Alexei Kosygin
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin 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.
Alexei Kosygin was born in the city of Saint Petersburg in 1904 to a Russian working-class family. During the Russian Civil War, he was conscripted into the labour army. After the Red Army's demobilization in 1921, he worked in Siberia as an industrial manager. In the early 1930s, Kosygin returned to Leningrad and worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. During the Great Patriotic War, 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. However, in 1952, Stalin removed Kosygin from the Politburo, thereby weakening Kosygin's position within the Soviet hierarchy.
Following Stalin's death in 1953, Kosygin was appointed chairman of the State Planning Committee on 20 March 1959. Later, in 1960, he was promoted First Deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. When Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power on 14 October 1964, Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev succeeded him as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and First Secretary of the Communist Party respectively. He then formed a triumvirate alongside Brezhnev and CC Secretary Nikolai Podgorny that led the Soviet regime in Khrushchev's place.
Upon Khrushchev's ouster, Alexei Kosygin initially emerged as the Soviet Union's head of government in both name and practice. In addition to overseeing the country's economy, he assumed a preeminent role in directing its foreign policy. However, in 1968, the Prague Spring triggered a massive backlash against his reforms, thereby enabling Leonid Brezhnev to eclipse him as the dominant force within the Soviet leadership. Despite having his standing significantly weakened in the Kremlin, Kosygin was allowed by Brezhnev to remain in office until his retirement on 15 October 1980 due to bad health. He died two months later on 18 December 1980.
Early life
Kosygin was born into a Russian working-class family consisting of his father and mother and his siblings. The family lived in Saint Petersburg. Kosygin was baptized one month after his birth. He lost his mother in infancy and was brought up by his father.He and his father sympathized with the Revolution and Alexei was conscripted into a labour army on the Bolshevik side at the age of 14 during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. After demobilization from the Red Army in 1921, Kosygin attended the Leningrad Co-operative Technical School and found work in the system of consumer co-operatives in Novosibirsk, Siberia. When asked why he worked in the co-operative sector of the economy, Kosygin replied, quoting a slogan of Vladimir Lenin: "Co-operation – the path to socialism!" Kosygin stayed there for six years until Robert Eikhe advised him to quit, shortly before the repressions hit the Soviet consumer co-operation movement.
Early career
Pre-war period
He applied for a membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1927 and returned to Leningrad in 1930 to study at the ; he graduated in 1935. After finishing his studies, Kosygin worked as a foreman and later a manager in a textile mill director. He rose rapidly during the Great Purge, overseen in Leningrad by the provincial communist party boss, Andrei Zhdanov. He was appointed director of the October Textile Factory in 1937, head of the Industry and Transport department of the Leningrad provincial communist party in July 1938, and in October 1938, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviets of Working People's Deputies, i.e. 'mayor' of Leningrad City. In 1939, he was appointed People's Commissar for Textile and Industry and earned a seat on the Central Committee. In 1940 Kosygin became a Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars.Wartime
Kosygin was appointed by the State Defence Committee to manage critically important missions during the Great Patriotic War.As deputy chairman of the Council of Evacuation, he had the task of evacuating industry from territories about to be overrun by the Axis. Under his command 1,523 factories were evacuated eastwards, as well as huge volumes of raw materials, ready-made goods and equipment. Kosygin managed clearing of congestions on the railways in order to maintain their stable operation.
During the Leningrad Blockade he was sent to his hometown to manage the construction of an ice road and a pipeline across Lake Ladoga. This allowed to evacuate some half million people from the besieged and starving city, and to supply fuel to its factories and power plants. He was also responsible for the procurement of locally available firewood.
In 1943 Alexey Kosygin was promoted to Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR. In 1944 he was appointed to head the Currency Board of the Soviet Union.
Afterwar period
Kosygin became a candidate member of the Politburo in 1946. During the Soviet famine of 1946–47 He headed the foodstuff relief missions to the most suffering regions. He was appointed USSR Minister for Finance in February 1948, and a full member of the Politburo on 4 September 1948, putting him among the dozen or so most ranking officials in the USSR.Kosygin's administrative skills led Stalin to take the younger man under his wing. Stalin shared information with Kosygin, such as how much money the families of Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Lazar Kaganovich possessed, spent and paid their staff. Stalin sent Kosygin to each home to put their houses into "proper order".
Temporary fall
Kosygin's patron, Zhdanov, died suddenly in August 1948. Soon afterwards, Zhdanov's old rivals Lavrentiy Beria and Georgy Malenkov persuaded Stalin to let them remove members of the decapitated Zhdanov faction, of whom the three most prominent were Nikolai Voznesensky, then Chairman of the State Planning Committee and a First Deputy Premier, Alexey Kuznetsov, the party secretary with oversight over the security, and Kosygin. During the brutal purge that followed, known as the Leningrad affair, Voznesensky, Kuznetsov and many others were arrested and shot. Kosygin was relegated to the post of USSR Minister for Light Industry, while nominally retaining his membership of the Politburo until 1952. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs:Kosygin told his son-in-law Mikhail Gvishiani, an NKVD officer, of the accusations leveled against Voznesensky because of his possession of firearms. Gvishiani and Kosygin threw all their weapons into a lake and searched both their own houses for any listening devices. They found one at Kosygin's house, but it might have been installed to spy on Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had lived there before him. According to his memoirs, Kosygin never left his home without reminding his wife what to do if he did not return from work. After living two years in constant fear, the family reached the conclusion that Stalin would not harm them.
Khrushchev era
In September 1953, six months after Stalin's death, Kosygin was appointed USSR Minister for Industrial Goods, and in December he was reinstated as a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, under Malenkov, Stalin's immediate successor, but lost that position in December 1956, during Khrushchev's ascendancy, when he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the State Economic Commission. When the power struggle between Khrushchev and the so-called 'Anti-Party Group' came to a head in 1957, Kosygin backed Khrushchev because, as he said later, if Malenkov and his allies had won "blood would have flowed again", but the French journalist, a close observer who was based in Moscow at the time, concluded that "Kosygin did not owe anything to Khrushchev" and that out of the post-1957 leadership "was visibly the least willing to praise the First Secretary", and that Khrushchev was "somewhat reluctant" to promote Kosygin.However, despite Khrushchev's reluctance, Kosygin's career made a steady recovery. In June 1957, he was again appointed a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and a candidate member of the Presidium Central Committee. In March 1959, he was made Chairman of Gosplan, and on 4 May 1960, he was promoted First deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and a full member of the Presidium.
As First Deputy Premier Kosygin travelled abroad, mostly on trade missions, to countries such as North Korea, India, Argentina and Italy. Since 1959 Kosygin headed Soviet mission to the ComEcon. Later, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kosygin was the Soviet spokesman for improved relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. According to Michel Tatu, in 1960–62, Kosygin was one of the 'big four', with Khrushchev, Frol Kozlov and Leonid Brezhnev, who would be present in the Kremlin to greet visiting leaders of East European communist parties, implying, but in November 1962, after Khrushchev complained about the management of Gosplan, and opposed Kosygin's plans for economic reform, he was removed from the inner leadership.
Premiership
Struggle for power with Brezhnev
When Khrushchev was removed from power in October 1964, Kosygin replaced him as Premier as part of a collective leadership dynamic that included Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary and Nikolai Podgorny who ultimately became Chairman of the Presidium. Overall, the new Politburo adopted a more conservative outlook than that under Khrushchev's rule.Kosygin, Podgorny and Andrei Kirilenko were the most reformist members of the new Soviet leadership. Conversely, Brezhnev and Arvīds Pelše belonged to the moderate faction while Mikhail Suslov retained his leadership of the party's Stalinist wing.
In October 1964, at a ceremony in honour of Soviet cosmonauts, Brezhnev called for the strengthening of the Party apparatus. This speech was only the beginning of a large campaign directed against Kosygin. Several newspapers, such as Pravda and Kommunist, criticized the work of the Council of Ministers, and indirectly Kosygin, its chairman, for planning the economy in an unrealistic fashion, and used the highly aggressive rhetoric previously used to condemn Khrushchev against Kosygin.
Brezhnev was able to criticize Kosygin by contrasting him with Vladimir Lenin, who – Brezhnev claimed – had been more interested in improving the conditions of Soviet agriculture than improving the quality of light industrial goods. Kosygin's support for producing more consumer goods was also criticized by Brezhnev, and his supporters, most notably Konstantin Chernenko, for being a return to quasi First World policies. At the 23rd Party Congress, Kosygin's position was weakened when Brezhnev's supporters were able to increase expenditure on defense and agriculture. However, Brezhnev did not have a majority in the Politburo, and could count on only four votes. In the Politburo, Kosygin could count on Kiril Mazurov's vote, and when Kosygin and Podgorny were not bickering with each other, they actually had a majority in the Politburo over Brezhnev. Unfortunately for Kosygin this was not often the case, and Kosygin and Podgorny were constantly disagreeing on policy.
Kosygin's position in the Soviet leadership was ultimately weakened following his enactment of several economic initiatives in 1965 that collectively came to be known within the Party as the "Kosygin reforms". Due largely to coinciding with the political upheaval created by the Prague Spring, the reforms provoked a backlash among the party's old guard who proceeded to flock to Brezhnev and strengthen his position within the Soviet leadership. By March 1971, it became apparent that Brezhnev was the leader of the country, with Kosygin as the spokesman of the five-year plan and Podgorny's position within the collective leadership strengthened.