In 1979, on this day Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet general staff, abruptly resigned his post just after returning from an inspection tour of Red Army military bases in East Germany. His official reason for stepping down was declining health; unofficially, however, there were rumors he was afraid of being arrested, exiled, or even killed as so many other Soviet political and military officials had been in the half-decade since Yuri Andropov was dismissed as head of the KGB.

Ogarkov's FateAnd indeed there had been at least one assassination attempt on Ogarkov's life during his East German visit; that attempt had prompted two of the marshal's senior aides to turn in their own resignations a week before Ogarkov himself quit.

A new post from the Necessary Evil Thread by Chris OakleyIronically, Marshal Ogarkov might have been better off not resigning; less than two weeks after he retired as defense minister he was fatally injured in a hit-and-run accident near his Moscow flat. Post-Cold War conspiracy theorists would speculate Ogarkov had been targeted for murder by one of his political adversaries, but the official Moscow police determination in the matter of the marshal's death was that he had been hit by a drunk driver. In any case, his demise would further heighten the already intense paranoia many Soviet citizens felt about their government -- by New Year's Day 1980 anti-government rallies would become an almost weekly event in the USSR's larger cities and foreign embassies in Moscow would go on full security alert as riots began to tear further at the country's badly frayed social fabric.

The tension would finally erupt into outright civil war less than twelve months after Ogarkov's resignation.