Korniets, Leonid

Born Aug. 8 (21), 1901, in the village of Bobrinets, now in Kirovograd Oblast; died May 29, 1969, in Moscow. Soviet statesman and party figure. Member of the CPSU from 1926. Son of a farm laborer.

Korniets assumed responsible party and government positions in 1931 and became second secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine (Bolshevik) in 1938. He was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in 1938-39 and chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in 1939-44. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, Korniets was a member of the military councils of a number of fronts and was one of the organizers and leaders of the partisan movement in the Ukraine. He was first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in 1944—46 and of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR in 1946-53. Korniets became minister of state purchases of the USSR in 1953 and minister of bread products of the USSR in 1956. He was chairman of the State Committee on Bread Products of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and a minister of the USSR from 1958 to 1961. In 1961 he became first deputy chairman and then in January 1963, chairman, of the State Committee on Farm Produce of the Council of Ministers of the USSR; he was also a minister of the USSR.

Korniets was a delegate at the Eighteenth through Twenty-third Party Congresses; he was elected to the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) at the Eighteenth Congress and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU at the Nineteenth through Twenty-third Congresses. He was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet at the first to seventh convocations. Korniets was awarded three Orders of Lenin, four other orders, and various medals.