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Russian politician Nikolai Ryzhkov, member of the Politburo and former head of government of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 94.

This was announced on Wednesday by the President of the Council of the Russian Federation, Valentina Matviyenko, in Moscow. Ryzhkov only resigned as senator in the Federation Council in October after twenty years. Ryzhkov, born on September 28, 1929, ended his term in the Senate ‘prematurely’, as the daily ‘Vedomosti’ reported at the time.

Ryzhkov was the last chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers under former Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. From 1985 onwards he was significantly involved in Gorbachev’s reform policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (transformation). The politician wrote the book ‘My Boss Gorbachev: The True Story of a Downfall’, which was also published in German in 2013.

“Vedomosti” praised Ryzhkov, born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, as one of the key decision-makers in the final years of the Soviet Union, which collapsed more than three decades ago. After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986, he led the crisis team to remove the consequences of the nuclear disaster.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ryzhkov was defeated by Boris Yeltsin as a communist candidate in the 1991 presidential elections. Initially he represented the border region of Belgorod in Ukraine as a member of the State Duma in the 1990s and, after several attempts at other positions, became a member of the Senate in 2003. (sda/dpa)