Alexei Kosygin

Biography

Alexei Kosygin was born in Saint Petersburg in 1904 to a working-class family. Drafted into a labour army at fourteen during the Civil War, he then attended a cooperative technical school and worked for six years in consumer cooperatives in Novosibirsk. He joined the Communist Party in 1927, graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute in 1935 and rose fast during the purges, becoming chairman of the Leningrad city soviet in 1938 and a people's commissar in 1939.

In the Second World War he organised the evacuation of more than 1,500 factories eastward and the ice road and pipeline across Lake Ladoga to besieged Leningrad. He headed the Russian republic's government from 1943 to 1946, was briefly Soviet finance minister in 1948 and joined the Politburo, but narrowly survived the Leningrad affair and lost ground in Stalin's last years.

Under Khrushchev he chaired the State Planning Committee and from 1960 was first deputy premier. When Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964 Kosygin became chairman of the Council of Ministers, sharing power with Brezhnev and Podgorny. He launched the 1965 economic reform, which gave enterprises more autonomy, mediated the Tashkent Declaration between India and Pakistan in 1966, and met Lyndon Johnson at Glassboro in 1967.

After the Prague Spring of 1968 his reforms stalled and Brezhnev eclipsed him, but he stayed in office until ill health forced his retirement in October 1980. He died two months later and is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.