Paul Goble
Staunton, November 29 – Today, Yegor Ligachev reached a milestone no other member of the Soviet Politburo ever did: he celebrated his 100th birthday, prompting Russians to recall his role in perestroika and his opposition to Boris Yeltsin, to whom he once addressed the now famous words, “Boris, you are not right,” your policies are destructive not constructive.
Born in Novosibirsk Oblast in 1920, Ligachev graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1943 and the Higher Party School in 1949. He began his rise through the Soviet leadership in the Komsomol and then the CPSU, before being dropped as a party secretary and removed from the Politburo in 1990.
After 1991, Ligachev served as a member of the KPRF central committee between 1993 and 2013 and as a member of the Duma between 1999 and 2003. In 2013 after heart surgery, he retired from public life, surfacing again only in 2018 when he urged that the airport in Tomsk not be named for him (newizv.ru/news/society/29-11-2020/avtoru-slov-boris-ty-ne-prav-egoru-ligachevu-ispolnilos-100-let).
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