Vladimir Vasilyevich Shcherbitsky

From the early 1960s through the late 1980s, when Shcherbitsky served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and earlier as chairman of its Council of Ministers, the republic's economy roughly quadrupled and industrial output rose nearly fivefold. Under his watch the Kremenchuk Hydroelectric Station was completed ahead of schedule and the Yuzhmash (Southern Machine-Building Plant) in Dnepropetrovsk grew into a pillar of the Soviet space and rocket industry. Transport infrastructure was modernised with the reconstruction of the Simferopol–Alushta–Yalta mountain highway and the opening of a regular trolleybus line across Crimea. In agriculture, kolkhoz debt was written off, state procurement prices for livestock products were raised by an average of 35%, and by the end of the 1980s the republic was harvesting 51 million tonnes of grain annually: more than a tonne per person. A product of the Dnepr industrial belt himself, he created a republic-level energy ministry and systematised industrial policy spanning defence, consumer goods, and construction; the population of the Ukrainian SSR rose from 43.1 million to 52 million during his tenure. Culturally, roughly 60% of schools taught in Ukrainian, the state dance ensemble and folk choir flourished, and Dynamo Kyiv, strengthened by his recruitment of Valeriy Lobanovskyi, became the Soviet Union's pre-eminent football club.

For Shcherbitsky, who rose through the Dnepropetrovsk industrial belt, industrialisation was both conviction and lived experience. During his leadership from 1972 to 1989, Ukraine's industrial output increased roughly fivefold and agricultural production doubled, reaching 51 million tons of grain annually. The republic produced 52% of the USSR's iron ore, 27% of its coal, 35% of its steel, 45% of metallurgical equipment, 95% of mainline diesel locomotives, and over 50% of its sugar. With some 300 industrial branches, Soviet Ukraine manufactured everything from airliners and rockets to processed foods. The population grew from 43.1 to 52 million, and nearly 380 million square metres of housing were built between 1961 and 1980, housing 34.4 million people in new apartments. Shcherbitsky's pragmatism (leveraging the Dnepr network to advance republican interests within the Moscow-centred system) brought unprecedented material prosperity to Ukraine, even within the structural limits of the Soviet model.