The non-Politburo power who was the institutional memory of the Soviet government for 25 years
In 1979 Brezhnev stalled his Hero of Socialist Labour — Smirtyukov was, he said, a key figure in the government's feud with the CC. Kosygin took it to the Politburo himself; Tikhonov and Shcherbitsky backed it, and the award passed.
He joined the Council of People's Commissars apparatus at 21 in 1930 and served in the Kremlin for 60 years until 1990, the living embodiment of the Soviet government machinery. As Mikoyan's assistant, he handled wartime Red Army supply for the State Defence Committee; from 1964 he served for 25 years as Administrator of Affairs of the Council of Ministers under Kosygin, Tikhonov, and Ryzhkov. Alone among non-Politburo officials, he received the most secret Politburo decisions, and Central Committee department heads were instructed to coordinate major plans with him. His institutional memory was the axis that kept the state running through every change of leadership.
Career Timeline
- 1924–27Village soviet secretary, cooperative secretary, club manager
- 1927–31Moscow State University, faculty of Soviet law
- 1930–41Sovnarkom apparatus: senior referent, consultant, sector head
- 1941–46Deputy head of Sovnarkom Secretariat, assistant to Mikoyan on GKO supply
- 1946–53Deputy head, Council of Ministers Secretariat
- 1953–64Deputy Administrator of Affairs, Council of Ministers
- 1964–89Administrator of Affairs, Council of Ministers
- 1989–90Adviser to the Administrator of Affairs
Related historical events
Wartime Supply: "Only We Knew the Size of the Army"
When war broke out, Smirtyukov was at a Sovnarkom rest house outside Moscow. On the morning of 22 June 1941, a phone call announced the war and a car arrived to bring him back to the Kremlin. Mikoyan appointed him as his assistant for Red Army supply under the State Defence Committee, pairing him with the chief quartermaster, General Andrei Khrulev. Smirtyukov's wartime work fell into three strands. First, he and Khrulev personally inspected supply depots and frontline logistics. In the early days they toured the vast warehouses around Moscow, deciding what to evacuate and what to leave for the front. Once, reporting on an enormous warehouse, Smirtyukov declared there were "millions of pairs of felt boots"; Khrulev quietly corrected him: "only eight hundred thousand," and Mikoyan laughed that eight hundred thousand was still a lot. Throughout the war the two men shuttled to the front solving supply breakdowns. When Ivanovo textile mills lost their trucks to the army and could not bring in wool, Khrulev improvised horse-drawn transport divisions from collective-farm horses. Second, Smirtyukov rotated with Vladimir Pavlov as GKO supply representative to blockaded Leningrad. They pushed food through on small military vessels under shellfire and flew in high-calorie items: chocolate, egg powder. With the help of the former Leningrad statistical chief Volodarsky, they located hidden stocks of pipes and rails and built a fuel pipeline into the besieged city. For this work Smirtyukov received his first Order of Lenin in March 1943. Third was his most secret task. Every month a document was prepared stating the full strength of the Red Army, its monthly losses in dead and wounded, and the food rations for every front. Only five people in the USSR were party to it, and Smirtyukov was one. The General Staff's Lieutenant-General Chetverikov came to his office; together they drafted the decision, the memo to Stalin, and the appendix with figures handwritten into the typed text. After Mikoyan and Khrulev signed, Smirtyukov delivered it to Stalin's secretary Poskrebyshev. Stalin, who might let other papers sit for weeks, signed this one immediately, sometimes twice: as GKO chairman at the end, and as the country's supreme authority on the first page. At 5 a.m. on Victory Day, 9 May 1945, Smirtyukov drove out through the Spassky Gate with Mikoyan and Khrulev, bound for Berlin. Stalin had ordered them to arrange food rationing for the city's civilian population. That evening in Dresden, the four of them poured vodka into cut-glass tumblers to toast victory. When Mikoyan asked why they had poured so much, Smirtyukov replied, "We'll drink it all at once and have no more." Mikoyan looked at him and said, "The psychology of a cabman!" And that, for Smirtyukov, was the end of the war.