A veteran of the Great Patriotic War, Yazov served as Minister of Defence from 1987 until he was arrested for his part in the 1991 August coup, four months before the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yazov was born in the village of Yazovo (called Lyebyezhye at the time of his birth),[2] Krestinsky volost, Kalachinsky district, Omsk province.

He was commanding the Far East Military District in the northern summer of 1986, when, according to Time magazine, he made a favourable impression on General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, which led to later promotions.

He was appointed Soviet Defence Minister on 30 May 1987, after Marshal Sergei Sokolov was sacked as a result of the Mathias Rust incident two days earlier.

[citation needed] On the morning of 22 August, before the first interrogation, Yazov turned to Gorbachev with a video recorded message in which he read a letter and called himself an "old fool", regretted participating in this "adventure" and asked for forgiveness from the President of the USSR.

[11] In his memoirs, Yazov clarified that he was persuaded to turn to Gorbachev with a penitential speech to protect him from the criminal article "Treason to the Motherland", and under the influence of fatigue he succumbed to the persuasion of television reporters.

[15] Despite his selection by Gorbachev for the Defence Minister's position, William Odom, in his book The Collapse of the Soviet Military, repeats Alexander Yakovlev's description of Yazov as a "mediocre officer", "fit to command a division but nothing higher".

In March 2019, Yazov was tried in absentia and convicted of war crimes by a Lithuanian court for his role in the military crackdown in Lithuania in January 1991, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.