Alexei Kosygin
Alexei Kosygin | |
|---|---|
Алексей Косыгин | |
Kosygin in 1965 | |
| 8th Premier of the Soviet Union | |
| In office 15 October 1964 – 23 October 1980 | |
| President | Anastas Mikoyan Nikolai Podgorny Leonid Brezhnev |
| Deputy |
|
| Leader | Leonid Brezhnev |
| Preceded by | Nikita Khrushchev |
| Succeeded by | Nikolai Tikhonov |
| First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union | |
| In office 4 May 1960 – 15 October 1964 | |
| Premier | Nikita Khrushchev |
| Preceded by | Frol Kozlov |
| Succeeded by | Dmitriy Ustinov |
| Chairman of the State Planning Committee | |
| In office 20 March 1959 – 4 May 1960 | |
| Premier | Nikita Khrushchev |
| Preceded by | Joseph Kuzmin |
| Succeeded by | Vladimir Novikov |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 21 February [O.S. 8 February] 1904 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire |
| Died | 18 December 1980 (aged 76) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Resting place | Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow |
| Citizenship | Soviet |
| Political party | Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1927–1980) |
| Spouse | Klavdia Andreyevna (died 1967) |
| Residence | House on the Embankment |
| Profession | Teacher, civil servant[1] |
| Awards | |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | Russian SFSR |
| Branch/service | Red Army |
| Years of service | 1919–1921[2] |
| Rank | Conscript |
| Commands | Red Army |
| Battles/wars | Russian Civil War |
Central institution membership
Other political offices held
| |
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin[a] (21 February [O.S. 8 February] 1904–18 December 1980) was a Soviet statesman who served as the Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1964 to 1980. Following Khrushchev’s removal from power, he briefly led the Soviet Union as part of a triumvirate in the mid-to-late 1960s.
Kosygin was born in the city of Saint Petersburg in 1904 to a Russian working-class family. He was conscripted into the labour army during the Russian Civil War, and after the Red Army's demobilization in 1921, he worked in Siberia as an industrial manager. Kosygin returned to Leningrad in the early 1930s and worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), Kosygin was tasked by the State Defence Committee with moving Soviet industry out of territories soon to be overrun by the German Army. He served as Minister of Finance for a year before becoming Minister of Light Industry (later, Minister of Light Industry and Food). Stalin removed Kosygin from the Politburo one year before his own death in 1953, intentionally weakening Kosygin's position within the Soviet hierarchy.
Following Stalin's death in 1953, Kosygin was appointed to the position of chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) on 20 March 1959. Kosygin next became First Deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. When Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964, Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev succeeded him as Premier and First Secretary, respectively. Thereafter, he formed a triumvirate (troika) alongside Brezhnev and CC Secretary Nikolai Podgorny that led the Soviet Union in Khrushchev's place.
During the years immediately following Khrushchev's ouster, Kosygin initially emerged as first among equals within the Soviet leadership.[3][4][5][6] In addition to managing the Soviet Union's economy, he assumed a leading role in directing the country's foreign policy.[7][8] However, the onset of the Prague Spring in 1968 sparked a severe backlash against his policies, thereby enabling Leonid Brezhnev to eclipse him as the dominant force within the Politburo. While he and Brezhnev disliked one another, he remained in office until being forced to retire on 23 October 1980, due to bad health. He died two months later on 18 December 1980.
- ^ Law 1975, p. 214.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
saddeathwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Zubok, Vladislav M. (2009) [2007]. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-8078-5958-2.
...[T]he Soviet leader surrendered without a fight, and the plenum ratified Khrushchev's ouster without discussing his foreign policy record. As it turned out, the new leadership had no consensus on foreign affairs. [¶] The new rulers felt even less confident in foreign affairs than Stalin's lieutenants had ten years earlier. First Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin, and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Nikolai Podgorny had very little experience in international affairs or the issues of international security...[¶]The role of leading Soviet statesman fell by default to Kosygin, whose background lay exclusively in domestic economy...
- ^ Brown, Archie, ed. (1990). The Soviet Union: A Biographical Dictionary. London, United Kingdom: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. ISBN 0-297-82010-9.
...It was only when Khrushchev was removed from all his offices that in October 1964 Kosygin finally became Chairman of the Council of Ministers and was seen as one of the top two Soviet leaders, along with Brezhnev who became party chief.[¶]Throughout the remainder of the 1960s Kosygin acted like a Prime Minister in the full sense of the term and it was he who engaged in highest-level talks on behalf of the Soviet Union with President Lyndon Johnson,...President Charles de Gaulle, and with the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. It was only from the beginning of the 1970s that Brezhnev took over these functions and made increasingly clear that he was the senior partner in the party-government duo.
- ^ Pearson, Raymond (1998). The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. MacMillan Press Ltd. pp. 71–72. ISBN 978-0-333-60628-5.
Khrushchev was succeeded by the dual partnership of Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev. Like the 'collective leadership' of 1953-55, this partnership was intended to signal a break with the personality cult of their predecessor but again turned out to be an interim arrangement...from which a single dominant personality emerged...Who that new leader would be was uncertain for a few years after 1964. Comparisons with the last leadership contest during 1953-55 indicated that Brezhnev, as the new First Secretary of the CPSU, filled the winning Khrushchev role, while Kosygin, as a representative of the apparat, played the losing Malenkov role. And yet Kosygin appeared to be the senior in the partnership, insisting on an immediate warming of diplomatic relations with the West and a prosecution of economic de-Stalinisation, especially in industry, on a scale which Khrushchev himself had never attempted...Brezhnev may have made no secret of his reservations about domestic de-Stalinisation but seemed content to play the junior in the partnership for the time being.
- ^ McCauley, Martin (1993). The Soviet Union 1917–1991. Longman. p. 288. ISBN 0582-01323-2.
Brezhnev began as a member of a collective leadership in 1964 but had become primus inter pares (first among equals) by the early 1970s...It took him longer than Khrushchev to establish his dominance but he chose to accumulate power gradually rather than adopt the high-risk strategy of his predecessor. Between 1964 and 1968 he had to play second fiddle to Aleksei Kosygin who, as Prime Minister, took the lead in economic reform and foreign policy.
- ^ Mendras, Marie (1989). "Policy Outside and Politics Inside". In Brown, Archie (ed.). Political Leadership in the Soviet Union. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. p. 143. ISBN 0-253-21228-6.
- ^ McCauley 1993, p. 288.
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