Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, a Soviet prime minister who in 1990 took most of the blame for the economic chaos that engulfed the final years of communist rule, leading to the nation’s political collapse and the end of the Cold War, has died. It was 94.
His death was confirmed on Wednesday by Valentina Matvienko, the head of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, in a statement on Telegram. The statement does not say where or when he died.
Starting out as a welder at a factory in the Urals, Mr. Ryzhkov rose as a party loyalist with financial experience to heights of success as a protégé of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Communist Party general secretary Mr. Gorbachev in 1985 named Mr. Ryzhkov chairman of the Cabinet — a title more commonly known as prime minister — the second most powerful position in the Soviet hierarchy.
For millions of citizens, Mr Ryzhkov was a figure of command and compassion at the scenes of two disasters – the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, where he ordered the evacuation of a 19-mile radius contaminated with radiation, and the 1988 earthquake that killed 25,000 people in Soviet Armenia, where he coordinated relief efforts and comforted survivors.
It also fell to Mr. Ryzhkov to share, with Mr. Gorbachev and other senior officials, responsibility for a national economy battered by the costs of a long arms race with the West and in ruins after seven decades of corruption and mismanagement. of dictators.
The task was urgent. Food and fuel, as well as clothing, shelter, medical aid and other financial needs, were in short supply for the 286 million people living in the vast expanse of the 15 Soviet republics. Mr. Ryzhkov and Mr. Gorbachev understood the problem and were well aware that a solution lay in a move toward a Western-style market economy.
In a speech at a Communist Party congress in Moscow in 1986, Mr. Ryzhkov put the case bluntly. “Of all the dangers,” he said, “the biggest is red tape. Creating the appearance of the task. Covering behind hollow rhetoric. Bureaucracy can hinder the improvement of the economic mechanism, reduce independence and initiative, and create barriers to innovation.”
He spoke of a need for “radical reform” and “deep restructuring” and said prices must be more closely linked to production costs and consumer demand and that incentives for workers must be improved. “To put it bluntly,” he said, “the persistent need for control system improvement has been in many ways underestimated until recently.”
Mr. Gorbachev agreed with these goals. But, from his perspective, the main questions were how quickly to make changes and how to successfully introduce them to a people unaccustomed to free markets.
The road ahead, to Mr. Gorbachev, was full of obstacles: independent democracies. local officials and factory managers protecting their privileges; farmers who could hoard rather than sell their crops. and bureaucrats fear changes that could expose their comfortable intransigence and cost them their jobs.
By 1990, the need for action was strong and the political landscape had changed. Most of the 15 democracies, whose economic problems had become more serious, were rushing to adopt free-market reforms, while the national government had become more anxious to surrender its strong central economic controls.
Under mounting pressure for action, Mr. Ryzhkov unveiled a proposed package of changes in May 1990 that would combine a small dose of free-market liberalization with continued tight government regulation. It stopped short of the systemic transformation that many experts said was necessary to stop the Soviet Union’s worsening economic crisis.
Amid growing lines at markets and shortages of food — particularly potatoes, a national staple — protesters began appearing outside the Kremlin, calling for Mr. Ryzhkov’s resignation. The protests soon spread to other cities. Warning that the country was sliding into chaos, Mr. Gorbachev in July fired Mr. Ryzhkov from the Politburo of the Communist Party.
In September, Mr. Gorbachev announced a plan to dismantle the Communist economic monolith and install a free-market economy within 500 days. Prices were to be gradually loosened from state control, industries were to be privatized, farms and companies to be sold or leased as private property, and job guarantees to be abolished in favor of the labor market.
Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Republic, sided with Mr. Gorbachev’s 500-day plan and urged even stronger measures, including a banking and stock exchange system and greater autonomy for politically restless republics.
Mr. Ryzhkov also advocated a slower, more cautious retreat from central controls as a more prudent course toward free markets. He wanted tighter controls on property prices and ownership, warning of massive job displacement if free-market proposals were adopted too quickly. But it was too late for such arguments. The Soviet Union had already dissolved into coups and uprisings in the republics.
In his book, “Gorbachev: His Life and Times” (2017), historian William Taubman said tensions had boiled over into a heated confrontation between Mr. Ryzhkov and Mr. Gorbachev after a Yeltsin deputy bluntly demanded Mr. Ryzhkov to resign.
“If I have to go,” cried Mr. Ryzhkov, “so should everyone else. We have all contributed to the collapse, the blood, the economic chaos. We are all responsible. Why should I be the only scapegoat?’ And he warned Mr. Gorbachev: “Go ahead. Run the government yourself! Then the next blow will be against you.”
Western analysts said Mr. Gorbachev needed someone to blame for the financial mess of the late 1980s and the coming reversals in market reform moves. In November 1990, he created a new power structure in which he would rule with the leaders of the republics. There was no place in the new scheme for Mr Ryzhkov. Kremlin watchers said this meant his forced retirement.
A month later, Mr. Ryzhkov suffered 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 protégé of Gorbachev, who assumed the new title of prime minister.
By spring, a resilient Mr. Ryzhkov was seeking to return to power. The Communist Party wanted a strong candidate for the presidential election of the Russian Federation and chose Mr. Ryzhkov to run against Mr. Yeltsin, the highly favored candidate of the reformist movement of Democratic Russia. Mr. Ryzhkov won only 17 percent of the vote and conceded 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 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 Mechanical Engineering School in Kramatorsk and worked as a shop steward, railway department head and mine foreman.
He joined the Communist Party in 1956 and in 1959 graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). He started as a welder at the nearby Uralmash heavy machinery plant and slowly rose through the ranks. He became chief engineer in 1965, then deputy plant manager and, in 1970, plant manager.
He moved to Moscow in 1975 as first deputy in the Ministry of Heavy and Mechanical Transport, was appointed first deputy chairman of the State Planning Commission of the USSR in 1979, and two years later was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1982 he was promoted to the Party Secretariat as head of its financial department.
Mr. Ryzhkov’s main patron was Yuri V. Andropov, general secretary of the Communist Party and a mentor to Mr. Gorbachev.
When Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, he appointed Mr. Ryzhkov as a full member of the Politburo before naming him prime minister, replacing 80-year-old Nikolai A. Tikhonov, a remnant of the Kremlin gerontology left by the former Soviet leader. Leonid I. Brezhnev.
Mr. Ryzhkov quickly allied 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 at risk of radiation, and the Armenian earthquake, when he hugged weeping survivors and berated officials for incompetence.
Mr Ryzhkov was married to Lyudmila Sergeyevna Ryzhkova. They had a daughter, Marina. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
After his years in government, Mr Ryzhkov faded into Russia’s leftist old guard, eventually leading a small communist faction in Parliament called Power to the People. He was a frequent critic of Mr. Yeltsin and others as they pursued their quasi-capitalist ambitions.
