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Nikolai Vladimirovich Talyzin (Russian: Никола́й Влади́мирович Талы́зин; 28 January 1929 – 23 January 1991) was a Soviet bureaucrat and economist who was head of the Gosplan, or the State Planning Committee.[1]
He was born in Moscow to a working-class family. After graduating from the Moscow Communications Institute, he worked at the Scientific Research Institute of Radio of the Soviet Ministry of Communications as an engineer, leading designer, senior research fellow, and deputy director. At the institute, he headed the pioneering work on the creation of the world's first satellite television broadcasting system "Orbita" in the USSR, which was put into operation in 1967 and provided the opportunity to watch Soviet Central Television programs for almost 90 million citizens of the USSR living in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Under his leadership, the satellite systems "Moscow" and "Moscow-Global" were also introduced.[2]
Talyzin was chosen by Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1985 to help start the program of economic change known as perestroika, after serving five years as the Soviet representative at Comecon, the Eastern European trade bloc. He was appointed head of the State Planning Commission, or Gosplan, when almost every sector of the Soviet economy was still firmly under state control. He became one of the three First Deputy Premiers at this time, as well as a non-voting member of the Communist Party Politburo.
The planning commission's task shifted from setting production targets to mapping out economic strategy, as Gorbachev pushed his economic reforms. Talyzin came under strong criticism, and moved to the post of head of the Bureau for Social Development in 1988,[3] blamed for slowing reforms. In September 1989, with perestroika failing to produce the promised results, he was dismissed, along with many other conservatives in Nikolai Ryzhkov's government, whom he blamed for slowing the pace of reforms.