Mikhail Timofeevich Efremov

Born May 9 (22), 1911, in the village of Nikolaevka in present-day Krasnoarmeiskoe Raion, Kuibyshev Oblast. Soviet government and party figure, member of the CPSU since 1932.

Efremov came from a poor peasant family and was raised in a children’s home in Korsun’ from 1922 to 1927. In 1927–28 he was a komsomol worker. He graduated in 1931 from the Samara Electrical Engineering Technicum and began work in this profession. In 1941 he graduated from the Kuibyshev Industrial Institute and worked as chief power engineer of construction at a plant at Chapaevsk. Beginning in 1943 he worked as an instructor and department chief of the Kuibyshev Oblast committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). In 1951–52 he was second secretary of the Kuibyshev Oblast Committee of the CPSU; he became first secretary of the committee in October 1952. In 1959–61 he worked for the Central Committee of the CPSU as chief of the department for the party organs of the RSFSR and was a member of the Central Committee’s RSFSR bureau. In 1961–62 he was first secretary of the Cheliabinsk Oblast Committee of the CPSU; in 1962–64, first secretary of the Gorky Industrial Oblast Committee of the CPSU; and in 1964–65, first secretary of the Gorky Oblast Committee of the CPSU. In 1965 he became deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In October 1971 he became Soviet ambassador to the German Democratic Republic and in March 1975, Soviet ambassador to Austria. He was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU at the Twentieth, Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth Party Congresses. He was deputy to the fourth through eighth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. His awards include two Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals.