TIKHONOV, NIKOLAY ALEKSANDROVICH

born May 14 [May 1, Old Style], 1905, Kharkov, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Kharkiv, Ukraine] died June 1, 1997, Moscow, Russia premier of the Soviet Union from 1980 to 1985. He was closely associated with the former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Born into a middle-class Ukrainian family, Tikhonov graduated from the Metallurgical Institute in Dnipropetrovsk in 1930 and later went to work for a pipe factory in Nikopol, rising from engineer to plant manager. In the late 1930s he met Brezhnev, who was then regional party secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and in 1940 Tikhonov joined the CPSU. He entered government administration in 1950, eventually becoming a deputy minister and then a minister in Moscow in the late 1950s, overseeing economic affairs. In the early 1960s he worked for the State Planning Committee, and in 1965, after Brezhnev became party leader, he was named deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Tikhonov became first deputy prime minister to Premier Aleksey Kosygin in 1976, and, although he did not become a full (voting) member of the Politburo until late in 1979, he was chosen to succeed the ailing Kosygin as premier of the Soviet Union just two months before Kosygin's death in December 1980. Regarded as a loyal and dutiful but not particularly effective premier, the ailing Tikhonov retired from his post as premier in 1985, just months after Mikhail Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the Communist Party. Tikhonov remained a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU until mid-1989, when he was ousted.