Mikhail Georgievich Pervukhin

On 24 June 1941, the third day of the German invasion, Pervukhin was appointed deputy chairman of the Evacuation Council under the Council of People's Commissars. As the front collapsed, from July to December 1941, under his direction 1,523 industrial enterprises were relocated to the Urals, the Volga region, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia, an industrial redeployment operation without precedent in world history.

Pervukhin was also tasked with organising additional power supply for the relocated factories. In the first half of 1942 alone, the evacuated heavy-industry plants produced roughly 10,000 aircraft and 54,000 artillery pieces. This output became the material foundation for the defence of Moscow in the winter of 1941 and the subsequent Stalingrad counteroffensive.

At the same time, the State Defence Committee appointed him plenipotentiary for the Red Army's Military-Chemical Defence Directorate, preparing defensive measures against possible chemical-weapons use. This dual assignment illustrates Pervukhin's central position in the wartime Soviet industrial mobilisation system.

Mikhail Pervukhin was Igor Kurchatov's administrative and economic counterpart in the Soviet atomic bomb project, the man who turned nuclear physics into a production reality. In the autumn of 1942, acting on Molotov's instructions, he investigated why nuclear physics work in the USSR had stalled. He met with Ioffe, Kurchatov, Alikhanov, and Kikoin, grasped the field's potential, and reported back that work 'must be resumed immediately.' The leadership accepted his recommendation within days. When the State Defense Committee formally restarted nuclear research on 11 February 1943, Pervukhin was made the chief economic manager responsible for all material-technical supply and construction.

The scope was vast. Together with Kurchatov he established Laboratory No. 2 (now the Kurchatov Institute) in Moscow's Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo district and built its experimental uranium-graphite reactor. He organized the entire supply chain: uranium ore prospecting, production of ultra-high-purity graphite, and construction of a heavy-water experimental reactor. In April 1945, he and Kurchatov jointly proposed to Stalin the creation of a dedicated administrative body, the Scientific-Technical Council, with broad directive powers over all enterprises and institutes, regardless of their branch affiliation. On 20 August 1945 he was appointed deputy chairman of the Special Committee (chaired by Beria) and subsequently served as chairman of the Engineering-Technical Council and first deputy head of the First Main Directorate, directing the construction of the plutonium production complex (Plant No. 817, now the Mayak facility) and the uranium enrichment plant (Plant No. 813, now the Ural Electrochemical Combine).

The project's culmination came in August 1949. Pervukhin chaired the state commission for the test of the first Soviet atomic bomb, RDS-1, at the Semipalatinsk test site. After the successful detonation, a secret decree of 29 October 1949 awarded him the title Hero of Socialist Labor and the Order of Lenin. If Kurchatov was the face of the physics, Pervukhin was the administrator who translated the vast state project into real factories, mines, power grids, and chemical processes. He continued to advocate for the peaceful use of atomic energy (nuclear power plants, nuclear-powered ships and aircraft) and until his final years sat on every state commission accepting new nuclear power stations.

At the CPSU Presidium session of 18 June 1957, Pervukhin joined the majority of members who criticized Khrushchev for deciding key policy questions unilaterally, ignoring other Presidium members and departing from Leninist norms of leadership. He specifically challenged the break-up of the branch ministries, the transfer of enterprises to the regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy), and the slogan of overtaking the USA by 1960 in per-capita meat and milk production; he was a First Deputy Premier at the time. The Presidium majority voted to relieve Khrushchev as First Secretary.

The bid to remove Khrushchev failed. The resolution of the 22–29 June 1957 plenum on the 'Anti-Party Group of Malenkov, Kaganovich and Molotov' demoted Pervukhin from full to candidate member of the Presidium. From July to December 1957 he chaired the USSR State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations, and from 1958 to 1962 he served as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the USSR to the German Democratic Republic.

His ambassadorship unfolded in the second Berlin crisis. Khrushchev's November 1958 ultimatum demanded that the West accept West Berlin as a free demilitarized city within six months and threatened unilateral action, while the GDR's economic difficulties and mass flight through Berlin drove the pressure to close the border. Pervukhin warned Moscow that the East German leadership under Walter Ulbricht was 'sometimes impatient and took a unilateral approach' on the West Berlin border, pushing to cut off free movement as soon as possible. On 5 December 1958 Ulbricht told him that 'the current moment is a turning point in the problem of recognition of the GDR', and in July 1961 that the most propitious time to seal the border, to maximize surprise, was the night between Saturday and Sunday. As ambassador, Pervukhin was the channel through which Ulbricht pressed Moscow.

Pervukhin observed that an open and essentially uncontrolled border in Berlin 'unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which unfortunately, does not always turn out in favor of the Democratic [East] Berlin'. He remained wary of a sectoral barrier, believing it would increase anti-Soviet sympathies in Berlin and Germany. Instead he proposed restrictive measures, stronger border security, or stopping free movement, while conceding that closure was possible if the political situation worsened.

Flying from East Berlin to Moscow for the Warsaw Pact leaders' meeting in early August 1961, Pervukhin told his deputy Yuli Kvitsinsky that the GDR's action must not be seen as its plan alone, since this could give the Federal Republic and its allies a pretext to intervene: 'The Soviet Union and the entire Warsaw Pact must stand in front of the GDR so that it will be clear to all that there is no way back.' On 13 August 1961 the GDR erected the Berlin Wall with Soviet and Warsaw Pact consent, on Khrushchev's order in response to Ulbricht's persistent pressing. Pervukhin's ambassadorship ended when Pyotr Abrasimov succeeded him at the end of 1962.

From 1963 to 1965 he headed the Directorate of Energy and Electrification at the USSR Supreme Council of the National Economy, and from 1965 to the end of his life he was a member of the Gosplan collegium, head of the department of territorial planning and location of production, and a member of all state commissions accepting new nuclear power plants.