Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny

Podgorny was born in Karlovka, Poltava province, to a foundry worker, began as an apprentice in 1917, and helped found the local Komsomol. At barely 18 (in reality closer to 15, having added three years during the Civil War to join a combat unit) he became Komsomol secretary for Karlovka district, and later graduated from the Kiev Technological Institute of the Food Industry. Throughout the 1930s he worked as an engineer in Ukrainian sugar factories, building a technocratic career. Untouched by the Great Purge, he was promoted to deputy people's commissar of the food industry for Ukraine in 1939 and for the USSR in 1940.

After the war his path tilted toward the party. He became First Secretary of the Kharkov oblast committee in 1950, rose to Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1953, and to First Secretary in 1957. In these years he became one of Khrushchev's most trusted lieutenants and the master of the Ukrainian nomenklatura. In 1963 Khrushchev rebuked him for a poor harvest and summoned him to Moscow, but saved face by giving him a Central Committee Secretary post.

Precisely this man proved the symbolic and practical key to the October 1964 coup against Khrushchev. Podgorny guaranteed the participation of senior Ukrainian cadres in what Khrushchev had considered his personal fiefdom: a devastating psychological blow to the First Secretary. In return, Brezhnev promised him the head-of-state post. The irony of leading the putsch against the patron who had raised him lays bare the brutal dynamics of Soviet elite politics.

Podgorny began as a food-industry technocrat, rose to become First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and entered the Central Committee Secretariat in 1963. After Khrushchev’s removal, he formed one pillar of the collective leadership alongside Brezhnev and Kosygin. His transfer in 1965 to chair the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was both an elevation and a move away from the Secretariat’s leverage over appointments.

As formal head of state, he represented the USSR abroad, received foreign envoys, and participated in major decisions as a Politburo member; it is therefore misleading to reduce him to a purely ceremonial figure. Yet Brezhnev’s command of the party apparatus steadily narrowed Podgorny’s independent influence. In 1977 Podgorny was removed first from the Politburo and then from the presidency, which Brezhnev assumed himself. His rise and fall show how the post-1964 promise of collective leadership gradually tilted back toward the predominance of one leader.

When Podgorny took the chairmanship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in December 1965, the powers of the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium were expanded. The Presidium gained formal control over the activity of the Council of Ministers, which strengthened his position in the Politburo, and his frequent disagreements with Council chairman Kosygin over economic policy came out of the same ground.

He did not treat the post as ceremonial. According to Lukyanov, who then worked in the Presidium, resolutions strengthened the role of the soviets and stressed their independence and the inadmissibility of party substitution of state bodies, followed by decrees on rural, district and city soviets. This led by 1972 to a law on the status of deputies, adopted on 20 September, which first enshrined deputies' immunity, guarantees and accountability, and was later reproduced in Bulgaria and Mongolia. In the same period he turned the formal procedure of receiving ambassadors' credentials into a political event, talking with each ambassador for an hour and preparing carefully.

The expansion of the office, however, made it a danger. On 24 May 1977 a unanimous Central Committee vote removed him from the Politburo on Grigory Romanov's proposal, and the vote appeared to take him by surprise. Immediately afterwards he rose from his Politburo seat to sit with the ordinary members; he was nominally still Presidium chairman, but his leadership had ended. Twenty-three days later, on 16 June, he lost the chairmanship and Brezhnev took the post. The account that Brezhnev had Konstantin Chernenko comb the 1936 Constitution so that the party leader could also hold the Presidium chairmanship, making the 1977 Constitution's approval Podgorny's death knell, comes from English Wikipedia and Zemtsov-Daniels literature and cannot be presented as established fact.

His exit took the form of removal from the public record rather than explicit punishment or explanation. The last mention of him in major Soviet media was his meeting with Finnish President Kekkonen; the authorities gave no explanation and no denunciation. He retained his Supreme Soviet seat for a time, and his figure was removed from one of Dmitry Nalbandyan's paintings in the Tretyakov Gallery. According to Japanese ambassador Uomoto, he attended the 7 November 1978 Kremlin reception for the October Revolution anniversary as a Central Committee member and spoke with Brezhnev, Kosygin and Gromyko, who showed embarrassment at his presence.

The personal aftermath survives in an interview with his daughter. Pensioned off, he was deeply hurt; Brezhnev telephoned him a couple of times asking "How are you, Kolya?", and then the relationship ended. He intended to write memoirs, brought home six packets of paper and a typewriter, but got no further than three pages. In 1980 lung cancer was found; given his age, surgery and chemotherapy were decided against. The sources differ on when he died. Russian-language sources give 11 January 1983 in Moscow with burial at the Novodevichy cemetery, while English Wikipedia records 12 January 1983 in Kiev of cancer. Neither should be stated as settled; only the month of his death is common to both.