Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin (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 Nikita 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 (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). 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 (Gosplan) on 20 March 1959. Later, in 1960, he was promoted to 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. Thereafter, he formed a triumvirate alongside Brezhnev and Central Committee 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 in the Soviet leadership. Despite having his standing significantly weakened in the Kremlin, Kosygin was permitted 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.
Kosygin was born into a Russian 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. 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.
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 Leningrad Textile Institute; he graduated in 1935. After finishing his studies, Kosygin worked as a foreman and later a manager as 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.
Kosygin was appointed by the State Defence Committee to manage critically important missions during the Great Patriotic War (World War II).
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 (government) of the Russian SFSR. In 1944 he was appointed to head the Currency Board of the Soviet Union.
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. (A Politburo member earned a modest salary by Soviet standards but enjoyed unlimited access to consumer goods.) Stalin sent Kosygin to each home to put their houses into "proper order".
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:
Beria and Malenkov were doing everything they could to wreck this troika of Kuznetsov, Voznesensky and Kosygin ... Many people perished in Leningrad. So did many people who had been transferred from Leningrad to work in other regions. As for Kosygin, his life was hanging by a thread ... Men who had been arrested and condemned in Leningrad made ridiculous accusations against him ... I simply can't explain how he was saved from being eliminated along with the others. Kosygin, as they say, must have drawn a lucky lottery ticket.
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.
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 Michel Tatu, 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.