Grigory Vasilyevich Romanov

During his 13 years as First Secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee (1970–1983), Romanov fundamentally reshaped the city's physical and industrial infrastructure. His signature achievement was mass housing: roughly one million Leningraders received new apartments during the 10th Five-Year Plan (1976–1980) alone. Nineteen new metro stations opened under his tenure, including Lomonosovskaya, Primorskaya, and Udelnaya, and in 1973 construction began on the first unit of the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant at Sosnovy Bor. The 1978 resolution 'On the Construction of Flood Protection Works for the City of Leningrad' launched the Gulf of Finland barrage (dam) project, completed in 2011 after interruptions. In industry, over 50 research-production associations (NPOs) were established, integrating R&D with manufacturing in defense, shipbuilding, and energy. To reduce reliance on migrant workers from other regions, Romanov vastly expanded the network of vocational-technical schools (PTU). Cultural infrastructure included the Leningrad Sports and Concert Complex and the Youth Palace. Notably, 1981 saw the opening of the Leningrad Rock Club, the USSR's first officially sanctioned independent rock venue, and the first Soviet rock opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, ran continuously for a decade. Taken together, these projects marked a rare instance in which a regional party organization, rather than central ministries in Moscow, drove comprehensive urban development.

Romanov was among the youngest Politburo members and had been identified as a future leader from the mid-1970s. In 1972, Alexei Kosygin told Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti that "the key figure in the future political life of the USSR will be Romanov." Brezhnev likewise confided to French President Giscard d'Estaing that Romanov was his chosen successor. Yuri Andropov solidified this trajectory in 1983 by summoning Romanov to Moscow as CC Secretary for the military-industrial complex.

When Andropov died in February 1984, however, Politburo elder Andrei Gromyko brokered the selection of Konstantin Chernenko as a compromise General Secretary. The decision bought time for both Romanov and Gorbachev, but during Chernenko's 13-month tenure, Gorbachev consolidated procedural control as de facto Second Secretary, chairing Politburo, Secretariat, and Central Committee sessions during Chernenko's prolonged illness.

On March 10, 1985, when Chernenko died, Romanov was on holiday in Palanga, Lithuania. He was informed of the death only ten hours later. Unable to obtain a flight from Klaipėda, he traveled to Vilnius and reached Moscow the following day, only to find the succession already settled. Andrei Gromyko had nominated Gorbachev, who was unanimously elected General Secretary at the March 11 Politburo meeting and Central Committee Plenum. Romanov later recalled: "Nobody seriously considered Gorbachev. But by the time we arrived in Moscow the very next day, he had already done it — he had already cut the deal in secret with all of them." On July 1, 1985, Gorbachev removed Romanov from the Politburo, citing "health grounds." It was forced retirement at age 62.

Romanov lived quietly as a Moscow pensioner, later joining the CPRF after the Soviet collapse, and died in 2008 at 85. His political defeat was not merely a personal reversal but an institutional fork that set the Soviet Union on a fundamentally different path of reform.

Defeated in the March 1985 succession, Romanov exited fast: in July he left the Politburo and the Secretariat for reasons of health, a formula no one believed of one of the youngest men in the room, at sixty-two. He was the first grandee cleared away by the Gorbachev order.

One rumour trailed his name for decades: that for his daughter's wedding in 1974 he had borrowed Catherine the Great's imperial china from the Hermitage, and that drunken guests had smashed it. Carried by Western media and Soviet word of mouth, the story hardened into fact; yet the museum and later inquiries found no basis for it. The wedding had been a small family affair and no china had ever left the building. Romanov himself considered it an organised slander, and some researchers read it as a reputation-killing operation before the succession, or as Western disinformation. Its source was never established.

In retirement he lived quietly on a pension and refused nearly all interviews. Until his death in 2008 he wished to be remembered as the man who could have preserved the Soviet Union. Historians are largely sceptical, but Romanov's USSR remains a favourite premise of alternate history.