Yegor Ligachev

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Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev (Его́р Кузьми́ч Лигачёв) (born November 29, 1920) is a Russian politician, who was a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Originally a protege of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ligachev became a potential challenger to his leadership.

Ligachev had been first secretary of the party in Tomsk, Siberia when he was discovered by Yuri Andropov and brought to Moscow to become head of the Central Committee's Department for Organizational Party Work. He was promoted to the position of Central Committee secretary and, as such, helped organize a pro-Gorbachev faction within the party in the hopes of putting Gorbachev in a position to succeed Andropov. The faction was not strong enough to elect Gorbachev when Andropov died, however, and Konstantin Chernenko was chosen as a compromise, stop-gap candidate.

Once Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 he promoted Ligachev to be his second in command. However, once Gorbachev began to institute his glasnost and perestroika reform programs, Ligachev gradually became an opponent of Gorbachev's by 1988 and leader of the Kremlin's conservative faction.

In 1990 Ligachev criticized Gorbachev for establishing a Soviet Presidency as a means of circumventing the party and also argued that glasnost had gone too far and that press freedoms should be curtailed. The conflict between the two men culminated at a party congress held in July where Ligachev stood against Gorbachev for the general secretaryship as the "Leninist" candidate. On losing the election (the first to be contested since Stalin's time) Ligachev left the party leadership and went into retirement.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ligachev was elected three times to the Russian Duma as a member for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and became the Duma's equivalent of the Father of the House (i.e. its oldest member).