Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo on March 11, 1985, just over four hours after his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko died at the age of 73.[ Gorbachev, aged 54, was the youngest member of the Politburo. His initial goal as general secretary was to revive the stagnating Soviet economy, and he realized that doing so would require reforming underlying political and social structures.
On July 1, 1985, Gorbachev sidelined his main rival by removing Grigory Romanov from the Politburo and brought Boris Yeltsin into the Central Committee Secretariat. On December 23, 1985, Gorbachev appointed Yeltsin First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party replacing Viktor Grishin.