Andrei Kirilenko (politician)

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This article is about the politician. For the basketball player, see Andrei Kirilenko (basketball).

Andrei Pavlovich Kirilenko (October 26, 1906 - May 12, 1990) was a leading official of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in the 1970s and early 1980s among the few serving on both the Politburo (1962-1982) and Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU (1966-1982).

He was for a while positioned as a potential successor to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, although he was a few months older than Brezhnev. However, by the time of Brezhnev's death, his longer-term protege Konstantin Chernenko had reached sufficient prominence, and the defection to Britain of a relative of Kirilenko contributed to Kirilenko's forced retirement (decided before but announced after Brezhnev's death in November 1982).

Prior to joining the national leadership he had been Communist Party secretary for Zaporizhia in the region Dnepropetrovsk (1938-1947), then from Mykolaiv (1947-1950) and then from the Sverdlovsk region (1955-1962) . In the Secretariat he shared responsibility for ideology with Mikhail Suslov.