Nation: ALEKSEI KOSYGIN: THE COMPLEAT APPARATCHIK

Born: Feb. 20, 1904, in St. Petersburg, son of a lathe operator.

Education: After serving in the Red Army at 15, he entered the Leningrad Co-operative Technicum, later earned a degree at the Leningrad Textile Institute.

Rise to Power: Gifted with phenomenal memory and an analytical intelligence that might have taken him to the top of any capitalist corporation, Kosygin advanced swiftly as an efficient, inventive technocrat of the Stalinist era. He became overall boss of the textile industry in 1939, during the war served as deputy chairman of the U.S.S.R. Council of People’s Commissars. He soon caught Stalin’s eye, and in 1948 became the youngest (43) member of the Politburo.

From that time, Kosygin has seldom been far from the center of Soviet power, no matter what upheavals occurred there. Though skilled as a politician, he was not classed as a hard-line Stalinist. His success as Deputy Premier for a total of 19 years was mostly due to his talent as a masterful apparatchik, the engineer of Soviet economic machinery. Said Nikita Khrushchev in 1958: “Kosygin knows everything.”

In the Triumvirate: In 1964, when the party Central Committee sacked Khrushchev, it promoted Kosygin—then First Deputy Premier—to Premier. Today, Leonid Brezhnev, an ebullient and sloganeering politician, acts as Russia’s chairman of the board: Kosygin is the chief Soviet operating officer and head of government. A pragmatist, he remains aloof from ideological disputes and factional politics. Under his leadership, the government is slowly absorbing many of the administrative responsibilities long held by the party. The third member of the Kremlin triumvirate, President Nikolai Podgorny, is the least powerful, although in recent months he has emerged as a traveling Soviet spokesman to non-aligned nations such as Austria and, last week, Egypt.

Personality: Oddly, younger Russians admire the sober Kosygin more than they do Brezhnev. Correct, levelheaded, with a taste for anonymity and a dull, if cultured, public speaking voice, Kosygin emphasizes moderation and maintenance of peace. He is a widower—his wife Klavdia died of cancer last month—and has a married daughter, Liudmila Gvishiani. For all his drab public façade, Kosygin is capable of sharp, dry wit. On a visit to Britain last February, while dining with Tory Leader Ted Heath, he observed: “It is less fun to be in opposition in some countries than in others.”