visual representation. Most influential, however, was the film Zoya directed by Lev Arnshtam (1944). The beauty and the performance of the actress Galina Vodyanitskaya in the role of Kosmode-myanskaya left a lasting impression in popular consciousness that turned the partisan heroine into a symbol of identity for more than one postwar generation of young Soviet women imitating her in dress, hairdo, and manner.
In the post-Soviet debate on the legend and reality of Soviet war heroes, some voices turned her into a henchman of Stalin’s plan of “scorched earth,” killed by the villagers, not by the Germans; others raised questions about her identity. Still, Kosmodemyanskaya is one of the few members of the Soviet pantheon of heroes who did not fall victim to the strong iconoclastic movement of the 1990s. Kosmodemyanskaya’s place in history lies beyond historical truth; it is founded on her power as a legend that became part of collective memory.
Her grave can be found in the Moscow Novodevishche Cemetery, a special museum and a monument by M. G. Manizer in the village Petr-ishchevo, the place of her execution, near Moscow. See also: WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kosmodemyanskaya, Liubov. (1942). My daughter Zoya. Moscow: Foreign Language Press. Sartorti, Rosalinde. (1995). “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints.” In Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
(1904-1980), Soviet prime minister.
Alexei Kosygin was born into a worker’s family in St. Petersburg. After finishing schooling at the Leningrad Cooperative Technical School in 1924, he moved to Siberia and worked in a series of positions in the cooperative movement. It was while in Siberia, in 1927, that he joined the Communist Party. After returning to Leningrad he completed further studies at the Leningrad Textile Institute in 1935. Reflecting the opportunities opened up by the Stalinist terror and the patronage of Leningrad party boss Andrei Zhdanov, Kosygin moved rapidly from being a foreman and shop superintendent in the Zhelyabov factory through a series of industrial, city, and party posts, until in 1939 he became people’s commissar for the textile industry. From April 1940 until March 1953 he was deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (from 1946 Council of Ministers), or deputy prime minister; from June 1943 until March 1946 he was also prime minister of Russia. During this period, he likewise held a series of ministerial appointments, principally in the light industry and consumer goods industry areas. Kosygin had become a full member of the Party’s Central Committee in 1939, a candidate member of the Politburo in March 1946, and a full member in February 1948.
Kosygin’s upward trajectory was halted in connection with the fall of Zhdanov and the Leningrad Affair. Although one of the intended victims of this affair, Kosygin survived, but at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 he was dropped to candidate status in the Presidium (as the Politburo was then called). Following Stalin’s death and the consolidation of the position of one of Kosygin’s enemies, Georgy Malenkov, Kosygin was dropped altogether from the enlarged Presidium in March 1953. At the same time, he was removed as deputy prime minister. He retained a ministerial position in the consumer goods/light industry sector and was restored as deputy prime minister in December 1953. He held this post until December 1956 when he became deputy chair (and from 1959 chair) of the state planning body. With Malenkov’s fall as part of the Antiparty Group, in June 1957 Kosygin was restored to candidate membership of the Presidium and in the following month to the deputy prime ministership. He retained this post, from May 1960 as first deputy chairman, until October 1964, when he became chairman of the Council of Ministers, or prime minister. In May 1960 he also became a full member of the Central Committee Presidium.
The fluctuations in Kosygin’s official positions in the early to mid-1950s reflect the vicissitudes of factional politics in the late-Stalin and early post-Stalin periods. In particular, Kosygin’s fortunes seem to have been related inversely to those of Malenkov. Khrushchev’s triumph over the Anti-party Group consolidated Kosygin’s position near the apex of Soviet politics, but it was Kosygin’s turning against Khrushchev that later allowed Kosygin to attain prime ministership. When the Soviet leadership tired of Khrushchev, they turned
KOSYGIN REFORMS
to Kosygin and Brezhnev. In the initial post-Khrushchev period, there seemed to be a general balance both between these two leaders and within the broader party leadership. Initially Kosygin was actively involved in foreign policy, including overseeing the Tashkent Agreement between India and Pakistan in 1965, negotiating with U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson at Glassboro in 1967, and conducting key talks with the Chinese in 1965 and 1969. He was the sponsor of the so-called Liber-man economic reforms (also known as the Kosy-gin reforms) in September 1965, which sought to generate greater autonomy from party control for the economic managers, although he also tightened central direction of the economy by eliminating the regional economic councils. Kosygin basically sought the more efficient management of the economy, but with the hostile Soviet reaction to the Prague Spring, the likelihood of liberalizing moves in the economy was eliminated. The suppression of the Prague Spring marked the ascendancy of Brezhnev and the clear subordination of Kosygn, who remained prime minister until his retirement in October 1980, and therefore through most of the period that Gorbachev would later call the “era of stagnation”. He was more a technocrat than a politician, but bears some of the responsibility for the Soviet Union’s perilous economic situation during the 1980s. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; KOSYGIN REFORMS; LENINGRAD AFFAIR; MALENKOV, GEORGY MAXIM-ILYANOVICH; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breslauer, George W. (1982). Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics. London: Allen amp; Unwin. Gelman, Harry. (1984). The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of D?tente. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tatu, Michel. (1968). Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin. New York: Viking.
After Nikita S. Khrushchev was removed in October 1964, Alexei N. Kosygin (1904-1980) became chairman of the USSR Council of the Ministers, as part of a duumvirate with Leonid Brezhnev. Within months the new leadership restored the industrial ministerial structure, which Khrushchev had replaced with regional sovnarkhozy (economic councils). Gosplan regained its prime role in economic planning.
In September 1965, Kosygin announced a comprehensive planning reform that implemented some of the ideas of the Kharkov economist Yevsey Liber-man and many other industrial economists who had urged relying on the profit indicator instead of detailed and numerous directives, which often conflicted with each other. Profitability had for some time been one of the indicators of plan fulfillment, though the main indicator was still gross output (valovaya produktsia, orval for short), as compared with planned levels. Now the directives would be seven in number, with profitability on capital (at controlled prices, not market ones)-or sales, for consumer goods firms-to constitute the main bonus-forming indicator. Instead of four standard indicators for use of labor, there would be only one: the wage fund.
Other obligatory tasks were to be sales (real-izatsiya), assortment, payments to the budget, centralized investments, new techniques to be introduced, and mandatory supply tasks. The infamous val would be abandoned, along with the cost reduction target, both of which jeopardized quality of production. Depending on the enterprise’s success in increasing sales and the profit rate-and subject to fulfillment of the other tasks in plan- retained profits would go to new investments, social facilities and housing, and extra worker bonuses. This provision was intended to enhance material incentives for those engaged at the enterprise. Though differentiated and quite complicated, these norms were supposed to be stable. After paying a new capital charge of 6 percent, more than half of net profits usually went to the state, however, not to enterprise funds. New enterprise whole prices would be announced by 1967 but still based on costs, not market scarcity. This would permit the end to subsidies for loss- making enterprises.
One advantage of the sovnarkhozy system was retained: The regional inter-industrial supply depots were preserved under the State Committee on Material Supplies (Gossnsab). Wholesale trade was thereby to be expanded. Several other state committees were also established for price setting and for science and technology. Concern for technological change was also reflected in the creation of science-production associations, intended to
