Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin

Alexei Kosygin at Lyndon B. Johnson's in Glassboro, New Jersey , June 23, 1967

Alexei Kosygin ( Russian Алексей Николаевич Косыгин ., Scientific transliteration Alexei Nikolaevich Kosygin ; born February 21 ^{. Jul} / 5. March  1904 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 18th December 1980 in Moscow ) was Prime Minister of the Soviet Union .

Life

Kosygin was born the son of a factory worker. After participating in the civil war from 1919 to 1921, he studied in Petrograd and from 1924 to 1934 worked in the consumer cooperative in Siberia . In 1927 he joined the Communist Party . From 1935 to 1936 he continued his studies at the textile college in Leningrad and then became director of a spinning mill . In 1938 he was elected mayor of Leningrad and in 1939 he was elected to the Central Committee of the WKP (B) . From 1940 to 1946 he held the office of deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars ; In 1943 he was appointed Prime Minister of the RSFSR .

During the Second World War Kosygin played a major role in the defense of Leningrad during the encirclement by the German Wehrmacht . He ordered an extensive evacuation of the city; around 500,000 people were affected. After the war he held the position of Deputy Prime Minister of the USSR until 1960. From 1948 to 1952 he was a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee . He also held the office of Minister for the Textile Industry (1948-1953), then he was Minister for Consumer Goods for one year and from 1959 to 1960 chairman of the Planning Commission ( Gosplan ) . In that year he was reassigned to the Politburo and was First Deputy Prime Minister until 1964. After the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev on October 14, 1964, Kosygin was his successor as Prime Minister and next to the CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev the leading man in the Soviet Union.

A letter named after him in English "Kosygin Proposal" in 1966 held out the prospect of agreeing a binding negative security guarantee in the context of negotiations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty . The proposal was sent to the Conference on Disarmament on February 3 (ENDC / 167 February 3, 1966).

Kosygin was a guest of US President Lyndon B. Johnson in June 1967 . The two spoke at the Glassboro Conference on foreign policy issues such as the Six Day War , the Vietnam War and disarmament issues.

Domestically, Kosygin concentrated on economic policy ; In terms of foreign policy, he pursued a policy of detente . For example, he negotiated the Moscow Treaty with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1970 . He also broke the ice between the Soviet Union and China . In 1980 he gave up his offices for health reasons. He was succeeded as Prime Minister Nikolai Tichonow , who was only a year younger .

Kosygin died on December 18, 1980. His urn was buried on the Kremlin wall in Moscow.

Fonts

• Alexei Nikolajewitsch Kosygin: Selected speeches and essays 1939-1976. State Publishing House of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1977.

literature

• Alexej N. Kosygin , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 13/1981 from March 16, 1981, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Alexei Kosygin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Alexei Nikolajewitsch Kosygin in the catalog of the German National Library

predecessor	Office	successor
Nikita Khrushchev	Prime Minister of the Soviet Union 1964–1980	Nikolai Tikhonov