The Presidential Council was an advisory body to the President of the Soviet Union. It was created on 14 March 1990[1] to replace the Politburo as the major policymaking body in the USSR. According to article 127 in the Soviet constitution the job of the presidential council was "to implement the basic thrust of USSR's domestic and foreign policy and ensure the country's security",[2] and to present the president policy alternative on social, economic, foreign and defence problems facing the nation, but it lacked a clear mission and had no policymaking authority, and its members were unable to work as a team. In late 1990, Gorbachev invited White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu to Moscow to advice him on organising the presidential support staff.[3] [4] It was abolished on 26 December 1990. Only the writer Valentin Rasputin was a non-party member.
The members were as follows:
| Name | Occupation | |
|---|---|---|
| Chingiz Aitmatov | A Kyrgyz writer | |
| Vadim Bakatin | Minister of Interior | |
| Valery Boldin | Head of the Central Committee General Department | |
| Nikolai Gubenko | Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union | |
| Alberts Kauls | Chairman of the Ādaži agricultural company (Latvian) | |
| Vadim Medvedev | Secretary for Ideology of CPSU Central Committee | |
| Yury Maslyukov | Chairman of the State Planning Committee | |
| Yury Osipian | Physicist and Vice Chairman of the USSR Academy of Sciences | |
| Yevgeny Primakov | Chairman of the USSR Soviet of the Union | |
| Valentin Rasputin | A ruralist writer | |
| Grigory Revenko | The head of the president's staff (Ukrainian) | |
| Alexander Yakovlev | A senior secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union | |
| Nikolai Ryzhkov | Chairman of the Council of Ministers | |
| Stanislav Shatalin | Economist | |
| Eduard Shevardnadze | Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union (Georgian) | |
| Gennady Yanayev | Vice President of the Soviet Union | |
| Veniamin Yarin | Chairman of the Russian United Labour Front | |
| Dmitry Yazov | Marshal and Minister of Defence of Soviet Union |