Sergey Afanasyev (engineer)

Sergey Alexandrovich Afansyev
Sergey Afanasyev in 1998. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev
Minister of General Machine Building
In office 2 March 1965 – 8 April 1983
Premier	Aleksei Kosygin, Nikolai Tikhonov
Succeeded by	Oleg Baklanov

Sergey Alexandrovich Afanasyev (Russian: Серге́й Алекса́ндрович Афана́сьев) (August 30, 1918 – May 13, 2001) was a prominent Soviet engineer, space and defence industry executive, the first Minister of the Soviet-era Ministry of General Machine Building.

Sergey Afanasyev was born in the city of Klin in the Moscow region. He graduated from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University in 1941, and was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (since 1943). During World War II, he worked as an engineer at an artillery factory in Perm, learning armor design. He became the protégé of Minister of Defence Dmitriy Ustinov and from 1946 worked in the Ministry of Defence Industries.

In the late 1950s, Sergey Afanasyev worked in top management positions in Leningrad, and in the early 1960s in Moscow as Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

After his appointment in March 1965 as head of the newly created Ministry of General Machine Building, a post he occupied until 1983, Sergey Afanasyev had to build up the new Ministry from zero, uniting numerous defence plants, scientific labs, engineering facilities and famous constructors of space and military rockets under one roof. The new industry under Afanasyev’s control was a secret formation, and was never publicly acknowledged until the late 1980s. In private circles he was referred to as “the world’s first Space Minister”.