Andropov, Andrei

Grechko, Andrei

Kirilenko, Andrei

Kunayev, Dinmukhamed

(b. Jan. 12, 1912 [Dec. 31, 1911, Old Style], Verny [now Almaty], Kazakhstan--d. Aug. 22, 1993, near Almaty), as first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan (1960-62; 1964-86), was the effective ruler of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic for more than two decades and the highest-ranking Soviet leader of Muslim heritage. Kunayev studied metallurgy in Moscow and worked as a machinist, engineer, and administrator in the mining industry.

He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1939, and in 1942 he was named deputy chairman of the Kazakhstan Council of Ministers. After a three-year break, during which he served as president of the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan (1952-55), he was promoted to chairman of the republic's Council of Ministers. Kunayev, a close associate of Leonid Brezhnev, who also hailed from Kazakhstan, took control in the republic after Brezhnev ousted Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet leader in 1964. He became a candidate member of the CPSU Politburo in 1966 and was elevated to full membership in 1971. Although Kunayev's term was marked by autocratic ruthlessness and corruption, there were widespread protests when he was replaced in 1986.

Mazurov, Kirill

Pelshe, Arvid

Ponomarev, Boris

Romanov, Grigory

Shelest, Peter

Solomencev, Michail

Ustinov, Dmitri

(b. Oct. 17 [Oct. 30, New Style], 1908, Samara, Russia--d. Dec. 20, 1984, Moscow), Soviet military and political figure who was minister of defense from 1976 to 1984.

An engineer by profession, Ustinov graduated in 1934 from the Military Institute of Mechanics in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and worked first as a construction engineer, then as director of a Leningrad armament factory. In 1941 Stalin appointed Ustinov people's commissar of armaments, a position that he kept under the titles of minister of armaments (1946-53) and minister of defense industries (1953-57). In that post, Ustinov in 1941 initiated the evacuation of many Soviet arms factories to sites east of the Ural Mountains, out of the reach of the advancing German armies.

After the war he set the course by which the Soviet armed forces eventually reached their high levels during the Cold War. He was a full member of the Central Committee from 1952, and in 1957 Nikita Khrushchev made him a deputy premier, still with overall responsibility for the armaments industry. In 1963 he became both chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy and first deputy premier. In 1965 he became a candidate member of the Politburo, and in 1976, when Defense Minister Marshal Andrey Grechko died, Ustinov was appointed to replace him. At the same time, he was made a full member of the Politburo and marshal of the Soviet Union. During the 1970s Ustinov played an important behind-the-scenes role in Soviet-U.S. arms limitation negotiations.

Suslov, Mikhail

(b. Nov. 21 [Nov. 8, old style], 1902, Shakhovskoye, Russia--d. Jan. 25, 1982, Moscow), leading Soviet Communist ideologue and power broker from the 1950s until his death. The son of a peasant, Suslov joined the Young Communist League during the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War and joined the Communist Party in 1921 at the age of 19. He was sent to Moscow for secondary education and later studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute of the National Economy (1924-29) and the Economics Institute of the Red Professors. He taught at Moscow State University and at the Industrial Academy. He first received a political role in 1931, when he became a member of control commissions that supervised Stalinist purges in the Urals and the Ukraine. During the Great Purges that began in 1937, he rose in the party hierarchy, becoming a leading official first in Rostov and then in the Caucasus and a member of the Central Committee in 1939. During World War II he supervised the deportations of ethnic minorities from the Caucasus and, after the war, was in Lithuania, rounding up dissidents for deportation to Siberia. From the late 1940s on, he remained at the centre of power in Moscow, becoming a member of the Presidium (Politburo) in 1952 and, except for a brief time after Stalin's death (1953-55), enjoying a pivotal position in the ruling clique. He was generally viewed as both conservative and flexible, being critical of Titoism, Eurocommunism, and other brands of independence from Moscow but, nevertheless, favouring hard-line political solutions rather than military ones, except as a last resort, as in Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland (1981-82). In 1957 he helped Nikita Khrushchev to quell a conspiracy by a so-called "anti-party group" in the Politburo. But in October 1964, Suslov was the chief organizer of the bloodless coup that ousted Khrushchev and substituted Leonid Brezhnev--apparently in a successful effort to restore the power of the consensus-oriented Politburo. He thereafter concentrated on interparty relations, between the Soviet party and other Communist parties around the world.

Scherbitski, Vladimir

Masherov, Peter

Demichev, Peter

Grishin, Victor

Shelepin Alexander

(b. Aug. 18, 1918, Voronezh, Russia--d. Oct. 24, 1994), Soviet government official who led the Komsomol (Young Communist League; 1952-58), served as head of the Committee for State Security (KGB; 1958-61), and was a member of the Communist Party's Politburo (1964-75). He is thought to have played a role in Nikita Khrushchev's ouster in 1964. Shelepin joined the Communist Party in 1940 and rose rapidly in both the party and the Soviet government. Appointed first secretary of the Komsomol's central committee in 1952, he directed the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of youths for Khrushchev's ambitious Virgin Lands Program, aimed at the economic development of Central Asia. Long regarded as an ally of Khrushchev, Shelepin became chairman of the KGB in 1958. As he was not originally from the security branches, this has been viewed as an attempt by Khrushchev to curb the police apparatus and bring it more firmly under party control. In 1962 Shelepin was appointed chairman of the new Committee of Party and State Control, which had broad investigative and administrative powers. After Khrushchev's downfall in 1964, Shelepin, thought to represent a hard-line faction in the party, joined the party Presidium (i.e., the Politburo). But his position slowly eroded thereafter, probably because he was a potential rival to party leader Leonid Brezhnev. In 1975 he was dropped from the Politburo (formerly the Presidium) and was not reelected to the Central Committee at the 25th party congress.

Kulakov, Fedor

Rashidov, Sharif

Mzavanidze, Vasili

Polianski, Dmitri

Gromyko, Andrey

(b. July 18 [July 5, Old Style], 1909, Starye Gromyki, Belorussia, Russian Empire [now in Belarus]--d. July 2, 1989), Soviet foreign minister (1957-85) and president (1985-88) of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. Although never strongly identified with any particular policy or political faction, he served dependably as a skilled emissary and spokesman.

Gromyko was born in a Belorussian village, the son of a peasant, and attended an agricultural school in Minsk, studying agricultural economics. After completing postgraduate studies in 1936, he served as senior research associate at the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences and as a university lecturer (1936-39). In the wake of Joseph Stalin's purges, which depleted the foreign service, Gromyko was appointed chief of the U.S. division of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in 1939. While yet learning English, he was appointed counselor at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. In 1943 he became ambassador to the United States (at the young age of 34) and in 1946 became a representative to the UN Security Council. He was promoted to deputy foreign minister in 1946 and further to first deputy foreign minister in 1949. In 1952 he became a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom. In 1953 he returned to Moscow as deputy foreign minister, resuming his post as first deputy foreign minister in 1954. In 1956 he attained full membership on the Central Committee.

In 1957 Gromyko began his long tenure as foreign minister. His exact influence in policy making is unclear. He became renowned for his extensive knowledge of international affairs and for his negotiating skills, and he was entrusted with major diplomatic missions and policy statements. He frequently accompanied other Soviet leaders, including Nikita S. Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Aleksey Kosygin, on visits to foreign leaders. He became a member of the Politburo in 1973 and was named a first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1983.

After Mikhail S. Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, a younger man, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, was appointed to head the foreign ministry, and Gromyko was promoted to the presidency, a position that carried great prestige but little power. Gromyko gave up his Politburo seat and the presidency of the Supreme Soviet on Sept. 30, 1988, in the midst of Gorbachev's shake up of the Politburo. A further party purge in April 1989 resulted in Gromyko's removal from the Central Committee as well. His autobiography was published in 1988 and translated into English in 1990.

Alyiev, Geidar

Born: May 10, 1923, in Nakhichivan
Education:Graduate in history, Teachers Training Institute of Azerbaijan
Occupation: Politician
Political Career: Entered NKVD 1941; Member, CPSU 1945; Major general, State Security 1950-60; Vice chairman, then chairman, KGB of Azerbaijan 1961-69; First secretary CC CP of Azerbaijan 1969-76; Member, Politburo, CPSU, and first deputy chairman in charge of transport, USSR Council of Ministers 1982-87; Forced into retirement by Mikhail Gorbachev 1987; Opposition leader during Soviet invasion of Baku 1990; Left CPSU 1991; Elected chairman, Supreme Majlis, National Assembly and Deputy Speaker, Supreme Soviet of Azerbaijan 1990-93; Founding president NAP 1992; Speaker of the Supreme Soviet and acting president 1993; Elected president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces October 1993. 1991.
Office: Office of the President, Istiglal kuc. 19, Baku 370066.

Related Site:Azerbaijan Resource Page

Chernenko, Konstantin

(b. Sept. 11 [Sept. 24, New Style], 1911, Bolshaya Tes, Yeniseysk, Russian Empire [now in Krasnoyarsk kray, Russia]--d. March 10, 1985, Moscow), chief political leader of the Soviet Union from February 1984 until his death in 1985. Born to a Russian peasant family in the Yeniseysk region of Siberia, Chernenko joined the Communist Party in 1931. Trained as a party propagandist, he held several administrative posts before becoming head of agitation and propaganda (agitprop) in Moldavia (1948-56), where he was first noticed by Leonid Brezhnev and brought to Moscow to head a similar department for the party's Central Committee (1956-60). When Brezhnev took over the party in 1964, he made Chernenko his chief of staff. Chernenko was a full member of the Central Committee from 1971 and of the Politburo from 1977.

An old-line conservative, Chernenko traveled extensively with Brezhnev and was considered his aide, confidant, and, by some observers, his heir apparent. After Brezhnev's death, however, he was unable to rally a majority of the party factions behind his candidacy to be head of the party and lost out to Yury V. Andropov, the former KGB chief, who became general secretary on Nov. 12, 1982. However, Andropov had become mortally ill by the following August, and after his death six months later, Chernenko succeeded him as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Feb. 13, 1984. On April 12 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Like his predecessor, Chernenko began showing signs of deteriorating health shortly after taking office. His frequent absences from official functions because of illness left little doubt that his election had been an interim measure, and upon his death he was succeeded by Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Tikhonov, Nikolay

(b. May 14, 1905, Kharkov, Ukraine, Russian Empire--d. June 1, 1997, Moscow, Russia), served as premier of the Soviet Union from 1980 to 1985 and was aided in his career by his long-standing friendship and political association with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Tikhonov, who was raised in a middle-class Ukrainian family, became an assistant train driver in 1924. After graduating (1930) as a metallurgical engineer from Dnipropetrovsk (Ukraine) Metallurgical Institute, he began working in heavy industry, rising from engineer to plant manager. Tikhonov met Brezhnev in the 1930s and joined the Communist Party in 1940. Though he was only 35 at the time, it was an advanced age for someone hoping to achieve high political rank. Between 1947 and 1950 he was a manager at a pipe factory located in the same area where Brezhnev was serving as regional party secretary. Tikhonov entered government administration in 1950 when he joined the Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy; he became a deputy minister five years later. In the early 1960s Tikhonov worked for Gosplan, the state planning committee. He became deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1965, and in 1976 he was named first deputy chairman to Aleksey Kosygin. Tikhonov was made a full (voting) member of the Politburo in 1979, and the following year he succeeded Kosygin as premier. He was primarily responsible for the economy but was not particularly effective in that role.

He retired in September 1985, just a few months after Mikhail Gorbachev's election, and was replaced by the younger, reform-minded Nikolay Ryzhkov--a changing of the guard that symbolized the ushering in of perestroika, the policy of economic restructuring.