Yegor Kuz'mich Ligachev (born 1920) was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union beginning in 1966. During the 1980s he became a leading advocate of a more conservative approach to perestroika but was ousted from command in 1990.

At the stormy and controversial 28th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in July 1990, Yegor Ligachev, a member of Mikhail Gorbachev's Politburo since 1985 and secretary of the Central Committee with responsibilities in agriculture, stood up to denounce the general course of the U.S.S.R. since 1985. He no doubt expressed the frustrations of many long-time party loyalists when he stated: "Thoughtless radicalism, improvisation, and swinging from side to side have yielded us little good during the past five years of perestroika." At the Congress, Ligachev presented himself as the spokesperson for traditional Marxist-Leninist, socialist values developed since 1917, in distinction to the...