Unions in 1986 and became Deputy Chairman of the trade unions in 1989. In April 1990 he was elected Chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. As chairman of the trade unions, he was not able to quell the growing labour discontent in the country, but his position granted him a seat in the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) at the 28th CPSU Congress (held in 1990), alongside his election as Secretary of the Central Committee. Vice president On 27 December 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev proposed Yanayev as Vice President of the Soviet Union. He was Gorbachev's third choice for the post; Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev had turned the offer down. Yanayev had initially been rejected by the Supreme Soviet, but he was finally approved by a second vote due to Gorbachev's insistence, (by a vote of 1,237 for to 563 against), only days after Shevardnadze had resigned from office due to Gorbachev's willingness to give leeway to conservatives. Yanayev said after the vote "I am a Communist to the depths of my soul." Some weeks after Yanayev's election, a senior Soviet official described Yanayev as "Gorbachev's Quayle—a conservative nonentity, no threat to Gorbachev, and his selection would pacify the right-wing". At the beginning of January 1991, Yanayev headed a committee working on the formation of a new cabinet. Later, he was sent to the Soviet city of Kuznetsk to negotiate with a newly formed independent trade union, making this the first time since 1917 that a Russian government official had negotiated with a trade union. However, after gaining the attention of the Soviet government, the unionists withdrew their plans for a strike. August Coup Shortly after taking office, Yanayev joined a group of more conservative Communist politicians, led by KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who hoped to persuade Gorbachev to declare a state of emergency. After Gorbachev announced his proposal for a New Union Treaty to form the Union of Sovereign States, as a reorganisation of the Soviet Union into a new confederation, he went on vacation to his dacha in the Crimea. Believing that this new Union treaty would lead to the disintegration of the USSR, the State Committee of the State of Emergency placed Gorbachev under house arrest on 19 August, one day before the treaty was due to be signed. On that same day the Telegraph