Aleksey Kosygin

Aleksey Kosygin (1904-1980), chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a position equivalent to that of premier, from 1964 to 1980. Aleksey Nikolayevich Kosygin was born in Saint Petersburg (called Leningrad from 1924 to 1991) into a working-class Russian family. He fought in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) and joined the Communist Party in 1927. He was educated at the Leningrad Cooperatives Technicum and the Leningrad Textile Institute, where he earned an engineer’s diploma in 1935. After a brief career in trade and light industry, he was promoted in 1938 to a post in the party’s Leningrad branch, becoming chairman of the executive committee of the city council, the top municipal government post.

Kosygin worked in the Soviet central government from 1939 until leader Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, serving at various times as chief of the textile industry, organizer of the wartime evacuation of factories, minister of finance, and, in 1940, deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (which later became the Council of Ministers). While in charge of wartime evacuations, Kosygin helped 500,000 people escape from Leningrad during the two-and-a-half year siege (August 1941-January 1944) by German forces during World War II. He became a member of the party’s Central Committee in 1939, sat on the policymaking Politburo as a nonvoting member from 1946 to 1948, and was a full member from 1948 to 1952.

Kosygin was under a political cloud in Stalin’s final years due to the purge and arrest of officials with whom he had served in Leningrad. Under Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, Kosygin held a string of senior offices and returned to the Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966) as a nonvoting member in 1957 and a full member in 1960. He specialized in industrial management and economic planning, acquiring a reputation for competence and consistency in these areas. Although Kosygin had only a secondary role in the overthrow of Khrushchev by his fellow leaders in October 1964, he benefited from the change when he became their choice to replace Khrushchev as chairman of the Council of Ministers, or premier. His influence at first rivaled that of the new general secretary of the party, Leonid Brezhnev. However, Brezhnev asserted his primacy by 1970 and used his powers as general secretary to cut out rivals and put favorites of his own in high positions. Kosygin’s main initiative as premier was to introduce a reorganization of Soviet industry in 1965 that aimed to streamline planning procedures and give material rewards to productive executives and workers. The reform was watered down within a few years, as Kosygin’s political position declined, and was abandoned completely in the early 1970s. He resigned in October 1980 to make way for an associate of Brezhnev, Nikolay Tikhonov. Kosygin died later that year.