Nikolai Podgorny

• 1. Introduction

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  Nikolai Podgorny held the highest ceremonial office in the Soviet Union for more than a decade, yet his story ends with him being physically removed from a painting. On the 24th of May 1977, a unanimous vote by the Central Committee stripped him from the Politburo. Within twenty-three days, he lost the chairmanship of the Presidium as well. Then, quietly, Soviet artists erased his figure from Dmitry Nalbandyan's 1977 painting of the Soviet leaders gathered at Red Square. He had stood between Brezhnev and Kosygin. Then he simply was not there.

  How does the head of state of a superpower go from second-most-powerful figure in the country to an absence in a canvas? The answer runs through sugar refineries in Ukraine, a collective leadership held together by competing ambitions, and one speech in Baku that Podgorny would regret for the rest of his life.

• 2. From Karlovka to Kiev

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  Podgorny was born on the 18th of February 1903 in Karlovka, a city then part of the Russian Empire, to a Ukrainian working-class family. He began work at the age of 17, starting as a student in the mechanical workshops of his hometown. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, he became one of the founders of the Karlovka branch of the Komsomol, the Communist youth organisation, and served as a Secretary of the Komsomol from 1921 to 1923.

  He graduated from a local workers' school in 1926, then completed a degree at the Kiev Technological Institute of Food Industry in 1931. His expertise was practical rather than ideological: he went directly into the sugar industry after graduating. By 1937, he was deputy chief engineer in Vinnytsia. Two years later, in 1939, he held the position of chief engineer of the Kamenetz-Podolsk Oblast sugar trusts. By the end of that same year, he had become Deputy People's Commissar for Food Industry of the Ukrainian SSR, and the following year was elevated to the equivalent post at the all-Union level in Moscow.

  The arc from a mechanical workshop in a small Ukrainian city to the national commissariat in just over two decades tells something important about how the Soviet system rewarded those who mastered the logistics of feeding the state.

• 3. Building Ukraine, Backing Khrushchev

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  During World War II, Podgorny became Director of the Moscow Technological Institute of Food Industry in 1942. When Ukraine was liberated from Nazi Germany, he returned to help reestablish Soviet control over the republic on orders of the Ukrainian SSR and the central government. In April 1950, he was made First Secretary of the Kharkiv Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and by 1953 had risen to Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPU.

  From 1957 to 1963, Podgorny served as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. That was the most powerful position in the republic. In this role he focused on rebuilding an economy that had been devastated by the war, pushing to increase both industrial and agricultural output and directing particular attention to training new party cadres.

  His proximity to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shaped his politics deeply. He travelled with Khrushchev to United Nations headquarters in 1960. He served as a Soviet emissary to Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Canada, and Yugoslavia. According to historian Ilya Zemtsov, Brezhnev began conspiring against Khrushchev partly because Khrushchev had chosen Podgorny, not Brezhnev, as his potential successor. That decision set the machinery of Podgorny's eventual downfall in motion years before anyone removed him from anything.

  There was one notable stumble along the way. In 1961, Podgorny fell briefly out of Khrushchev's favour after attributing poor corn yields in Ukraine to bad weather. Khrushchev insisted the crops had been stolen and pilfered. Podgorny recovered the following year by reporting to Khrushchev that agricultural output had doubled Ukraine's grain supply to the state, and First World observers outside the USSR marked him as one of Khrushchev's most plausible heirs.

• 4. The Troika and the Baku Speech

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  In October 1964, Podgorny and Brezhnev together appealed to the Central Committee, accusing Khrushchev of economic failures, voluntarism, and immodest behaviour. Politburo members, influenced by Brezhnev and his allies, voted to remove Khrushchev. What followed was a collective leadership: Brezhnev as First Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier, and Anastas Mikoyan as head of state. Podgorny took up the role of Second Secretary, and therefore controlled the Party's Organisational Division.

  That position was the source of both his power and his vulnerability. The Organisational Division could, if Podgorny chose, become a personal power base inside the party. Brezhnev recognised this, and allied himself with Alexander Shelepin, the KGB chairman, to hold both Podgorny and Kosygin in check.

  In February 1965, an article in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta criticised the Kharkiv Party organisation Podgorny had previously led, casting doubt on his economic record by indirection. Podgorny counterattacked. In a speech in Baku, in the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, he criticised the Soviet leadership's heavy industrial policy. He had calculated the move as a blow against Brezhnev and Shelepin. Instead, it antagonised the entire conservative wing of the leadership. Mikhail Suslov, who had remained neutral until that point, sided with Brezhnev and called Podgorny's views revisionist.

  By December 1965, Podgorny relinquished his seat in the Secretariat and took Mikoyan's place as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Historian Ilya Zemtsov later concluded that leaving the Secretariat ended any realistic prospect Podgorny had of becoming First Secretary.

• 5. Second in the Union

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  On the 6th of December 1965, Podgorny formally replaced Anastas Mikoyan as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the post that made him the nominal head of state of the Soviet Union. The position had been largely ceremonial. That began to change in the early 1970s, when Brezhnev strengthened the Presidium by granting it executive powers, partly at Kosygin's expense.

  Podgorny interpreted this as a gift. What he did not know was that Brezhnev, alarmed by his new authority, had already ordered Konstantin Chernenko to examine the 1936 Soviet Constitution for any mechanism to diminish it. Chernenko found none under existing law. His solution was to propose that the constitution itself be changed to allow the Party leader to also hold the chairmanship of the Presidium. A new constitution was drafted to include exactly that provision.

  After the Prague Spring crisis in 1968 damaged Kosygin's standing, Podgorny emerged as the second most powerful figure in the country behind Brezhnev, a judgement confirmed later by scholar Robert Vincent Daniels. At the 24th Party Congress in 1971, though Brezhnev and Kosygin were affirmed as the top figures, Podgorny demonstrated his continued weight by leading delegations to China and to North Vietnam that same year.

  In diplomatic protocol, Podgorny outranked Brezhnev. He was first; Brezhnev was third. Since September 1970, Brezhnev had been trying to build opposition in the Politburo to remove him. At the 1970 Central Committee plenum, Brezhnev's backers did not even attempt it. Brezhnev could count on only five votes. Seven Politburo members opposed granting him greater power.

• 6. Erasure

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  The vote on the 24th of May 1977 was unanimous. Grigory Romanov proposed removing Podgorny from the Politburo, and the Central Committee agreed without dissent. Accounts suggest the outcome surprised Podgorny himself. He rose immediately from his Politburo seat and moved to sit among the ordinary members.

  Twenty-three days later, on the 16th of June 1977, he lost the chairmanship of the Presidium. Soviet media informed the public that he had retired because of his stance against detente and against producing more consumer goods. His name then disappeared from Soviet coverage entirely.

  On the 7th of October 1977, the new Soviet Constitution was approved, the document that made it legal for the Party leader to hold the head of state post simultaneously. This measure, engineered through Chernenko's review, removed the constitutional protection that had made Podgorny difficult to dislodge while he remained in office.

  The scrubbing of Podgorny from public memory was not merely administrative. Nalbandyan's 1977 painting of Soviet leaders at Red Square, in which Podgorny had stood between Brezhnev and Kosygin, was altered at the Tretyakov Gallery to remove him. The last confirmed sighting of him in a significant public setting came in November 1978, at the 61st anniversary reception of the October Revolution at the Grand Palace of the Kremlin. The Japanese Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Tokichiro Uomoto, observed Podgorny speaking with Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Andrei Gromyko. All three, Uomoto noted, appeared embarrassed by his presence. Shortly after that evening, Podgorny lost his remaining seat in the Supreme Soviet.

  Podgorny died of cancer in Kiev on the 12th of January 1983, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. He was awarded five Orders of Lenin and one Order of the Red Banner during his career, along with foreign state prizes from Bangladesh, Bulgaria, the Mongolian People's Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Finland.