister Ivan Silayev for operative management of the USSR economy. Volsky was in charge with industry and military complex until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Alexander Shokhin replaced Volsky in the post. The RSPP, called "Union of Red Directors" at the beginning of the 2000s, is the successor of the previous USSR scientific and industrial union in the Russian Federation. He was also one of the major leaders of Civic Union, a bloc of centrist figures, which was founded in December 1992. The bloc was made up by the People's Party of Free Russia led by Alexander Rutskoy, the Socialist Party of the Working People, the Union for Revival of Russia, the Social Democratic Centre headed by Oleg Rumyantsev, and the RSPP and Democratic Reform Movement, both led by Volsky. It became a very powerful movement in summer 1992. However, its success did not last long, and the bloc was dissolved in summer 1993. Volsky also left the bloc. Volsky met the Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev at his mountain hide-out near Grozny in July 1995. It was the first meeting between senior Russian and Chechen officials since the beginning of the Chechen War. He was described as "a man who is always in the shadows." After civil memorial and church service with the attendance of state and political figures of Russia, businessmen, ambassadors, his body was buried at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery on 12 September 2006.

Legacy Robin White's 2002 fiction, The Ice Curtain, includes Volsky's hypothetical activities in regard to a diamond cartel in Russia.