20 Facts About Nikolai Patolichev

Nikolai Semyonovich Patolichev was a Soviet statesman who served as Minister of Foreign Trade of the USSR from 1958 to 1985.

Nikolai Semyonovich Patolichev was born in 1908 in Zolino in Vladimir Governorate in a peasant family of Russian ethnicity, the son of a Red Army hero in the Russian Civil War, and was orphaned at the age of twelve.

Nikolai Patolichev joined the Communist Party in 1928 in the city of Dzerzhinsk as a Komsomol.

In February 1941, at the 18th All-Union Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikolai Patolichev was promoted to full membership on the Central Committee.

On 28 December 1941, Nikolai Patolichev was relieved from duties in Yaroslavl and transferred to Chelyabinsk.

Nikolai Patolichev served as First Secretary of the Chelyabinsk Oblast and City Party Committees from 4 January 1942 to 21 March 1946, and took a hands-on approach with industrial war production, even intervening when factories missed their production targets.

In February 1946 Nikolai Patolichev was recalled to Moscow to head the Organization and Instruction Department of the Central Committee, and was elected to the Orgburo on 18 March 1946.

Kaganovich took over Khrushchev's post of First Secretary, with Nikolai Patolichev becoming Central Committee secretary for agriculture and procurement, de facto Second Secretary.

Nikolai Patolichev was removed from his posts on the Orgburo and Secretariat on 24 May 1947; his post in the latter body was taken by Mikhail Suslov.

Nikolai Patolichev next became first secretary of the Rostov Oblast and City Party Committees, serving from August 1947 to June 1950.

In October 1952, Nikolai Patolichev delivered one of the main speeches at the 19th Party Congress and was re-elected to the Central Committee as a full member.

On 5 March 1953, Nikolai Patolichev was removed from the Central Committee Presidium in the reorganization that followed Stalin's death.

At the contentious plenum of the Byelorussian Central Committee that followed, the delegates rallied behind Nikolai Patolichev and rejected the Presidium's decree, which was later dropped.

Nikolai Patolichev managed to fend off Beria's attempt to remove him, but at the January 1955 Central Committee plenum in Moscow he clashed with Khrushchev over agricultural policy.

Nikolai Patolichev was later replaced as first secretary in Byelorussia by ethnic Belarusian Kirill Mazurov, and in July 1956 became first deputy minister of Foreign Affairs.

In 1956 Nikolai Patolichev was reassigned from Byelorussia once more to Moscow, this time as First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Nikolai Patolichev served in that position from 1956 to 1958, when he was elevated to the honorable post of Minister of Foreign Trade of the USSR.

Nikolai Patolichev served as Minister of Foreign Trade for twenty-seven years, until Mikhail Gorbachev replaced him.

Nikolai Patolichev was 81 years old at the time of his death.

Nikolai Patolichev is one of two people to have received 11 Order of Lenin decorations.