Andrei Kirilenko

Andrei Pavlovich Kirilenko was a Soviet statesman from the start to the end of the Cold War. In 1906, Kirilenko was born at Alexeyevka in Belgorod Oblast to a Ukrainian working-class family. He graduated in the 1920s from a local vocational school, and again in the mid-to-late 1930s from the Rybinsk Aviation Technology Institute. He became a member of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) in 1930. As many like him, Kirilenko climbed up the Soviet hierarchy through the "industrial ladder"; by the 1960s, he was Vice-Chairman of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). After Nikita Khrushchev's forced resignation, Kirilenko became Leonid Brezhnev's "chief lieutenant" within the Central Committee.