Alexei Kosygin
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin (Russian: Алексе́й Никола́евич Косы́гин, IPA: [ɐlʲɪkˈsʲej nʲɪkɐˈla(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ kɐˈsɨɡʲɪn]; 21 February [O.S. 8 February] 1904 – 18 December 1980)[3] was a Soviet statesman during the Cold War. He served as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1980 and was one of the most influential Soviet policymakers in the mid-1960s along with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.
"Kosygin" redirects here. For other uses, see Kosygin (disambiguation).
Alexei Kosygin
21 February [O.S. 8 February] 1904
Saint Petersburg, Russia
18 December 1980 (aged 76)
Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1927–1980)
Klavdia Andreyevna (died 1967)
Teacher, civil servant[1]
1919–1921[2]
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 a member of the State Defence Committee and was tasked 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.
Stalin died in 1953, and on 20 March 1959, Kosygin was appointed to the position of chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), a post he would hold for little more than a year. 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, as a member of the collective leadership, Kosygin formed an unofficial Triumvirate (also known by its Russian name Troika) alongside Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, that governed the Soviet Union in Khrushchev's place.
During the initial years following Khrushchev's ouster, Kosygin initially emerged as the leading figure in Soviet politics.[4][5][6] In addition to managing the Soviet Union's economy, he assumed a preeminent role in its foreign policy by leading arms control talks with the US and overseeing relations with other communist countries. However, the onset of the Prague Spring in 1968 sparked a severe backlash against his policies, enabling Brezhnev to eclipse him as the dominant force in 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.
Early life[edit]
Kosygin was born into a Russian[7] working-class family consisting of his father and mother (Nikolai Ilyich and Matrona Alexandrovna) and his siblings. The family lived in Saint Petersburg. Kosygin was baptized (7 March 1904) one month after his birth.[8] He lost his mother in infancy and was brought up by his father.[9]
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[10] and found work in the system of consumer co-operatives in[11] Novosibirsk, Siberia.[12] 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!"[13] Kosygin stayed there for six years until Robert Eikhe personally advised him to quit, shortly before the repressions hit the Soviet consumer co-operation movement.[9]
Early career[edit]
Pre-war period[edit]
He applied for a membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1927[11] and returned to Leningrad in 1930 to study at the Leningrad Textile Institute; he graduated in 1935.[13] 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 (CC). In 1940 Kosygin became a Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars.
Wartime[edit]
Kosygin was appointed by the State Defence Committee to manage critically important missions during the Great Patriotic War (World War II).[11]
As deputy chairman of the Council of Evacuation,[14] he had the task of evacuating industry from territories about to be overrun by the Axis. Under his command 1523 factories were evacuated eastwards, as well as huge volumes of raw materials, ready-made goods and equipment. Kosygin managed clearing of congestions on the railroads in order to maintain their stable operation.[15]
During the Leningrad Blockade he was sent to his hometown to manage the construction of an ice road and a pipeline across the Lake Ladoga.[16] This allowed to evacuate some half-million people from the besieged and starving city, and to supply fuel to its factories and power plants.[15] He was also responsible for the procurement of locally available firewood.[15]
In 1943 Alexey Kosygin was promoted to Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government) of the Russian SFSR. In 1944 he was appointed to head the Currency Board of the Soviet Union.[9]
Afterwar period[edit]
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.[9] 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[17] 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. (A Politburo member earned a modest salary by Soviet standards[18] but enjoyed unlimited access to consumer goods.) Stalin sent Kosygin to each home to put their houses into "proper order".
Temporary fall[edit]
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,[19] while nominally retaining his membership of the Politburo until 1952.[20]
Personality[edit]
Compared to other Soviet officials, Kosygin stood out as a pragmatic and relatively independent leader. In a description given by an anonymous high-ranking GRU official, Kosygin is described as "a lonely and somewhat tragic figure" who "understood our faults and shortcomings of our situation in general and those in our Middle East policy in particular, but, being a highly restrained man, he preferred to be cautious." An anonymous former co-worker of Kosygin said "He always had an opinion of his own, and defended it. He was a very alert man, and performed brilliantly during negotiations. He was able to cope quickly with the material that was totally new to him. I have never seen people of that calibre afterwards."[72]
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said Kosygin was like "Khrushchev without the rough edges, a fatherly man who was the forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev". He noted that Kosygin was willing to discuss issues so long as the Soviet position was not tackled head-on.[73] Former United States Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said that Kosygin was devoted, nearly fanatically, to his work. Kosygin was viewed by Western diplomats as a pragmatist "with a glacial exterior who was orthodox if not rigid".[74] Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet dissident, believed Kosygin to be "the most intelligent and toughest man in the Politburo".[68] Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew remembered Kosygin as "very quiet-spoken, but very determined, mind of great ability and application".[75] David Rockefeller admitted that Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin was a talented manager doing miracles in ruling the clumsy Soviet economy.[76]
Legacy[edit]
Historical assessments[edit]
Kosygin would prove to be a very competent administrator, with the Soviet standard of living rising considerably due to his moderately reformist policy.[17] Kosygin's moderate 1965 reform, as with Nikita Khrushchev's thaw, radicalized the Soviet reform movement. While Leonid Brezhnev was content to maintain the centralized structure of the Soviet planned economy, Kosygin attempted to revitalize the ailing economic system by decentralising management. Following Brezhnev's death in 1982, the reform movement was split between Yuri Andropov's path of discipline and control and Gorbachev's liberalization of all aspects of public life.[34]
Chernenko: The Last Bolshevik: The Soviet Union on the Eve of Perestroika author Ilya Zemtsov describes Kosygin as "determined and intelligent, an outstanding administrator" and claims he distinguished himself from the other members of the Soviet leadership with his "extraordinary capacity for work".[77] Historians Moshe Lewin and Gregory Elliott, the authors of The Soviet Century, describe him as a "phenomenal administrator".[16] "His strength", David Law writes, was "his exceptional capability as an administrator". According to Law Kosygin proved himself to be a "competent politician" also.[7] Historians Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White claim that Brezhnev was unable to remove Kosygin because his removal would mean the loss of his last "capable administrator".[78] In their book, The Unknown Stalin, Roy Medvedev and Zhores Medvedev called Kosygin an "outstanding organizer", and the "new Voznesensky".[17] Historian Archie Brown, the author The Rise & Fall of Communism, believes the 1965 Soviet economic reform to have been too "modest", and claimed that Kosygin "was too much a product of the Soviet ministerial system, as it evolved under Stalin, to become a radical economic reformer". However, Brown does believe that Kosygin was "an able administrator".[5] Gvishiani, a Russian historian, concluded that "Kosygin survived both Stalin and Khrushchev, but did not manage to survive Brezhnev."[2]
Kosygin was viewed with sympathy by the Soviet people, and is still presently viewed as an important figure in both Russian and Soviet history.[2] Because of Kosygin's popularity among the Soviet people, Brezhnev developed a "strong jealousy" for Kosygin, according to Nikolai Egorychev. Mikhail Smirtyukov, the former Executive Officer of the Council of Ministers, recalled that Kosygin refused to go drinking with Brezhnev, a move which annoyed Brezhnev gravely.[78] Nikolai Ryzhkov, the last Chairman of the Council of Ministers, in a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in 1987 referred to the "sad experiences of the 1965 reform", and claimed that everything went from bad to worse following the reform's cancellation.[79]
