Kirilenko, Andrei Pavlovich
Kirilenko, Andrei Pavlovich
Born Aug. 26 (Sept. 8), 1906, in Alekseevka, in present-day Belgorod Oblast. Soviet statesman and party figure, Hero of Socialist Labor (1966). Became a member of the CPSU in 1931. The son of an artisan.
Kirilenko graduated from a rural school in 1920 and from a vocational and technical school in 1925 and then worked at enterprises in Voronezh Oblast and in a mine. He held posts in the Komsomol, on soviets, and in cooperatives in 1929–30. Graduating from the Rybinsk Aviation Institute in 1936, he was a design engineer in an aviation plant.
Kirilenko was second secretary of the Voroshilov raion committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine in Zaporozh’e in 1938 and second secretary of the Zaporozh’e oblast committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine from 1939 to 1941. He was in the Soviet Army and a member of the military council of the Eighteenth Army of the Southern Front in 1941–42 and then was a representative of the State Defense Committee at an aviation plant from 1942 to 1944. Second secretary of the Zaporozh’e oblast committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine from 1944 to 1947, Kirilenko was secretary of the party committee of the oblast of Dnepropetrovsk (1950–55) and first secretary of the party committees of the oblasts of Nikolaev (1947–1950) and Sverdlovsk (1955–62). First vice-chairman of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the RSFSR from May 1962 to April 1966, Kirilenko has been secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU since April 1966.
A delegate to the Eighteenth Conference of the ACP (Bolshevik) (February 1941) and to the Nineteenth through Twenty-fourth Congresses of the party, Kirilenko was elected to the Central Committee of the CPSU at the Twentieth, Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth Congresses and to the Central Committee of the CP of the Ukraine at the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Congresses of the CP of the Ukraine. He served as a candidate member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU from 1957 to 1961 and as a member of the Presidium from April 1962 to April 1966, then becoming a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
Kirilenko was part of the CPSU delegation to the International Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow in 1969 and headed the CPSU delegations to the congresses of the Communist parties of Chile (1965) and of France (1970) and the CPSU delegation to Italy in 1968. He was a deputy to the third through ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, a deputy and member of the Presidium of the fifth through seventh convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, and a deputy to the second and third convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. Kirilenko has been awarded five Orders of Lenin and several medals.