Early life Nikolai Voznesensky was born in Tula in the family of a clerk of a forestry office. He was the younger brother of
Alexander Voznesensky. His first job was as an apprentice locksmith. After graduating from the
Sverdlov Communist University he was sent to study at the economic faculty of the
Institute of Red Professors in 1928 and later himself became a professor of the institute from 1931. In 1935 he was awarded the academic degree of Doctor of Economics. During the
German-Soviet War he was responsible for putting the economy on a war footing. In 1942, he was co-opted onto the
State Defense Committee, and was again chairman of Gosplan, 1942–49.
Post World War II After the war, Voznesensky resumed his position as a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. In March 1946, he presented the first post-war Five Year Plan. In October 1946, in an incident that later formed part of
Nikita Khrushchev's seminal
Secret Speech to the 20th party congress, Voznesensky was co-opted onto the 'Politburo Commission for Foreign Affairs' whose remit was being expanded to include 'internal construction and domestic policy' The implication is that Stalin created this committee as a way of excluding certain members of the Politburo from the decision-making process, including his eventual successor,
Georgy Malenkov, who was temporarily out of favour. From February 28, 1947, to March 7, 1949, Voznesensky was a full member of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party. In December 1947, he published his major work,
The Wartime Economy of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War, which won him a Stalin Prize, and 200,000 ruble prize. In it, he forecast that as a result of the absorbing of Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence "the general crisis of capitalism has become more acute", that the high level of productivity achieved in the USA during the war would be followed by "a new devastating economic crisis and chronic unemployment" and that "having waxed fat on the people's blood during the Second World War, monopoly capitalism of the USA stands now at the head the anti-democratic camp ... and has become the instigator of imperialist expansion everywhere." The book was a refutation of the views of the Hungarian economist,
Eugen Varga, who forecast a softening of some of the harsher features of capitalism, and argued that the East European countries occupied by the Red Army did not amount to a huge loss to world capitalism. Varga was not an important figure like Voznesensky, but was allowed to defend himself, implying that he had powerful protection. Historians such as Robert Conquest and Gavriel Ra'anan have interpreted the debate as part of a power struggle between Zhdanov and his main rivals in the Politburo, Malenkov and
Lavrentiy Beria. == The Leningrad Affair ==