Nikolai Voznesenskii

Born Nov. 18 (Dec. 1), 1903; died Sept. 30, 1950. Soviet political and Party figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1943). Member of the Communist Party from 1919.

Voznesenskii was born in the village of Teploe, presently in Tula Oblast, into the family of a forestry official. He worked with the komsomol in Chern’ district and in the city of Tula. From 1921 he was a student at the la. M. Sverdlov Communist University, and upon graduating from the university he worked for the Party in the Donbas until 1928. From 1928 to 1931 he studied, and following that he worked in the economics division at the Institute of the Red Professorial and simultaneously at the Central Control Commission of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection and then at the Soviet Control Commission. In 1935 he was chairman of the city planning commission and vice-chairman of the Leningrad city soviet. In 1938 he became chairman of the State Planning Commission of the USSR and simultaneously a member of the bureau of the Soviet Control Commission. In 1939 he became vice-chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and in 1941 he became first vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. During the Great Patriotic War, Voznesenskii was a member of the State Committee for Defense, and in 1943 he became a member of the committee of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR for the economic recovery of areas liberated from the fascist German occupation. At the Seventeenth Congress of the ACP (Bolshevik) in 1934 he was elected a member of the Soviet Control Commission, and at the Eighteenth Congress in 1939 he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). At the 18th Party conference he presented the report “On the State of the Economy in 1940 and the Plan for Economic Development in 1941.” In February 1941 he became a candidate member, and in 1947 a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). He is the author of the book The War Economy of the USSR During the Great Patriotic War (1947), the first attempt at a scholarly analysis of Soviet economic development during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. Voznesenskii’s other works in the field of economics deal with problems of socialist planning, socialist reproduction on an enlarged scale, economic accounts, and the socialist organization of labor. He was awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1948) and two Orders of Lenin.