Grigory Romanov, chief rival of Gorbachev in 1980s; at 85
MOSCOW - Grigory Romanov, a Politburo member who was Mikhail Gorbachev's chief rival to become Soviet leader in the mid-1980s, has died, the Communist Party said yesterday. He was 85.
The party said Mr. Romanov died in Moscow, where he had lived in retirement since losing out to Gorbachev in 1985. No date or cause of death were given.
Mr. Romanov became a full member of the ruling Politburo in 1976, when the Soviet Union was led by Leonid Brezhnev, who treated him as his successor.
"Leonid Ilyich [Brezhnev] often told me: 'You, Grigory, will take my place,' " the Russkaya Zhizn magazine quoted him as saying last year in a hospital interview. "And he told [Cuban leader] Fidel Castro that it will be Romanov."
But when Brezhnev died in 1982, he was succeeded by KGB chief Yuri Andropov.
Andropov brought Mr. Romanov to Moscow, ending his 13 years as powerful regional party boss in Leningrad, and later promoted him to a position overseeing the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex.
Mr. Romanov maintained his Politburo post after Andropov's death, during the short rule of Konstantin Chernenko. But he was ousted shortly after Gorbachev took over in 1985, as the new Soviet leader was consolidating his power.
Mr. Romanov was undermined in part by a scandal over his daughter's 1974 wedding in Leningrad. As the struggle for power heated up in the 1980s, reports surfaced saying that the wedding party had been held in the 18th century Tauride Palace and the dinner served on imperial table service borrowed from the Hermitage, much of which was smashed by the guests. Mr. Romanov denied the report, saying the wedding party had been held at home, and described it as a deliberate attack by Gorbachev and his supporters.
As the story went, one of the wedding guests accidentally dropped a glass, and this was taken as the signal of the start of an old Russian tradition of smashing glassware in the fireplace.
In her memoir, Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister, said that when considering the future of the Soviet Union in 1983, she was at first intrigued by the prospect of a return to the Kremlin of a Romanov, the family name of the czars. But she changed her mind, saying that although he appeared to be an effective leader, he had also earned the reputation of a hard-line Marxist with an extravagant lifestyle.
"And I confess that when I read about those priceless crystal glasses from the Hermitage being smashed at the celebration of his daughter's wedding, some of the attraction of the name was lost as well," Thatcher wrote in "The Downing Street Years."
Mr. Romanov was honored yesterday by the current leadership of St. Petersburg, as the city is once again called. In an official obituary, Mr. Romanov is praised for introducing successful poultry farms, developing the industrial plants that became the mainstay of the region's economy and building residential housing at breakneck speed.
A St. Petersburg Communist leader said Mr. Romanov would have taken the Soviet Union down a different path.
"If Romanov had come to power, there wouldn't have been such a mess in the country in the second half of the 1980s," Vladimir Fyodorov said.
In the hospital interview, Mr. Romanov said his wish was to visit Castro in Cuba, where he had been four times. "Fidel is the only foreigner whom I can call a friend, and I knew many of them," he was quoted as saying.
