The deputy premier who directed Soviet economic integration with the Eastern Bloc for 18 years
Over his 18-year tenure as deputy premier, Soviet trade within the Comecon bloc rose above one half of all foreign turnover.
A Moscow Aviation Institute graduate who rose from the aviation shop floor to direct development of the USSR's first electronic high-speed computer, winning the Stalin Prize first class in 1954. He served as inaugural minister of Instrument Making and Automation (1956), then built planning expertise at Gosplan in Ukraine and at the all-Union level. From 1962 to 1980 he was deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and simultaneously the permanent Soviet representative to Comecon (1962–1977). Across the Khrushchev, Kosygin, and Tikhonov governments, he was the key institutional architect of Soviet-bloc foreign economic integration.
Career Timeline
- 1924–1932Turner, Kherson Petrovsky Plant
- 1934–1942Shop chief, deputy chief engineer at aviation plants
- 1942–1946Deputy head, Main Directorate, People's Commissariat of Aviation Industry
- 1948–1954Director, Moscow Calculating-Analytical Machines Plant and head of SKB-245
- 1954–1956First Deputy Minister of Machine Building and Instrument Making
- 1956–1957Minister of Instrument Making and Automation
- 1957–1958Deputy Chairman, Gosplan Ukrainian SSR — Minister
- 1958–1962First Deputy Chairman, Gosplan USSR — Minister; Chairman, Foreign Economic Commission
- 1962–1980Deputy Chairman, USSR Council of Ministers
- 1962–1977Permanent USSR Representative to Comecon
Related historical events
SKB-245 and the Strela: Launching Soviet Electronic Computing
The most distinctive chapter of Lesechko's career was his tenure from 1948 to 1954 as director of the Moscow Calculating-Analytical Machines Plant (SAM) and simultaneously head of Special Design Bureau SKB-245. During this period, SKB-245 (with Yury Bazilevsky as chief designer and Bashir Rameyev as his deputy) developed the Strela (Arrow), the first serially-produced electronic vacuum-tube computer in the USSR. A first-generation mainframe capable of 2,000 operations per second, built with 6,200 vacuum tubes and 60,000 semiconductor diodes, seven Strelas were manufactured between 1953 and 1956 and installed at the USSR Academy of Sciences Computing Centre, the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, Moscow State University, and key defence and economic-planning ministries.
The SAM plant under Lesechko was responsible for actual production of these complex machines, a challenge that required retooling an instrument-making factory for vacuum-tube computer assembly. Strela computers were immediately put to work on the calculations for the first Soviet hydrogen bomb RDS-6s (1953) and performed the aerodynamic computations for the Tu-104 passenger jet. 100 million operations in 17 hours underpinned critical Cold War military and scientific capabilities. For this achievement Lesechko was awarded the Stalin Prize first class in 1954, a decisive springboard for his subsequent move into state planning and foreign economic affairs.