Yeltsin's political patron and CPSU defence secretary who forced the T-72 tank through against Ustinov's opposition
As the T-72 tore past at 70 km/h throwing sparks from the cobblestones, Marshal Grechko said: 'Nothing to report. The tank goes into production.' He got Brezhnev on the line and added: 'To hell with Ustinov and all his twisting and turning!'
Yakov Ryabov was a Soviet party-state administrator who served as First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Committee (1971–1976) and CPSU Central Committee Secretary (1976–1979) with responsibility for the defence industry. A Ural engineer promoted by Andrei Kirilenko, he built a powerful Sverdlovsk party machine and was Boris Yeltsin's political patron, hand-picking him as his successor. As defence secretary he clashed with Dmitry Ustinov over the T-72 tank. A live-fire demonstration for Marshal Grechko broke Ustinov's resistance and made the T-72 the main Soviet battle tank. He later served as First Deputy Chairman of Gosplan, Chairman of GKES, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers (1984–1986), and Ambassador to France (1986–1990), before falling out with Gorbachev and Ryzhkov over perestroika.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1943–1944Turner, Factory No. 9
- 1946–1960Engineer to chief designer, shop head, and party committee secretary, Sverdlovsk Turbomotor Plant
- 1960–1963First Secretary, Ordzhonikidze District Committee, Sverdlovsk
- 1963–1966First Secretary, Sverdlovsk City Committee
- 1966–1971Second Secretary, Sverdlovsk Oblast Committee
- 1971–1976First Secretary, Sverdlovsk Oblast Committee
- 1971–1990Member, CPSU Central Committee
- 1976–1979Secretary, CPSU Central Committee (overseeing defence and military industry)
- 1979–1983First Deputy Chairman, USSR Gosplan
- 1983–1984Chairman, USSR State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations
- 1984–1986Deputy Chairman, USSR Council of Ministers (chemical industry)
- 1986–1990Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the USSR to France
Related historical events
As defence secretary: disputes over weapons development
After becoming a Central Committee secretary in 1976, Ryabov oversaw the party apparatus departments responsible for defence industries and for the armed forces, the Interior Ministry and the state security committee. In a retrospective interview, he said that he visited about 40 cities and 150 research and design organizations a year. He judged that parallel development of weapons for the same purposes by different design bureaus dispersed budgetary and engineering resources, while equipment entered production without adequate testing and caused accidents and disasters. In 1977, after inspecting Moscow’s air- and missile-defence system with Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov and others, he said it still did not work. Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov replied that previously the country had not even had such a system.
Ryabov argued for reducing the cost of storing obsolete tanks and the duplication of weapons designs, and called for suspending crewed spaceflight until the causes of failed spacecraft dockings were established. He put the cost of a Soviet launch at 180 million rubles at the time and later recalled that he prevailed on suspending those flights. In late 1978 he prepared an assessment proposing that some defence-industry work be cut, without reducing the Defence Ministry’s orders or the country’s defence potential, to save 8 billion rubles in 1979. He said he presented it to Mikhail Suslov, but the interview does not establish whether the proposal was adopted. These disagreements with Ustinov coincided with the end of Ryabov’s tenure as Central Committee secretary. He was transferred to become a First Deputy Chairman of Gosplan. The account is Ryabov’s retrospective testimony as a participant in these disputes, so his judgments and claims should be attributed to him.