Mikhail Lesechko

Born Oct. 3 (16), 1909, in Aleksandrovsk, present-day Zaporozh’e, Ukrainian SSR. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the CPSU from 1940.

A worker’s son, Lesechko was a lathe operator at the G. I. Petrovskii Plant in Kherson from 1924 to 1929. Upon graduating from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1934, he worked as shop chief and production superintendent at plants of the aviation industry from 1934 to 1942. From 1942 to 1946 he served on the staff of the People’s Commissariat for the Aviation Industry as chief engineer of the Central Administration. From 1946 to 1948 he worked with the Technical Council on Mechanization under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and from 1948 to 1954 he was director of the Moscow Calculating and Analytic Machines Plant and chief of a special design bureau. From 1954 to 1956 he was first deputy minister of instrument-making and automation techniques of the USSR, and he was minister from 1956 to 1957. Deputy chairman of Gosplan of the Ukrainian SSR and minister of the Ukrainian SSR from 1957 to 1958, Lesechko was first deputy chairman of Gosplan of the USSR and minister of the USSR from 1958 to 1960, chairman of the commission of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on foreign economic affairs, and minister of the USSR from 1960 to 1962. Since 1962 he has been deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and since 1968 simultaneously permanent representative of the USSR at the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

Lesechko was a delegate to the Twenty-second through Twenty-fourth Party Congresses and has been a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU since 1961 and a deputy to the sixth through ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Lesechko was awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1954), two Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals.