Alexei Kosygin

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexei Kosygin spent the last night of his life alone in a Moscow hospital, stripped of his government protection, his communications, and the luxury goods he had accumulated across five decades of Soviet power. When he died on the 18th of December 1980, not a single Politburo colleague, former aide, or security guard came to see him. His funeral was postponed for three days because he had died on the eve of Leonid Brezhnev's birthday, and also the birthday of Joseph Stalin.

  This was the end of a man who had once, in the mid-1960s, been mistaken by Henry Kissinger for the actual leader of the Soviet Union. The man who evacuated over a million people from a besieged city during World War II. The man who signed arms treaties, brokered peace between India and Pakistan, and drove the most ambitious overhaul of Soviet economic life since the Revolution.

  How does someone rise that high and fall that completely? And what does the arc of Alexei Kosygin's life reveal about the machinery of Soviet power itself?

• 2. The Making of a Soviet Manager

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  Kosygin was born in Saint Petersburg in 1904, into a Russian working-class family. His mother died in infancy, and he was raised by his father. When he was 14 years old, during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, he was conscripted into a labour army on the Bolshevik side.

  After demobilization in 1921, he found his footing not in the Party but in the cooperative sector of the Soviet economy, working in consumer co-operatives in Novosibirsk, Siberia. When asked why he chose that path, Kosygin quoted Vladimir Lenin: "Co-operation, the path to socialism."

  He stayed in Siberia for six years until a man named Robert Eikhe advised him to leave, shortly before state repressions swept through the Soviet consumer cooperation movement. That timely departure would prove characteristic. Kosygin had a gift for surviving situations that destroyed others.

  He returned to Leningrad in 1930 and graduated in 1935 from what was then a major textile institute. His ascent after that was rapid, aided partly by the Great Purge, which cleared the way for younger administrators. By October 1938 he was effectively the mayor of Leningrad City, serving as Chairman of its Executive Committee. In 1939, he became People's Commissar for Textile and Industry and earned a seat on the Central Committee. A year later, he became Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. He was 36 years old.

• 3. War and the Ice Road

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  When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the State Defence Committee turned to Kosygin for two of the most consequential logistics operations of the entire war.

  The first was industrial evacuation. As deputy chairman of the Council of Evacuation, Kosygin was responsible for moving Soviet factories out of territories about to be overrun by Axis forces. Under his command, 1,523 factories were relocated eastward, along with raw materials, finished goods, and equipment. He also managed clearing congestion on the railway network to keep it functioning under wartime pressure.

  The second was the Leningrad Blockade. Kosygin was sent to his home city to oversee construction of an ice road and a pipeline across Lake Ladoga. That ice road allowed approximately half a million people to be evacuated from the besieged city and brought fuel to its factories and power plants. He was also responsible for procuring locally available firewood for Leningrad's civilian population.

  By 1943, Kosygin was promoted to Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR, and in 1944 he was appointed to head the Currency Board of the Soviet Union. He emerged from the war with an unmatched reputation as an administrator capable of solving problems at extraordinary scale.

• 4. A Thread by Which He Hung

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  In August 1948, Kosygin's most important protector, Andrei Zhdanov, died suddenly. Within months, Zhdanov's old rivals Lavrentiy Beria and Georgy Malenkov moved to destroy what remained of the Zhdanov faction. The men at the center of that faction, Nikolai Voznesensky and Alexey Kuznetsov, were arrested and shot. Kosygin was relegated to the post of Minister for Light Industry.

  Nikita Khrushchev later described the period in his memoirs with unusual candor: "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 responded by taking practical precautions. He told his son-in-law Mikhail Gvishiani, an NKVD officer, about the accusations being leveled against Voznesensky. The two men threw their weapons into a lake and searched both their homes for listening devices. They found one at Kosygin's house, though it may have been left over from when Marshal Georgy Zhukov had lived there before him.

  Kosygin never left his home during those years without reminding his wife what to do if he did not return. The family lived that way for two years before concluding that Stalin would not come for them. Stalin removed Kosygin from the Politburo in 1952, but he survived. That survival would define everything that followed.

• 5. The Reform and Its Enemies

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  In 1965, Kosygin launched what became known as the Kosygin reform, an attempt to make Soviet industry more efficient by introducing limited market measures: profit making, increased incentives for managers and workers, and reduced dependence on centralized bureaucracy. The reform had actually been proposed to Khrushchev the previous year, who had taken some preliminary steps toward it.

  The thinking behind it was influenced by Soviet economist Evsei Liberman. In its testing phase, the reform was applied to 336 enterprises in light industry. Kosygin sought, as he put it, to shift from a "state-administered economy" to one in which "the state restricts itself to guiding enterprises".

  The results were striking. Real wages for Soviet citizens increased by almost 2.5 times during the Eighth Five-Year Plan of 1966-1970, which historians later called the "golden era" of the Soviet economy. Refrigerators in production rose from 109,000 units in 1964 to 440,000 by 1973. Housing construction, which had fallen sharply between 1960 and 1964, rebounded with an average annual growth rate of 4.26 million square metres.

  But the reform also created enemies. Brezhnev allowed it to proceed initially because the Soviet economy was entering a period of low growth and he needed results. When the Prague Spring of 1968 convulsed Eastern Europe, party conservatives used the political moment to rally against reform. The old guard flocked to Brezhnev, who was already contrasting Kosygin unfavorably with Vladimir Lenin and criticizing his interest in consumer goods as a return to quasi-First World policies.

  By 1971, it was apparent that Brezhnev was the leader of the country and Kosygin had been reduced to the role of spokesman for the five-year plan.

• 6. Diplomacy and the Spirit of Glassboro

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  Early in his tenure, Kosygin challenged Brezhnev's claim that representing the country abroad was the general secretary's prerogative. Kosygin believed that foreign representation belonged to the head of government, as was standard in non-communist countries. For a short period this view was actually implemented, which led Kissinger to conclude that Kosygin was the real leader of the Soviet Union.

  In 1966 Kosygin flew to Tashkent and mediated between India and Pakistan, getting both nations to sign the Tashkent Declaration. A year later, following the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the United States invited Kosygin to a summit with President Lyndon B. Johnson. The meeting, held at Glassboro, New Jersey, failed to produce agreement on limiting anti-ballistic missile systems, but its open atmosphere gave rise to the phrase the "Spirit of Glassboro".

  On the 12th of August 1970, Kosygin signed the Moscow Treaty alongside Andrei Gromyko and West German leaders Willy Brandt and Walter Scheel, normalizing relations between the Soviet Union and West Germany. In 1972 he signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Iraq.

  His diplomatic career had limits. Gromyko actively disliked Kosygin interfering in his ministry's affairs, and after Brezhnev consolidated his Politburo position, Kosygin was rarely seen outside the communist world. He also struggled personally with the Sino-Soviet split. He briefly visited Beijing in 1969 to try to reduce tensions, saying in private: "We are communists and they are communists. It is hard to believe we will not be able to reach an agreement if we met face to face." His view of China hardened over time, and according to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Kosygin came to view China as an "organized military dictatorship" with ambitions over Vietnam and the whole of Asia.

• 7. The Long Diminishment

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  Brezhnev eroded Kosygin's authority gradually and methodically over more than a decade. He strengthened Nikolai Podgorny's position as head of state and, through the 1977 Soviet Constitution, made the Council of Ministers subordinate to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. When Brezhnev himself replaced Podgorny as head of state in 1977, Kosygin's day-to-day role shrank further. Brezhnev also published memoirs claiming that he, not Kosygin, had been in charge of all major economic decisions, and had information about the 1965 reform suppressed.

  Kosygin suffered his first heart attack in 1976. People close to him said he changed after that, becoming tired and depleted, seeming to lose the will to continue. He twice filed a letter of resignation between 1976 and 1980, and was turned down both times. Brezhnev then appointed Nikolai Tikhonov, a conservative, as First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, reducing Kosygin to a standby role. At a Central Committee plenum in June 1980, the Soviet economic development plan was presented by Tikhonov, not Kosygin.

  Historian Ilya Zemtsov, writing in Chernenko: The Last Bolshevik, noted that Kosygin began visibly losing power with the 24th Party Congress in 1971, when official language first identified "the Politburo led by Brezhnev". Historian Robert Wesson, in Lenin's Legacy, observed that Kosygin's economic report to the 25th Party Congress "pointed even more clearly to the end of struggle" between the two men.

  The Russian historian Gvishiani put it plainly: "Kosygin survived both Stalin and Khrushchev, but did not manage to survive Brezhnev."

• 8. How He Was Remembered

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  Among Western leaders who dealt with Kosygin directly, the assessments were striking in their consistency. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called him "Khrushchev without the rough edges, a fatherly man who was the forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev." Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew remembered him as "very quiet-spoken, but very determined, mind of great ability and application." Henry Kissinger described him as devoted, nearly fanatically, to his work. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident, believed Kosygin was "the most intelligent and toughest man in the Politburo".

  An anonymous high-ranking GRU official described him as "a lonely and somewhat tragic figure" who "understood our faults and the shortcomings of our situation in general" but preferred to be cautious. A former colleague 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 since."

  Historian Archie Brown, in The Rise and Fall of Communism, argued that Kosygin was "too much a product of the Soviet ministerial system, as it evolved under Stalin, to become a radical economic reformer", while still calling him "an able administrator". Historians Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White concluded that Brezhnev could not remove Kosygin because doing so would cost him his last capable administrator.

  The Moscow State Textile University was named in Kosygin's honour in 1981. A bust was placed in Leningrad in 1982. In 2006, the Russian Government renamed a street after him. Nikolai Ryzhkov, the last Chairman of the Council of Ministers, told the Supreme Soviet in 1987 that everything had gone from bad to worse after the 1965 reform was cancelled.