Sergey Afanasyev (politician)

From 1988 until his death he was the Senior Science Consultant of the S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia.

After a reshuffle in the early 1980, Sergey Afanasyev was appointed as the head of the Ministry of Heavy and Transport Machinery, where he worked from 1983 to 1987.

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”.

Sergey Afanasyev's Ministry not only took part in developing his country's pioneering space programme but was a key player in the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the mid-1960s the nuclear arsenal of the USA was larger than the USSR had]]. But as the Cold War dragged on, Afanasyev's Ministry managed to sufficiently increase and almost match the number of nuclear missiles and warheads its main rival had and thus reach a fragile balance of military might. Over 1400 intercontinental ballistic missiles and some 1000 submarine-launched ballistic missiles were manufactured and later modernised by the Ministry, which was also responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of the nuclear arsenal and its control functions. That is why Sergey Afanasyev once admitted that his worst nightmare for many years was that one of the nuclear missiles might self-explode or even be launched by mistake.

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.

Sergey Afanasyev was one of the few people who refused to take orders from the feared Soviet police chief Lavrentiy Beria. In the 1950s, Beria was pushing for a swift production of missiles and indicated his orders were to be carried out within several months. At a meeting in the Kremlin, Sergey Afanasyev was the only engineer who voiced opposition to the plan, calling it unrealistic. Beria's first reaction was to arrest the young engineer, but he was later told that in that case the production would be delayed for over a year because Afanasyev was the only person on the ground knowledgeable enough to take charge.

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 Dmitry Ustinov and from 1946 worked in the Ministry of Defence Industries.

Sergey Aleksandrovich Afanasyev (Russian: Серге́й Алекса́ндрович Афана́сьев; 30 August 1918 – 13 May 2001) was a Russian engineer and later politician who was the leading figure in the Soviet Union's missile and space program. He was the Minister of General Machine Building (1965–1983).