How did Boris Yeltsin rise to the top as a Soviet Communist Party official? How did he come to fall out with Mikhail Gorbachev ? In 1987, when Yeltsin was the Moscow Party boss, he got into a bitter struggle with the deputy leader of the Soviet Party, Yegor Ligachev. Gorbachev sided with Ligachev and, in the privacy of the Moscow Party building, together they had Yeltsin laid low. His political career seemed to be at an end.