Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin was born in the city of Saint Petersburg on the 18th of February 1904. He grew up in a Russian working-class family with his father Nikolai Ilyich and mother Matrona Alexandrovna.
In 1965 Kosygin initiated an economic reform widely referred to as the Kosygin reform that sought to make Soviet industry more efficient by including market measures like profit making. The reform tried to increase quantity of production and free managers from centralized state bureaucracy while being applied to 336 enterprises in light industry during its testing phase.
The State Defence Committee appointed Kosygin to manage critical missions during the Great Patriotic War as deputy chairman of the Council of Evacuation. Under his command 1,523 factories were evacuated eastwards along with huge volumes of raw materials and infrastructure allowed evacuation of some half million people from the besieged Leningrad City.
When Khrushchev was removed from power on the 14th of October 1964 Kosygin replaced him as Premier. He formed a triumvirate alongside Leonid Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny to lead the regime before political upheaval created by the Prague Spring triggered massive resistance among party old guards.
Relations improved further when the 1970 Moscow Treaty was signed on the 12th of August 1970 after Kosygin mediated between India and Pakistan in 1966 getting both nations to sign the Tashkent Declaration. In 1972 Kosygin signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Iraq while protecting János Kádár's economic reforms in Hungary from intervention by Soviet leadership.