For more than 16 years Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin (1904-1980) served as chairman of the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers and effective head of the Soviet government. With party chief Leonid Brezhnev he helped shape Soviet economic development and played a leading role in the formation of foreign and domestic policy. Kosygin became for many a respected symbol of the conservative and workmanlike attitudes characterizing the "Brezhnev era."

Kosygin learned by experience. He was born into a working-class family in St. Petersburg on February 21, 1904. His father was a lathe operator, and he grew up in the cultured and cosmopolitan capital of tsarist Russia surrounded by increasingly militant and radical workers, absorbing much from both social cultures. (Throughout his life, he dressed impeccably, with shoes always brightly polished; but he could always communicate with ordinary factory hands and knew his way around the shop floor.) At the age of...