Grigori Romanov will be remembered best as the hardline apparatchik who, in 1985, was Mikhail Gorbachev’s main rival in the race to succeed Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader, after the latter’s death on March 10, after only 13 months in office.

By 1985 it had become clear to much of the party elite that there were crucial problems with the Soviet economic system, and that change was desperately needed to ensure the longer term health of the Soviet system overall. It is unlikely, however, that Romanov would have used words like glasnost or perestroika, concepts introduced by Gorbachev, or that he would have ushered in such sweeping changes.

Nevertheless, at the time, for many in the Kremlin, Gorbachev was seen as young, malleable and open to compromise. Romanov, in contrast, was the hardline, extravagant, Communist Party boss who ran Leningrad as his personal fief and who, by virtue of his position in Russia’s former capital, presented more of a potential threat to the Kremlin’s Moscow elites. In the event Gorbachev easily emerged the victor from their struggle.

Grigori Vasilievich Romanov was born in 1923, into a farming family in the Novgorod region. His father was wounded in the First World War and died in 1934. A good student, in 1938 Romanov finished secondary school with honours, joined the communist youth organisation, Komsomol, and entered the Leningrad shipbuilding technical institute. In 1941 Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and Romanov was called up.

During the war he served in military communications, surviving the 900-day Leningrad siege. Later in life he often talked of the courage people displayed and the despair they felt when the city’s largest bread stockpile was shelled.

Hospitalised with chronic malnutrition, he was visited by a young woman, Anya Stepanovna, whom he had been courting before the war, and whom he later married. After he had recovered, he returned to the front, and saw action on the Baltic at Riga and in Manchuria against the Japanese.

After the war he worked at the Zhdanov factory in Leningrad and developed his party career. By 1970 he had risen to first secretary of the Leningrad regional Communist party committee, and oversaw radical urban development plans.

He ordered work on flood defences, residential construction, the expansion of the Metro network, the completion of Leningrad sports centre, a “youth palace” on the banks of the Neva and a statue to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. During his tenure the Leningrad economy bucked the trend towards decline that was apparent in the national economy.

Leningrad was reasserting itself as a second capital and as a second political centre, and many present-day St Petersburg residents who are glad that Gorbachev, rather than Romanov, ended up running the country, remember Romanov’s work in the city with respect and affection.

Regional party success transformed him into a figure on the national stage. From 1976 he was a member of the Communist Party Central Committee’s politburo, and from 1983 he was a secretary of the central committee. He became Gorbachev’s main rival to take over as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from Chernenko and the rallying point for those who were worried that Gorbachev’s plans might prove too radical for the Soviet system to withstand.

Although at a speech to the Hungarian Communist Party Conference in 1985 he said he was keen to develop business ties with Western capitalist nations, he was equally adamant that this should not allow what he called imperialist forces to interfere in the Soviet bloc’s internal affairs. But he was defeated for the leadership by Gorbachev, and once the latter had come to power he made sure that there was no room in his new system for men like Romanov.

For Romanov and men like him, Gorbachev’s coming to power in March 1985 was both a national and a personal tragedy. Romanov had been the favourite of Chernenko’s predecessor as party leader, Yuri Andropov. But in addition to the uncertainty felt in Moscow regarding his suitability for the position of general secretary because of his extravagant lifestyle and alleged involvement in corruption, he engendered a certain degree of discomfort in the West. There, political sentiment backed Gorbachev — a younger man who stood for change.

Romanov had made many enemies among the intelligentsia, especially those in the theatre and performing arts. Actors accused Romanov of keeping a blacklist of Soviet and foreign artists who would not be allowed on television or radio, and of ordering the KGB to follow or bug them.

Romanov’s defeat led to his removal from politics in July 1985, after which he rarely sought to be involved in any way, although he did give interviews and enjoyed criticising the political elite for mismanagement and incompetence during the years that followed.

Grigori Romanov, Soviet politician, was born on February 7, 1923. He died on June 3, 2008, aged 85