Alexsei Kosygin
was born in St. Petersburg in 1904. During the Civil
War Kosygin served in the Red Army. In
1921 he entered the Petrograd Technical School and after he graduated
in 1924 he worked in a consumers' cooperative in Siberia.
Kosygin joined
the Communist Party (CPSU) in 1927. After
a period studying at the Leningrad Textile Institute he found work
as a director of the October Textile Factory.
In 1938 Kosygin was elected
to the Supreme Soviet and the following year became a member of the
Communist Party Central Committee.
During the Second
World War Kosygin was given responsibility for evacuating factories
to eastern areas of the Soviet Union. In 1941 he was a member of the
State Defence Committee in Leningrad.
Kosygin joined the Politburo
in 1948 but further progress was halted by clashing with Joseph
Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.
When Khruschev was ousted in 1964 Kosygin became Chairman of the Council
of Ministers.
Willy
Brandt
became Foreign Minister in
the Federal
Republic of Germany
in 1966. He developed the policy of Ostpolitik
(reconciliation between eastern and western Europe). Kosygin played
an important role in negotiating with Brandt.
Over the next few years
he was involved in negotiations with the United States and China.
Alexsei Kosygin died in
1980.
(1)
George
Brown,
In My Way (1971)
Kosygin, despite the almost
gloomy look which he habitually wears, does in fact have a sense of
humour, but the side of him that showed most was the suspicious side.
He was always a total Communist Party official, and I think always
suspicious not so much of other people as of what people in his own
country might think of his gullibility if he really set out to indulge
in the kind of discussion which might lead to a change of view. He
was very much afraid of his own inadequacies if he went outside his
brief. He was not, I would say, a big man, but a more than adequately
tough party official.
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