#11
The Times (UK)
JANUARY 10 2002
Obituary
Lev Zaikov
Moscow Communist Party boss in an era of transition

LEV ZAIKOV was perhaps best known as the man who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as Communist Party boss in Moscow when Yeltsin broke with the party leadership in the autumn of 1987.

Lev Nikolaevich Zaikov was born in the Russian city of Tula but spent most of his life in Leningrad. Before becoming a politician he had made his career in military industry, working his way up from the shop floor to becoming a factory manager by 1961. From 1974 until 1976 he was general manager of a large industrial association in the Leningrad region.

Zaikov, who was a capable administrator and not much concerned with ideology, had joined the Communist Party in 1957, but it was not until 1976 that he moved from an industrial to a political post. From that year until 1983 he was chairman of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Soviet. In those days, however, the head of the local Soviet was not the equivalent of the mayor in post-Soviet Russia, but, rather, number two in the hierarchy to the Party First Secretary. Accordingly, it was another promotion for Zaikov when he became First Secretary of the more powerful Leningrad regional party committee in succession to Grigory Romanov in 1983.

Thus Zaikov had already achieved some experience of local administration before the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, brought him to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee in 1985 and promoted him to full membership of the Politburo a year later. Within the party leadership Zaikov was responsible for overseeing the military and the armaments industry and was also, accordingly, involved in discussions about arms control.

When Boris Yeltsin, who was First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party organisation from 1985 to 1987 ventured criticism of the way perestroika was going in an unscheduled speech at a Central Committee meeting, he was replaced in that office by Zaikov.

Although a pragmatic official, Zaikov had no chance of competing with Yeltsin for the hearts of Muscovites, for by daring to challenge the party hierarchy Yeltsin had established a reputation for courage and independence. Moreover, his well-publicised populist gestures — such as occasionally travelling by bus or metro — had given him a near-hero status in the late 1980s. For a time, moreover, Zaikov had not only to compete with the popular image of Yeltsin but also to combine his city responsibilities with the sensitive post of overseer of the military.

Zaikov was replaced as Moscow Party First Secretary in 1989 and removed from all his leadership positions, including Politburo membership, in 1990 in the course of Gorbachev’s transfer of power from party to state institutions. He took no further part in political life and returned to Leningrad (soon to reacquire its pre-revolutionary name of St Petersburg), where he lived out the first decade of post-Soviet Russia as a pensioner.

Lev Zaikov, member of the Soviet Politburo, 1986-1990, was born in Tula, Russia, on April 3, 1923. He died in St Petersburg on January 7, 2002, aged 78.