"Невосполнимая утрата для томичей и для страны
In Moscow, at the age of 101, the former secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Yegor Ligachev died. This was reported in the government of the Tomsk region, a native of which he was and which he led in the 1960-1980s.
Yegor Ligachev - Soviet and Russian statesman and politician, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in 1983-1990, member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. In the 1980s, he was one of the initiators of perestroika, but later criticized the methods and rates of implementation of socio-economic and political reforms in the country.
Ligachev was the oldest of all the former members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU - in the fall he celebrated his centenary. According to media reports, a few days ago Ligachev was in intensive care, where he was on a ventilator. Doctors assessed his condition as extremely serious.
Yegor Kuzmich Ligachyov was a Soviet and Russian politician who was a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and who continued an active political career in post-Soviet Russia. Originally an ally of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ligachyov became a challenger to his leadership.
Wikipedia
Russian; Secretary of Central Committee of CPSU 1983–90, Deputy to USSR Supreme Soviet 1966–89, People's Deputy of the USSR 1989–91
A graduate engineer, Ligachev trained at the Higher Party School and from 1949 worked in the Komsomol and then the party apparatus, mostly in Siberia, where he was First Secretary of the Tomsk Regional Committee 1965–83. He was a full member of the Central Committee from 1976 but only gained prominence when Andropov brought him to Moscow as head of the party's Organizational Work department and Secretary of the Central Committee in 1983.
Initially a close colleague of Gorbachev, he gained full Politbureau membership when Gorbachev became General Secretary in April 1985 and became ‘second secretary’, supervising ideology and party organization.
A teetotaller and puritan, he promoted the anti-alcohol campaign of 1985–6, which badly misfired. He became increasingly critical of the pace and extent of reform under Gorbachev, especially of the ‘excesses’ of glasnost in the rewriting of history.
Hence from September 1988, his responsibilities were narrowed to agricultural reform. He continued to resist Westernization and ‘hasty’ change and in August 1990 retired from all his posts after the 26th Congress. In 1993 he published his memoirs, Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin.
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