Gosplan planner across the late Stalin and post-Stalin transition
He became Gosplan chairman in March 1953, just after Stalin's death, and handed the post back to Saburov four months later — so fleeting an interlude that many reference works leave it out altogether.
A Soviet economic planner who joined the Bolsheviks at sixteen and rose from the Luhansk locomotive works through Red Army political work to the upper ranks of central planning. During the war he helped draft the military-economic plans that coordinated industrial evacuation and matériel production; afterward he edited the Gosplan journal Planovoe khozyaistvo (1944–1949) and became Saburov's first deputy. He chaired Gosplan for barely four months in 1953 (the brief interregnum between Saburov's second and third terms, under Malenkov's first government) before returning to the first deputy post he held until 1957. In his later career he served as deputy finance minister and then directed the Finance Ministry's Research Institute, where he oversaw the collective monograph 50 Years of Soviet Finances (1967).
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1917–1922Red Guard, partisan, political worker in 42nd Rifle Division
- 1922–1929Graduate of Tolmachev Military-Political Academy, then instructor
- 1929–1937Economic Institute of Red Professors; head of political economy at Frunze and Lenin academies
- 1940–1949Deputy Chairman of Gosplan; editor of Planovoe khozyaistvo (1944–1949)
- 1949–1953First Deputy Chairman of Gosplan; first Soviet permanent rep. to Comecon (1949)
- 1953 (3–6월)Chairman of Gosplan (Mar–Jun)
- 1953–1957First Deputy Chairman of Gosplan
- 1957–1970Deputy Minister of Finance (1957–1960); Director, Financial Research Institute (1960–1970)
Related historical events
First Soviet Permanent Representative to COMECON (1949)
COMECON (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) was an intergovernmental economic organization founded by a decision of a closed economic conference held in Moscow on 5–8 January 1949, attended by representatives of the USSR, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Albania. The founding protocol was signed in Moscow on 18 January of that year, and the organization's headquarters were also located in Moscow. The body was intended to build close economic ties between the Soviet Union and the people's democracies of Eastern Europe, and in its early phase it functioned as a counterpart to the Marshall Plan.
Kosyachenko served as the Soviet permanent representative to the organization in 1949, the year of its founding. This post overlapped in time with his tenure as First Deputy Chairman of Gosplan, which he held from 1949 to 1953. Because COMECON's substantive activity only began in earnest around 1960, his term belongs to the organization's initial, formative period. The position represents the segment of his career devoted to external economic cooperation, a distinct area of work from his domestic planning duties.