Ligachev protégé who led Leningrad during early perestroika
At the March 1989 Politburo session, Solovyov reported that all seven Leningrad party leaders had been defeated and insisted voters were rejecting perestroika itself, not the candidates.
He spent over two decades building the Leningrad Metro before rising through the party apparatus as a technical cadre. Appointed First Secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Committee in 1985 and candidate Politburo member in 1986, he oversaw the Soviet Union's second city during early perestroika. In the March 1989 elections for the Congress of People's Deputies, he ran unopposed yet roughly 60 percent of voters crossed his name off the ballot. He and all seven Leningrad party leaders were defeated, a watershed moment that signaled the collapse of party authority.
Career Timeline
- 1951–1973Lenmetrostroy, from shift supervisor to chief engineer and head of Leningrad Metro construction
- 1973–1974Deputy Chair, Leningrad City Executive Committee
- 1974–1975Secretary, Leningrad Oblast Party Committee
- 1975–1978Second Secretary, Leningrad Oblast Party Committee
- 1978–1984First Secretary, Leningrad City Party Committee
- 1984–1985Minister of Industrial Construction, USSR
- 1985–1989First Secretary, Leningrad Oblast Party Committee (candidate Politburo member from 1986)
Related historical events
Leningrad Metro Builder
Solovyov joined the Leningrad Metro construction project immediately after graduating from the Leningrad Institute of Railway Engineers in 1951, starting as a shift supervisor. He rose quickly to section chief, and by 1961 he was chief engineer of Lenmetrostroy. He personally participated in building the first- and second-stage stations, including Park Pobedy, Ploshchad Mira, Nevsky Prospekt, Gorkovskaya, Petrogradskaya, and Moskovskaya. He directed some of the most technically demanding segments of the early system, including the tunneling under the Neva River and the breakthrough of the Kovensky washout, a water-saturated sand layer that had stalled construction.
From 1967 to 1973, Solovyov served as head of Lenmetrostroy, with authority over all Leningrad Metro construction. Under his leadership, the entire Nevsko-Vasileostrovskaya (Line 3) opened in 1967, followed by the Yelizarovskaya and Lomonosovskaya stations in 1970, and Zvyozdnaya and Kupchino stations plus the Kupchino depot in 1972. Solovyov personally drafted Leningrad's first comprehensive technical-development plan for metro construction, a planning methodology that later generations of metro builders adopted as their framework. He also initiated the northern extension of the Kirovsko-Vyborgskaya (Line 1): seven new stations northward from Ploshchad Lenina toward the Grazhdanka district.