Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin (February 21 [O.S. February 8]. 1904 – December 18, 1980) is a Soviet-Russian statesman during the Cold War.

Kosygin was born in the city of Saint Petersburg in 1904 to a Russian working-class family.

He is conscripted into the labor army during the Russian Civil War, and after the Red Army's demobilization in 1921, he works in Siberia as an industrial manager.

Kosygin returns to Leningrad in the early 1930s and works his way up the Soviet hierarchy.

During the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War), Kosygin is a member of the State Defense Committee and is tasked with moving Soviet industry out of territories soon to be overrun by the German Army.

He serves as Minister of Finance for a year before becoming Minister of Light Industry (later, Minister of Light Industry and Food).

Stalin removes Kosygin from the Politburo one year before his own death in 1953, intentionally weakening Kosygin's position within the Soviet hierarchy.

Stalin dies in 1953, and on March 20, 1959, Kosygin is appointed to the position of chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), a post he will hold for little more than a year.

Kosygin next becomes First Deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers.

When Nikita Khrushchev is removed from power in 1964, Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev succeed him as Premier and First Secretary respectively.

Hereafter, Kosygin forms a troika with Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, that govern the Soviet Union in Khrushchev's place.

During the latter half of the 1960s, Kosygin initially emerges as the most prominent figure in the post-Khrushchev troika.

In addition to managing the Soviet Union's economy, he assumes a preeminent role in the nation's foreign policy by leading arms control talks with the US and directly overseeing relations with other communist countries.

However, the onset of the Prague Spring in 1968 results in a severe backlash against his policies that enable Brezhnev to eclipse him as the dominant figure in the Politburo.

While he and Brezhnev dislike one another, he remains in office until being forced to retire on  October 23, 1980, due to bad health.

He dies two months later on December 18, 1980.