One of the best periods in the history of the Soviet Union can be called the second half of the sixties of the XX century. It was an era of stability and improved living standards for workers. In many ways, all this happened thanks to one of the youngest people's commissars and active business executive Alexei Kosygin.
Kosygin was rapidly moving up the career ladder. In 1936, he graduated from the textile institute in Leningrad and went to work at a factory, where in a year he managed to work up to the position of director, and two years later, at the age of 34, he became chairman of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council.
It was rumored that such a successful career was the result of the terror of Ezhev.
At the beginning of 1939, Alexei Kosygin became the people's commissar of the textile industry. With the outbreak of World War II, Kosygin evacuated thousands of factories to the east. Later, his competence included the supply of besieged Leningrad, which he carried out very successfully, knowing all the passages on Lake Ladoga.
Kosygin's personal life was full of secrets, they even said that he was the son of Tsar Nicholas II, taking into account the year and place of his birth. This theory was also supported by the fact that no one had ever seen Alexei's photographs of children.
In 1949, a very interesting incident occurred. The case was not long before the start of the arrests related to the "Leningrad affair". Kosygin found himself at one of Stalin's feasts, and when everyone had already left, Stalin called out to him: "And you, Kosyga, stay!" After this incident, no one dared to repress him.
Alexei Kosygin was a very observant person and very well saw what was the weakness of the Soviet economy of that time, which was good for the war period, but was completely unsuitable for peacetime. He saw a discrepancy in the scale of development between heavy and light industry. Sometimes metallurgists and steelmakers of the country, providing all its construction sites, did not have the opportunity to acquire basic things for life.
In the fall of 1964, while serving as chairman of the Council of Ministers, Kosygin launched one of the most effective reforms in the USSR - he began introducing cost accounting.
Promotional video:
Enterprises gained some freedom in the form of recruiting personnel, setting the size of the salary and determining the cost of production. In addition, they were able to negotiate prices and delivery times.
The function of the State Planning Committee of the Soviet Union was to provide them with information on the quantity and quality of products. By the end of the 1960s, more than thirty thousand factories and plants in the country had switched to a self-supporting system.
Achievements in five years in the second half of the 1960s were an increase in industrial production by one and a half times, turnover by 1.8 times and an increase in salary by two and a half times.
During this period, for the first time in Russia, economic growth and the standard of living of people went parallel. About two thousand enterprises were opened on the territory of the country, the construction of such large-scale projects as VAZ and KAMAZ started. In terms of the speed of development, it can be compared with the 30s, but without hunger, collectivization and repression.
During this period, receivers, televisions and even cars that were formerly a luxury became generally available.
For comparison, in 1965 about two hundred thousand cars were produced, and ten years later, in 1975, the number of vehicles produced reached 1.2 million.
During the Golden Five-Year Plan, housing construction increased threefold. Enterprises, having received the opportunity to distribute profits depending on their own needs, were able to start building houses for their employees.
For a long time, Kosygin acted as a negotiator in the international arena and achieved considerable success in this, although he did not study diplomacy anywhere.
He held meetings with the most prominent world politicians, finding a common language with them. In 1966, thanks to Kosygin, negotiations were held in Tashkent that ended the Second Indo-Pakistani War. He once hiked in the Caucasus mountains with the President of Finland.
Returning from the funeral of Ho Chi Minh, Alexei Kosygin at the Beijing airport held talks with the PRC Prime Minister regarding the conflict on Damansky Island.
History has preserved the phrase said by Kosygin that the imperialists dream of solving their problems through the collision of two states, the PRC and the USSR. This relieved the tension between these countries, preventing a nuclear war.
The Communists perceived the experiments introduced by Kosygin rather ambiguously. They saw in this system a return to philistinism.
In addition, Dubcek introduced a similar system in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. An attempt to implement a new system ended in failure.
It should be noted that despite the respect for Kosygin as a professional on the part of Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich personally disliked him and carefully tried to remove him from power.
1973 was marked by a sharp rise in oil prices from three to twelve dollars a barrel in connection with the defeat of the Arabs in the Fourth Arab-Israeli War. The leadership of the USSR decided that there was no need for cost accounting, and it was better to purchase consumer goods abroad for the dollars received from the sale of oil.
Kosygin died in 1980, on December 18, that is, the day before Brezhnev's birthday. In order not to spoil the general holiday, nothing was said about the death of the “chief engineer of the Soviet Union”.
However, Kosygin's works were not in vain, his reforms were implemented in China.
Anna Ponomareva
