The New York Times reports: former Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Yegor Ligachev has died

Actually, he died four years ago. But the editors of the main American newspaper believe that no one knew about this outside Russia

On December 3, The New York Times published an obituary for former Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Yegor Ligachev, who died four and a half years ago - in May 2021.

In its obituary, the publication introduced Ligachev as “the second-highest ranking party figure in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s” who “first supported and then sharply opposed Mikhail Gorbachev’s sweeping reforms that led to the country’s political collapse in 1991.”

The New York Times explained the publication four years later by saying that Ligachev’s death “did not receive widespread coverage outside Russia.” The newspaper admitted that it only now “learned about this by looking at a pre-prepared obituary.”

Ligachev was born in 1920 in the Novosibirsk region, and began his political career immediately after the Great Patriotic War. For 18 years - from 1965 to 1983 - he was the first secretary of the Tomsk Regional Committee of the CPSU, and then moved to work in Moscow, where he was elected secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. In this position, for several years he was actually the second most influential person in the party and in the country, after Mikhail Gorbachev.

Ligachev initially actively supported perestroika and Gorbachev’s reforms, but by 1988 he switched to more conservative positions, after which he lost his post as Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. In the last years of the USSR’s existence, he was one of the most active critics of Gorbachev’s course, and already in the 1990s he called his “biggest personnel mistake” supporting Gorbachev’s candidacy for the post of head of the USSR in 1985. In independent Russia, he was an ordinary member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, including from 1999 to 2003 - a State Duma deputy from this party.

Ligachev, among other things, is known as the author of one of the most famous catchphrases of the perestroika era. In 1988, at the 19th Party Conference of the CPSU, Boris Yeltsin harshly criticized the party leadership, accusing it of a lack of democracy and slow implementation of reforms. Ligachev answered him: “You, Boris, did not make the right political conclusions.”

Subsequently, until the end of the 1990s, this phrase, shortened to “Boris, you’re wrong!”, was regularly used by both Yeltsin’s opponents and his supporters (in the opposite form - “Boris, you’re right!”).

Ligachev died on May 7, 2021, six months after his 100th birthday.