Ryzhkov, Nikolai Ivanovich 1929-
Soviet politician

Born in the Urals industrial region, he began his working life as a miner before studying engineering at the Urals Polytechnic in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). He then worked his way up from welding foreman in a local heavy machine-building plant to head of the giant Uralmash engineering conglomerate, the largest industrial enterprise in the USSR. A member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) since 1956, in 1975 he went to Moscow to work as first Deputy Minister for Heavy Transport and Machine Building. Four years later, he became first deputy chairman of Gosplan, and in 1982 was inducted into the CPSU secretariat as head of economic affairs by Yuri Andropov. He was brought into the politburo by Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1985 and made Prime Minister in September, with a special brief to restructure the discredited state planning process. More cautious in his approach to reform than Gorbachev, and considerably less flamboyant than Boris Yeltsin, he was viewed as a steadying and stable influence in overcoming the economic and constitutional problems that blighted Gorbachev's reformed USSR. He stepped down as Prime Minister in 1991.