- Boris Pugo
Boris Karlovich Pugo ( _lv. Boriss Pugo, _ru. Бори́с Ка́рлович Пу́го) (
February 19 ,1937 –August 22 ,1991 , in Moscow) was aLatvia n Communistpolitical figure .Pugo was born in Kalinin, USSR (now
Tver ,Russia ) into a family of Latvian communists who had left Latvia following the loss of Communists in the Latvian independence war of 1918-1920. His family returned to Latvia after Soviet Union occupied and annexed it in 1940.Pugo graduated from Riga Polytechnical in 1960 and worked in various
Komsomol ,Communist Party and Soviet government positions since then, both in Latvia andMoscow . His positions between 1960 and 1984 included thefirst secretary of theCentral Committee of Komsomol ofLatvian SSR , a secretary of theCentral Committee of Komsomol of USSR, the first secretary ofRiga City Committee of Communist Party and the chairman ofKGB in Latvia.Pugo was the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Latvian SSR from
April 14 ,1984 toOctober 4 ,1988 .Between 1990 and 1991, he was the Minister of the Interior Affairs of the USSR. He was a member of the
August Coup in 1991. He soon after committedsuicide . He shot his wife and himself as soon as he realized that the coup had failed.Several media (including "
Moscow Times " and "TIME") have cast doubts on the circumstances of his suicide, suggesting he might have been killed and the murder masked as a suicide.External links
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20010905011525/http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2001/08/17/019.html An article on Pugo's death in Moscow Times]
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