Vladimir Ivashko; Gorbachev Aide, Communist Party Leader

Vladimir Ivashko, 62, a former top aide to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and head of Ukraine’s Communist Party. Ivashko was born in 1932 in Poltava, in southern Ukraine. After graduating from the Kharkiv Mining Institute, he worked as an industrial manager and then as a Communist Party official. He became the head of Ukraine’s Communist Party in 1989, and was elected speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament the next year. In 1990, Gorbachev called Ivashko to Moscow as deputy secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Ivashko favored democratic changes in the party and supported Gorbachev’s moves against die-hard Communist officials. He did not join the plotters of the August, 1991, coup that briefly ousted Gorbachev. Nonetheless, he lost his job in the collapse of communism that followed. On Monday in Kiev, Ukraine, after a long illness.