Dmitry Fedorovich Ustinov

Dmitry Fedorovich Ustinov (born Oct. 17 [Oct. 30, New Style], 1908, Samara, Russia—died Dec. 20, 1984, Moscow) was a Soviet military and political figure who was minister of defense from 1976 to 1984.

An engineer by profession, Ustinov graduated in 1934 from the Military Institute of Mechanics in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and worked first as a construction engineer, then as director of a Leningrad armament factory. In 1941 Stalin appointed Ustinov people’s commissar of armaments, a position that he kept under the titles of minister of armaments (1946–53) and minister of defense industries (1953–57). In that post, Ustinov in 1941 initiated the evacuation of many Soviet arms factories to sites east of the Ural Mountains, out of the reach of the advancing German armies. After the war he set the course by which the Soviet armed forces eventually reached their high levels during the Cold War. He was a full member of the Central Committee from 1952, and in 1957 Nikita Khrushchev made him a deputy premier, still with overall responsibility for the armaments industry. In 1963 he became both chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy and first deputy premier. In 1965 he became a candidate member of the Politburo, and in 1976, when Defense Minister Marshal Andrey Grechko died, Ustinov was appointed to replace him. At the same time, he was made a full member of the Politburo and marshal of the Soviet Union. During the 1970s Ustinov played an important behind-the-scenes role in Soviet-U.S. arms limitation negotiations.