Alexander Sizov

Alexander Alexandrovich Sizov was born on 12 September 1948 in the village of Volynkino in the Buysky District of Kostroma Oblast, in the family of a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. In the 1950s the family moved to Yaroslavl.

At the age of 16 he began work as an apprentice electrician at the Yaroslavl Motor Plant (YaMZ), and at 17 he became the Komsomol organiser of one of the plant's largest workshops. After finishing evening school he was sent by the plant to the Yaroslavl Technological Institute, now Yaroslavl State Technical University, where he was a group leader, a member of the Komsomol committee and chairman of the institute's trade union committee. He graduated in 1972 as a mechanical engineer. In 1986 he also completed studies in political science at the Higher Party School.

After graduating he returned to the Yaroslavl Motor Plant as a foreman and then senior foreman, and became secretary of the plant's Komsomol committee. In 1975 he took charge of the Yaroslavl city committee of the Komsomol, and in 1979 he moved into Communist Party work, heading the industry and transport department of the Leninsky district party committee until 1982.

From 1982 he held senior posts in the district administration, as first deputy chairman (1982 to 1985) and then chairman (1985 to 1992) of the executive committee of the Leninsky District Council of People's Deputies. From January 1991 to February 1992 he was also chairman of the Leninsky district council. He was elected several times to the Yaroslavl city council between 1976 and 1992.

From 1992 to 1999 he was deputy mayor of Yaroslavl for management and international relations, work for which he received the Order of Friendship in 1998.

In 1999 he was elected to the State Duma on the federal list of the Fatherland and All Russia bloc, and in 2003 he was re-elected on the United Russia list for the Yaroslavl, Ivanovo and Kostroma regions. He served from January 2000 to December 2007. In the third Duma he worked on the committee for CIS affairs and relations with compatriots; in the fourth he was deputy chairman of the committee on women, family and children and a member of the counting commission. For eight years he was also a deputy of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union State of Belarus and Russia, where he worked on economic questions and promoted a programme to modernise Yaroslavl's diesel and automotive plants. One of the achievements credited to his time in parliament was federal funding for a polyclinic for residents of the Leninsky and Kirovsky districts of Yaroslavl, which opened in 2006.

After his Duma term ended he was appointed deputy mayor of Yaroslavl, representing the mayor's office in state bodies. On 2 March 2008 he was elected to the Yaroslavl Regional Duma for single-member constituency No. 6, and until 2013 he chaired its committee on deputies' activity, ethics and rules. In 2013 he was appointed adviser to the governor of Yaroslavl Oblast on relations with political parties and public organisations, and he later advised the head of the Tutaev municipal district.

In 2016 he became head of the regional public organisation Vospitanniki Komsomola, Moyo Otechestvo, and from 2018 he chaired the board of the Fund for the Development of Yaroslavl and Yaroslavl Oblast. In July 2023 he was appointed an assistant to the mayor of Yaroslavl.

The death of Alexander Sizov was announced on 21 October 2026 by Mikhail Borovitsky, chairman of the Yaroslavl Regional Duma. He was 78 and died in Yaroslavl. The cause of death was not made public in the first reports.

Borovitsky said that Sizov had devoted his life to serving people and his native Yaroslavl land, had remained active in public life until his last days, and had earned the respect of colleagues and the trust of the region's residents. The death was reported by Kommersant, Argumenty i Fakty, Komsomolskaya Pravda, 76.ru, Yarcube and Yarreg.

Sizov is remembered in Yaroslavl as a politician whose career ran from the factory floor of the Yaroslavl Motor Plant through Soviet district government to the federal parliament. Tributes credited him with securing money to modernise major industrial enterprises in the region, with the polyclinic for the Leninsky and Kirovsky districts, and with helping the restoration of the Yaroslavl Big Manufactory and of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul. He held the Order of Friendship (1998) and the medal of the Order For Merit to the Fatherland, second class (2005), and was an honorary citizen of Tutaev (2011).