Shakhurin, Aleksei Ivanovich

Born Feb. 25, 1904, in the village of Mikhailovskoe, in what is now Moscow Oblast; died July 3,1975, in Moscow. Soviet state figure. Hero of Socialist Labor (1941). Lieutenant general of the engineers (1944). Member of the CPSU from 1925.

The son of a peasant, Shakhurin became a worker in 1921. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Engineering and Economics, he worked in the aircraft industry and at the N. E. Zhukovskii Air Force Academy. In 1938 he became first secretary of the party’s Yaroslavl oblast committee and then of the Gorky oblast committee.

Shakhurin was made people’s commissar of the aviation industry of the USSR in 1940. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, he helped evacuate enterprises of the aviation industry to the eastern part of the country and facilitated the production of matériel for the air force. After the war he served as deputy minister of the aviation industry of the USSR and vice-chairman of the State Committee on Foreign Economic Relations of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. He became a personal pensioner in 1959.

Shakhurin was a delegate to the Eighteenth Congress of the ACP(B) in 1939 and was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee. Shakhurin was awarded two Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals.