Word: kosygin
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...recent years Brezhnev has gained enough authority and prestige to put his portrait and quotations on propaganda posters all across the U.S.S.R. Yet so far he has avoided responsibility for chronic failures of the economy and agriculture. That onus he thrust upon other comrades, particularly his longtime partner Alexei Kosygin, who died in late December, less than two months after his resignation as Premier. Now more than ever, the gerontocratic leadership of the U.S.S.R. is dominated by Brezhnev appointees and protégés, with neither an obvious heir nor a challenger in their midst...
Stalin quickly recognized Kosygin's administrative skills, and promoted him into the Politburo in less than a decade. Soon after, the dictator turned on his protégé during a purge of Leningrad party officials in 1949-1950. Nikita Khrushchev recalled that Kosygin's life "was hanging by a thread. Kosygin must have drawn a lucky lottery ticket." Again, in late 1952, Kosygin's life was in jeopardy when Stalin demoted him and denounced one of his close colleagues...
...early supporter of Khrushchev's, Kosygin continued his rise in the Soviet hierarchy as a Deputy Premier after Khrushchev was made party chief in 1953. Following the Kremlin conspiracy to oust Khrushchev in 1964, Kosygin and Brezhnev divided up the two posts that their predecessor had held simultaneously. Brezhnev took over the much more powerful job of Party Secretary, while Kosygin became Premier, which put him in control of the day-to-day management of the Soviet government. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger viewed Kosygin as a pragmatist, with "a glacial exterior" who was "orthodox if not rigid...
Kissinger and other statesmen who have dealt with Kosygin have remarked on the former Premier's fanatic, indeed almost inhuman, devotion to duty. In 1967, when Kosygin learned that his wife Klavdiya was dying, for example, he did not interrupt his working day. When word of her death reached him, he remained atop the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square until he had finished reviewing a parade. Last week the great survivor's own passing was duly noted by his colleagues in the Kremlin, but was not conspicuously mourned...
DIED. Alexei Kosygin, 76, longtime Soviet Premier who with Leonid Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny formed the "troika" that wrested power from Nikita Khrushchev in 1964; of a heart attack; in Moscow (see WORLD...