Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin

Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin , 1904-80, Soviet political leader. A member of the Communist party from 1927, he joined its central committee in 1939. In the 1940s, as an aide to Joseph Stalin, he became recognized as an expert in economics and industry. He held various other government and party posts before becoming (1960) first deputy chairman of the USSR council of ministers. In 1964 he succeeded Nikita Khrushchev as premier, sharing overall power with Leonid Brezhnev , general secretary of the Communist party. By the late 1960s, however, his importance in the party and government hierarchy had diminished in relation to that of Brezhnev, although Kosygin continued as premier. In this post he introduced various economic measures designed to reform and modernize Soviet agriculture, industry, and trade. Most of his efforts, however, were frustrated by Brezhnev's hardline intransigence. Kosygin resigned due to ill health in 1980 and died shortly thereafter.

Kosygin, Alexei Nikolayevich (1904–81) Soviet politician. He joined the Communist Party in 1927 and became an expert in economics and industry. He was Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1964 to 1981. During his period in office he shared power with BREZHNEV, who came to overshadow him. Kosygin achieved a notable diplomatic success in bringing the 1965–66 INDO-PAKISTAN WAR to an end.

Arbuzov, Alexei Nikolayevich (1908–86), Soviet dramatist, one of the few to have found an audience in the West, compared by some English critics to Chekhov. His first major success came with Tanya (1939), about a woman transformed by widowhood. Later plays included a dramatization of Turgenev's novel On the Eve (1948), City At Dawn (1957), and the Chekhovian The Twelfth Hour (1959), the first to be seen in English, at the Oxford Playhouse in 1964. It Happened In Irkutsk (also 1959), reminiscent in form of Wilder's Our Town, was his greatest success in Russia; it was seen in Sheffield in 1967. By 1963 Arbuzov's plays were running simultaneously at over 70 Russian theatres. The Promise (1965) established his reputation abroad, in spite of a sentimental plot covering the lives of a girl and two men from adolescence in 1942 during the siege of Leningrad until 1960. It was produced in London and New York in 1967. Old World was produced by the RSC in 1976, the year after its première in Poland. A two-character play about an autumnal romance between a doctor and his patient, an ex-circus performer, it was staged in Paris (1977) as Le Bateau pour Lipaïa and in New York (1978) as Do You Turn Somersaults? Remembrances (1981) was staged in Watford (1984) as Chance Visitor.