Aleksandr Petrovich Rudakov

Rudakov was born on 11 September 1910 (29 August Old Style) in Polohy, Aleksandrovsky district, Katerynoslav gubernia, now a city in Zaporizhzhia oblast, Ukraine, and died in Moscow on 10 July 1966, aged 55, buried at the Kremlin Wall. He joined the Komsomol in 1925 and the party in 1931, worked as a miner in the Donbas from 1927, attended the workers' faculty of the Leningrad Mining Institute from 1930 and graduated from it in 1937. From 1938 to 1942 he worked in the apparatus of the CC of the CP(b)U as instructor and deputy head and head of the coal-industry department, serving as assistant to First Secretary Khrushchev from July 1938, and in 1941 as authorized representative of the Southwestern Front Military Council. He worked in the CC VKP(b) apparatus in 1942-1944, then in the CC CP(b)U as deputy secretary for the coal industry and department head in 1944-1948, head of the heavy-industry department in 1948-1953 and head of the party, trade-union and Komsomol organs department in 1953-1954. He was a candidate member of the CC CP(b)U from 28 January 1949 to 23 September 1952 and a member from 27 September 1952 to 17 January 1956, a candidate member of the CPSU CC from 25 February 1956 to 23 November 1962 and a full member from 23 November 1962 until 10 July 1966, and a deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet of the 6th-7th convocations and of the Ukrainian SSR Supreme Soviet of the 2nd-3rd convocations.

From 1954 to November 1962 he headed the CPSU Central Committee Heavy Industry Department, which had been created by splitting the CC Industrial-Transport Department. In that post he authored proposals dated 11 February 1955, 'On the possibilities of increasing production of large-diameter pipes at existing tube-rolling plants for the construction of trunk pipelines', which analysed the shortfall in large-diameter pipe, Minchermet's inertia and underused capacity at the Nikopol, Chelyabinsk (ChTPZ) and Rustavi plants, and the adoption of foreign hot-drawing expansion practice; the USSR imported 250 km of pipe from Czechoslovakia in 1955. The CC decision of 28 April 1955 on seamless large-diameter pipe at Minchermet enterprises confirms the department's role.

At the CPSU Central Committee plenum of 19-23 November 1962 the party apparatus was split into industrial and agricultural wings. On 23 November Rudakov was promoted to full CC membership and elected CC Secretary for industry, and from that date until 16 November 1964 he also chaired the newly created CC CPSU Bureau for Industry and Construction, the apex body of the industrial wing covering industrial party committees across republics and oblasts. The CC plenum of 16 November 1964 ordered the industrial and agricultural oblast and krai party organizations merged again, yet Rudakov kept the CC secretary post and the Heavy Industry Department until his death.

In the Secretariat portfolio distribution of 16 May 1966 Rudakov was assigned heavy-industry questions while personally heading the Heavy Industry Department. The Secretariat never met with full attendance in this period, and the gravely ill Rudakov did not attend its meetings. After his death on 10 July 1966, Mikhail Solomentsev was elected in his place from 13 December 1966. In this historiography the post-1964 leadership deliberately stepped back from the Khrushchev-era management reforms while strengthening the party-state apparatus and functioned through a collective-leadership Secretariat; Rudakov's retention of the heavy-industry portfolio until death belongs in that context.

Sources diverge on national and family background. The Russian sources resting on official personnel records, including hrono.ru's reprint of Izvestiya TsK KPSS No. 7 (1990), list him as Russian and describe a peasant family, while Ukrainian Wikipedia calls him a Ukrainian Soviet and communist-party figure yet gives Russian in its own infobox and states he was born into a family of an employee. Birthplace is not evidence of ethnicity, so neither position may be silently preferred.