Mikhail Pervukhin

Mikhail Georgiyevich Pervukhin (; 14 October [ O.S. 1 October] 1904 – 22 July 1978) was a Soviet politician and an engineer who served as people's commissar for various commissions under Stalin and Khrushchev presidiums.

He served as a First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1955 to 1957.

Early life and career He was born on 14 October 1904 in the village of Yuryuzansky Zavod, Ufa Governorate, Russian Empire to a Russian working-class family. Pervukhin was a political activist for the communist cause and became a party member of the Russian Communist Party in 1919. In August to September 1919, Pervukhin was a member of the Zlatoust city commission on the nationalisation of property belonging to the Russian bourgeoisie. He began working for the Zlatoust newspaper Borba in October 1919, and worked there until February 1920 when he started to attend after-school lessons. He fought alongside the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War in the South Urals. From October to November 1920, Pervukhin was a member of the Bolshevik squad quelling the anti-Bolshevik uprising in Chrysostom.

From January 1921 to mid-autumn Pervukhin worked as the Executive Secretary of the Proletarian Thought. He was a member of the Bureau of the Zlatoust Komsomol District Committee, and later became the head of its Department for Political Education in April 1922. Later that year he became the Zlatoust Komsomol District Committee's Deputy Secretary, and was its Technical Secretary from April to August 1922.

The Metal Workers' Union of the Zlatoust District Committee ordered Pervukhin to Moscow in the late summer of 1922 to study where he went to attend the Plekhanov Moscow Institute of the National Economy; he studied electrical engineering and found employment with the Moscow Electric Power Company in 1932. In May 1936, he became the Director of the Kashirskaya Power Plant. From June to September 1937, Pervukhin worked as Mosenergo's Chief Engineer, and later that year became its acting head. Pervukhin started to work for the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry in late 1937, and was later appointed to the post of Deputy People's Commissar for Heavy Industry in 1938, and First Deputy People's Commissars for Heavy Industry in June 1937 when Lazar Kaganovich was People's Commissar for Heavy Industry. Pervukhin, alongside Boris Vannikov, was Vyacheslav Molotov's deputy on the State Defense Committee's commission responsible for the development of the Soviet program of nuclear weapons since 1943. Along with Molotov, Pervukhin was a program manager of the commission's uranium project. When Joseph Stalin signed the State Defense Committee Resolution No. 9887, he established a Special Committee with emergency powers.

The Committee's main duty was to oversee the work of those who contributed to the development of the Soviet nuclear weapons. Stalin personally picked the members of the committee; Pervukhin was one of nine members. Pervukhin was the Deputy Chairman under Vannikov's Chairmanship of the First Main Directorate of the Council of People's Commissars, the executive branch of the special committee. He also served as Chairman of the State Commission on the RDS-1 testing at the Semipalatinsk Test Site. Malenkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, appointed Pervukhin the post of First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers on 28 February 1955. who held the post until 10 May 1957. Later, in 1957, Pervukhin joined the Anti-Party Group in a bid to remove Khrushchev as First Secretary.

Ambassadorship to East Germany Following the failed bid to remove Khrushchev, Pervukhin was demoted to a non-voting member of the Presidium, and became the Soviet Union's ambassador to East Germany in 1958.

Decorations and awards

Hero of Socialist Labour (1949) Five Orders of Lenin Order of the October Revolution Order of the Red Banner of Labour