Yakov Ryabov

Yakov Petrovich Ryabov was a Soviet politician, party functionary and diplomat. A long-serving regional party leader in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, he was First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1971 to 1976, in which capacity he promoted the career of Boris Yeltsin, whom he proposed as his successor in the post. He served as Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU from 1976 to 1979, supervising the defense industry and the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union, before holding senior economic posts and serving as Ambassador of the Soviet Union to France from 1986 to 1990.