Vladimir Alekseevich Kucherenko

Born July 18, 1909, at the railroad station of Lozovaia, Kharkov Oblast; died Nov. 26, 1963, in Moscow. Soviet state figure and scientist. Became a member of the CPSU in 1942.

Kucherenko was a worker and then a shop foreman at Lozovaia from 1925 to 1929. After graduating from the Kharkov Construction Institute in 1933, he served as work superintendent, chief engineer, and manager of a trust for the construction of several big industrial projects in the Ukraine and the Urals. In the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Kucherenko directed the construction and restoration of industrial enterprises in Makeevka, Kharkov, Donets, Dnepropetrovsk, and Sterlitamak. Beginning in 1950 he served as member of the board and then deputy minister of the construction of machine-building enterprises of the USSR. In 1954 he became chief of the Central Board for Housing and Civil Construction of the Moscow city soviet of working people’s deputies. From 1955 he was vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and chairman of the State Committee on Construction of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In January 1961 he was elected president of the Academy of Construction and Architecture of the USSR.

Elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU at the Twentieth and Twenty-second Congresses of the party and a deputy to the fifth and sixth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and to the fourth convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, Kucherenko received the State Prize of the USSR in 1951 and was awarded three Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals. He is buried in Red Square at the Kremlin wall. The Central Research Institute of Building Structures (TsNIISK) has been named after Kucherenko.