Nikolai Bulganin (1885-1975) was chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers from 1955 until 1958 and for a brief period of time he was one of the world's most prominent political figures.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bulganin was born June 11, 1885, in Gorky, formerly called Nizhni Novgorod, a trade and industrial center on the Volga river. His father worked as an accountant, but little has been revealed about Bulganin's youth, perhaps because he came from a fairly well-to-do family and was given an excellent private school education. In 1917, the midst of the revolution, he joined the Bolshevik (Communist) Party. For several months he worked as a party organizer in the region's textile factories, and in early 1918, when civil war broke out, he joined other young Communist enthusiasts in the newly formed Cheka, forerunner of the secret police.

As a Chekist in Gorky, Turkestan, and Moscow, Nikolai Aleksandrovich became closely associated with a number...