Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov

Nikolai Ryzhkov was born in 1929 to a Donbass mining family and went to the Urals to learn machine building. His school was Uralmash, the Urals Heavy Machinery Works, symbol of Soviet heavy industry. Starting as a site engineer, he became general director of the giant plant in 1970 at forty-one, then first deputy minister of heavy machine building and first deputy chairman of Gosplan: the archetype of the late-Soviet technocrat who approached the summit through the factory, not the party career.

In 1982 Andropov picked him to head the Central Committee's Economic Department, where with Gorbachev and Dolgikh he diagnosed the state of the economy; those reports became the underdrawing of perestroika. In September 1985 he replaced the eighty-year-old Tikhonov as chairman of the Council of Ministers. A premier of fifty-six embodied the new leadership's youth.

He believed in a modernised planned economy and orderly reform. A man who had run factories, he knew the shop floor, and he was also a man of open feeling, far from bureaucratic coldness. That feeling the whole country would see in December 1988, amid the ruins of the Armenian earthquake.

Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded on 26 April 1986. A week later, on 2–3 May, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Ryzhkov, together with Yegor Ligachev, visited the crippled plant in person, the first on-site inspection by the top Soviet leadership. Immediately after the visit, Ryzhkov ordered the government to evacuate all residents within a 30-kilometre radius of the plant. The 30-kilometre figure was closer to an estimate than a scientific calculation, and it was later revealed that some radioactively contaminated areas fell outside the evacuation zone. Nonetheless, nuclear physicist Valery Legasov assessed that Ryzhkov made a significant contribution to organising the liquidation effort. Ryzhkov later recalled Chernobyl as the heaviest ordeal of his premiership.

The earthquake that struck northern Armenia on 7 December 1988 took more than twenty-five thousand lives. Ryzhkov took overall charge of the relief and all but lived at the site for weeks. Television carried the image of a premier unable to hide his tears before the ruins, and his public reputation as the humane official dates from those days. Armenia did not forget: in 2008 it named him National Hero of Armenia, a rare honour for a foreign statesman after the Soviet collapse.

His record as premier was darker. The Law on State Enterprises and the Law on Cooperatives came from his government, but partial reform with price reform deferred swelled the deficit and the shortages together. When he announced a plan to raise bread prices in May 1990, panic buying swept the shops, and his political standing never recovered.

In the autumn 1990 battle over the 500 Days, Ryzhkov's regulated market line became the radicals' target. To go to the market meant abandoning the plan; to keep the plan meant emptying shops. Beaten from both sides, he collapsed with a heart attack in December and left the premiership early the next year, the last Soviet premier but one.

In the June 1991 Russian presidential election he ran as the communists' de facto candidate and took second place with 16.8 percent. In Yeltsin's era he was one of the defeated, but he did not leave the stage: after the Duma he sat from 2003 as senator for Belgorod in the Federation Council for another twenty years, giving up his seat only in 2023. He died in 2024, at ninety-four.

The longest-lived of Soviet premiers, he called perestroika a history of betrayals in his memoirs; what he had tried to defend, he said, was the rational core of socialist planning. Economic historians read his government as the case of men who knew reform was needed yet never touched its heart, prices, and so remained in the worst of middle grounds.