The man who ran Soviet foreign trade for 27 years, holder of eleven Orders of Lenin
In 1940, at an emergency Central Committee plenum convened after the failures of the Soviet-Finnish War, General Khrulev introduced the 31-year-old Patolichev to Stalin. Stalin offered him leadership of the Komsomol; Patolichev declined. The encounter shielded him in his later battles with Malenkov.
During the war he organized Tankograd; afterward he led the Communist Party of Belarus. From 1958 he served 27 years as Minister of Foreign Trade, directing Soviet oil and gas exports and economic détente with the West, the sole recipient of eleven Orders of Lenin.
Career Timeline
- 1939–41First Secretary, Yaroslavl Oblast
- 1942–46First Secretary, Chelyabinsk — organized 'Tankograd'
- 1946–47Secretary of the Central Committee, VKP(b)
- 1950–56First Secretary, CP of Belarus
- 1956–58Deputy, then First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs
- 1958–85Minister of Foreign Trade — 27 years directing Soviet imports and exports
Related historical events
Tankograd — The Wartime Miracle of Chelyabinsk
When Nikolai Patolichev arrived as First Secretary of the Chelyabinsk Oblast Party Committee in 1942, the city was already being called "Tankograd." The evacuated Leningrad Kirov Plant and Kharkov Diesel Plant had merged with the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant into a single tank-building complex, the Chelyabinsk Kirov Plant (ChKZ). As party boss, Patolichev coordinated production, supply, and civilian life across the oblast. ChKZ produced 18,000 T-34 medium tanks and tens of thousands of KV and IS heavy tanks and SU self-propelled guns; one in every five Soviet tanks came from this complex.
Patolichev's most striking achievement was the creation of the Ural Volunteer Tank Corps in 1943. Funded by local donations and staffed by 9,660 volunteers recruited from the region, the corps provided its own tanks and equipment and fought from Kursk to Berlin. Patolichev's four years in Chelyabinsk earned him five Orders of Lenin and made him a central figure in postwar Soviet industrial management.