Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, Soviet Premier who presided over the economic chaos, dies at 94

Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, a Soviet prime minister who in 1990 bore the brunt of the economic chaos that engulfed the final years of communist rule and led to the country’s political collapse and the end of the Cold War, has died . He was 94.

His death was confirmed on Wednesday by Valentina Matvienko, the head of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper chamber of parliament, in a statement on Telegram.

Starting as a welder in a factory in the Urals, Mr. Ryzhkov rose as a party loyalist with economic expertise to peaks of success as a protégé of the Soviet Union’s last leader. Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Communist Party’s general secretary, Mr. Gorbachev, appointed Mr. Ryzhkov in 1985 as chairman of the Council of Ministers – a title more commonly known as prime minister – to the second most powerful post in the Soviet hierarchy.

For millions of citizens, Mr. Ryzhkov was a figure of guidance and compassion at the scenes of two disasters: the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986, where he ordered the evacuation of a 30-kilometer radius contaminated with radioactivity, and the 1988 earthquake that killed 25,000 people in Soviet Armenia, where he coordinated relief efforts and comforted survivors.

It was also Mr. Ryzhkov’s job, along with Mr. Gorbachev and other senior officials, to share responsibility for a national economy ravaged by the costs of a long arms race with the West and teetering on disaster after seven decades of corruption and mismanagement under a series of successive governments. of dictators.

The task was urgent. There were shortages of food and fuel, as well as clothing, housing, medical aid, and other economic necessities for the 286 million people living across the vast expanse of the fifteen Soviet republics. Mr Ryzhkov and Mr Gorbachev understood the problem and were acutely aware that the solution lay in a move towards a Western-style market economy.

In a speech to a Communist Party congress in Moscow in 1986, Mr. Ryzhkov put the matter forthrightly. “Of all the dangers,” he said, “red tape is the greatest. Creating the appearance of work. Hiding behind empty rhetoric. Bureaucracy can hold back the improvement of the economic mechanism, dampen independence and initiative, and create barriers to innovation.”

He spoke of the need for “radical reforms” and “deep restructuring”, saying prices needed to be more closely linked to production costs and consumer demand, and incentives for workers improved. “To put it plainly,” he said, “the urgent need to improve the control system was in many ways underestimated until recently.”

Mr Gorbachev agreed with these objectives. But from his point of view, the most important questions were how quickly to implement change, and how to successfully introduce it to a people unaccustomed to free markets.

The road ahead for Mr. Gorbachev was strewn with obstacles: republics with an independent spirit; local officials and factory managers protect their prerogatives; farmers who prefer to hoard their harvests rather than sell them; and bureaucrats who fear changes that could expose their comfortable intransigence and cost them their jobs.

By 1990, the need for action was acute and the political landscape had changed. Most of the fifteen republics, whose economic problems had become more serious, rushed to implement free-market reforms, while the national government became increasingly concerned about giving up its powerful central economic control.

Under increasing pressure to act, Mr. Ryzhkov unveiled a proposed package of changes in May 1990 that would combine a small dose of free market liberalization with continued heavy government regulation. It stalled on the systemic transformation that many experts believed was necessary to stem the worsening economic crisis in the Soviet Union.

Amid growing lines at markets and shortages of food — especially potatoes, a national staple — demonstrators began appearing outside the Kremlin and demanding Mr. Ryzhkov’s resignation. The protests soon spread to other cities. Warning that the country was descending into chaos, Mr. Gorbachev in July dropped Mr. Ryzhkov from the Communist Party’s policy-setting Politburo.

In September, Mr. Gorbachev announced a plan to abolish the communist economic monolith and install a free market economy within 500 days. Prices were to be gradually freed from state control, industries were to be denationalized, farms and businesses were to be sold or rented as private property, and job guarantees were to be abolished in favor of a labor market.

Boris N. YeltsinThe President of the Russian Republic backed Gorbachev’s 500-day plan and pushed for even stronger measures, including a banking and stock exchange system and greater autonomy for the politically troubled republics.

Mr. Ryzhkov still favored a slower, more cautious withdrawal from central control as a more prudent path toward free markets. He wanted stricter controls on real estate prices and ownership, and warned of mass job displacement if free-market proposals were passed too quickly. But it was too late for such arguments. The Soviet Union was already disintegrating due to coups and uprisings in the republics.

In his book “Gorbachev: His Life and Times” (2017), historian William Taubman said tensions boiled over in a tumultuous confrontation between Mr. Ryzhkov and Mr. Gorbachev after a Yeltsin deputy rudely demanded that Mr. Ryzhkov would resign.

“If I have to leave,” Mr. Ryzhkov shouted, “so should everyone else. We all contributed to the collapse, the bloodshed, the economic chaos. We are all responsible. Why should I be the only scapegoat?” And he warned Mr Gorbachev: “Go ahead. Manage the government yourself! Then the next blow will be against you.”

Western analysts said Gorbachev needed someone to blame for the economic chaos of the late 1980s and the coming disruptions in market reforms. In November 1990, he created a new power structure in which he would rule together with the leaders of the republics. There was no place in the new plan for Mr. Ryzhkov. Kremlin observers said this marked his forced retirement.

A month later, Mr. Ryzhkov had a heart attack. During his recovery, on January 14, 1991, he resigned as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and was succeeded by Valentin Pavlov, another of Gorbachev’s protégés, who took the new title of Prime Minister.

In the spring, a resilient Mr Ryzhkov sought a return to power. The Communist Party wanted a strong candidate for the elections for the presidency of the Russian Federation and chose Mr Ryzhkov to face Mr Yeltsin, the heavily favored candidate of Democratic Russia’s reform movement. Mr. Ryzhkov won only 17 percent of the vote, conceding to Mr. Yeltsin.

On December 25, 1991, Mr. Gorbachev resigned as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union. He declared his office extinct and handed over his powers to Mr. Yeltsin. The next day, the Soviet Union was dissolved in favor of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a self-governing assembly of former Soviet republics.

Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov was born on September 28, 1929 in Dzerzhynsk, Ukraine. Little is known about his family background. He attended the Technical School of Mechanical Engineering in Kramatorsk and worked as a shop inspector, railway section head and mine foreman.

He joined the Communist Party in 1956 and graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1959. He started as a welder at the nearby Uralmash heavy machinery factory and slowly rose through the ranks. In 1965 he became chief engineer, then deputy factory manager and in 1970 factory director.

In 1975 he was transferred to Moscow as first deputy at the Ministry of Heavy and Transport Machine Construction, in 1979 he was appointed first deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, and two years later he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1982, he was promoted to the party’s secretariat to head its economic department.

Mr. Ryzhkov’s main patron was Yuri V. Andropov, the general secretary of the Communist Party and Mr. Gorbachev’s mentor.

When Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, he appointed Mr. Ryzhkov to full Politburo membership before appointing him prime minister, replacing the 80-year-old Nikolai A. Tikhonov, left behind by a remnant of the Kremlin’s gerontocracy by the former Soviet leader. Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Mr. Ryzhkov quickly aligned himself with Gorbachev’s economic policies. But to the public he was most visible on television responding to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, when he evacuated 336,000 people threatened with radioactivity, and to the earthquake in Armenia, when he hugged sobbing survivors and berated officials for incompetence.

Mr. Ryzhkov was married to Lyudmila Sergeyevna Ryzhkova. They had a daughter, Marina.

After his years in government, Mr. Ryzhkov disappeared into Russia’s left-wing old guard, eventually leading a small communist faction in parliament called Power to the People. He was a frequent critic of Yeltsin and others as they pursued their quasi-capitalist ambitions.