ABSTRACT
Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). He graduated as a civil engineer in 1955 and joined the Communist Party in 1961. He rose in party ranks and in 1981 became a mem
ber of the party’s Central Committee. In 1985 the re formist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev brought him to Moscow as a department head (and soon a secretary) of the Central Committee. That December he became first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee.
