Georgy Matyukhin

Georgy Gavrilovich Matyukhin was the first chairman of the Central Bank of Russia, the man who held the monetary tiller while the Soviet Union came apart. Born on 6 September 1934 in Barnaul, then in West Siberian Krai, he died on 5 September 2026 in the Republic of Altai, one day before his 92nd birthday. The Bank of Russia announced the death on 8 September 2026 and called him an active and responsible leader whose knowledge and experience were needed on important work. Cause of death was not made public. His nephew, Oleg Sayko, confirmed the death and the Altai place to the regional outlet Tolk. The MGIMO alumni association also said he died in the Republic of Altai. A funeral and a resting place were not made public.

He did not begin as a banker. After the Semipalatinsk Geological Prospecting College he worked from 1953 to 1956 as a geologist in the Tajik SSR and in Western Siberia. In 1961 he graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). That diploma took him into a closed world. For four years he worked in the central apparatus of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, the foreign-intelligence service. He was then posted to Uruguay under diplomatic cover and was expelled with a group of Soviet intelligence officers. In an interview with Kommersant he said that, as a spy, he "got burned" there. Exact dates of the Uruguay posting were not published in the standard biographies used here.

Even while still in intelligence work he enrolled at the Moscow Financial Institute, in the department of Vladimir Gerashchenko, father of the later central banker Viktor Gerashchenko. From 1970 he worked at the International Investment Bank, two years full time and then eleven years as a consultant. He completed correspondence postgraduate study at the Financial Institute and defended a candidate thesis on "International Regional Banks". From 1973 to 1980 he was at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences and defended a doctoral dissertation, "Problems of Credit Money under Capitalism". He was a professor at the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade from 1980 to 1988, then a leading researcher at the Institute of the USA and Canada from 1988 to 1990. The published books that carry his name include Hot Money (1974), on speculative wandering capital, Problems of Credit Money under Capitalism (1977), World Financial Centers (1979), and The Growth of Costliness and Inflation in the Capitalist World (1984). The official Bank of Russia library sketch also places him, after MGIMO, in posts at Gosplan and at the Comecon investment bank. The intelligence years and the academic years sit side by side in the public record. Neither erases the other.

The appointment that made him famous was political as much as technical. On 7 August 1990, on the recommendation of Ruslan Khasbulatov, he became acting chairman of the board of the State Bank of the RSFSR. He had already helped Khasbulatov draft economic bills. Later accounts, including his own memoir title and interviews gathered by the financial journalist Nikolai Krotov, describe the takeover of the Russian office of the USSR State Bank as a kind of storming: guards had been told not to let the republican team in, and a group of deputies went in with him. On 25 December 1990 he was confirmed as chairman of the Central Bank of the RSFSR. On 20 December 1991 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR abolished the State Bank of the USSR and transferred the functions of the emission centre, monetary regulation, and oversight of commercial banks to the Central Bank of the RSFSR, soon the Bank of Russia. For a few weeks in May and June 1992, after the bank took its Russian Federation title, he was formally chairman of the Bank of Russia itself. On 16 June 1992 he was dismissed. Viktor Gerashchenko, who had led the USSR State Bank, succeeded him.

What he left in those twenty-two months is still the skeleton of Russian banking. His main achievement, in the Bank of Russia's own later wording and in independent obituaries, was the two-tier system: a central bank responsible for monetary policy and supervision, and commercial banks that took deposits and made loans. Kommersant also credited him with a network of cash-settlement centres that helped stabilize payments across the country. He was the only head of the Bank of Russia in modern history whose signature was printed on a banknote, the 5,000-ruble note of the 1992 issue. No later governor repeated that gesture.

He was not a quiet technocrat, and he was not uncontested. He argued against what he called the practical confiscation of Soviet household savings at Sberbank. As prices were liberalized, he wanted deposit rates liberalized too, brought close to a real positive return after inflation. Rates on funds the government borrowed from the public stayed regulated and, in his view, discriminatorily low, below the central bank refinancing rate. He later described the bank as caught among three forces: commercial banks angry at the discount rate and reserve requirements, a government that wanted industry financed straight from the budget, and a Supreme Soviet that voted social payments the bank then had to cover with new money. In the 1990s he was accused of helping to wreck the Soviet financial system, of a role in the scandal of forged Chechen payment orders (the so-called fake avizo), and of reckless lending to commercial banks. Kommersant, which reported those accusations, also wrote that no real charges were brought, even after he left the chair. The accusations belong in the record. They are not findings of a court.

In later recollections, published in material collected by Krotov and quoted by writers including Mikhail Poltoranin, Matyukhin said that when the new bank began working with Vnesheconombank in December 1991 it found 12 billion dollars of foreign-exchange reserves and 300 tons of gold missing, with only receipts left. He said he raised the search for the missing reserves at meetings of central bankers in Basel, and that this contributed to his rapid removal. Viktor Gerashchenko reacted sharply and wanted explanations. Matyukhin did not give a public accounting. The claim is his account of a chaotic handover, not a settled inventory. It should be labelled as such.

The end of the job, in his memoirs The Central Bank of Russia: The Beginning of the Road (an earlier edition was titled I Was the Chief Banker of Russia), is told as a summons rather than a vote. In July 1992, while he was meeting regional staff in Tver, Khasbulatov called him to Moscow. With deputy chairman Yuri Voronin present, he was told the bank was working badly, that there were many complaints, and that he should resign. He was asked to write, on the spot, a resignation citing poor health, and not to attend the Supreme Soviet sitting that would accept it. He wrote it. He later said that this was how democracy was practised by the people who had taken on the burden of establishing it in Russia. Some secondary dates for the Gerashchenko succession differ (one Kommersant passage says November 1992). The dated public record used by English and Russian Wikipedia, and by Forbes after the death, is a dismissal on 16 June 1992. This account uses that date.

After the chair he held leading posts at the banks Gorny Altai, Noosfera, Sobinbank, and Dialog-Optim. End dates for those posts were not set out in the obituaries. He remained a figure historians of the Bank of Russia returned to, in Krotov's essays and in the bank's own virtual exhibition of its chairmen. His grandson, Stanislav Anatolyevich Matyukhin, later worked for seven years at the Bank of Russia as a deputy head in the department that licensed joint-stock investment funds, management companies, specialised depositories, and non-state pension funds. A spouse and children were not named in the sources used here.

He died at 91, in the 92nd year of his life, back in the Altai country of his birth region, though the death was in the Republic of Altai rather than the Altai Krai city of Barnaul. The Bank of Russia sent condolences to relatives and those close to him. No public memorial details had been released when this profile was written. He should not be confused with other people named Matyukhin, including the Ukrainian footballer Serhiy Matyukhin, the director Vladimir Matyukhin, or a hustle dancer of the same given and family name. English search suggestions often attach this spelling to other Georgys. This profile is the economist who was the first chairman of the Bank of Russia.