Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kosarev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Васи́льевич Ко́сарев; 1 November 1903 – 23 February 1939) was a Soviet politician and Communist Party official who was active in the youth movement.

He played a critical role in promoting the idea of Nikolai Starostin in establishment of professional football competitions in front of the Soviet Council on Physical Culture.

He is reported to have joined the Red Army as a volunteer,[2] or alternatively to have avoided serving by pleading ill health.

[3] In March 1926, one of Zinoviev's supporters, Grigory Yevdokimov complained to the Central Committee that 'hundreds' of members of the Leningrad Komsomol had lost their jobs during the purge.

[2] In March 1927, he was appointed a secretary of Komsomol,[1] and later in 1927 was elected to the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Starostin's younger brother Andrei, also a footballer, paid a posthumous tribute to Kosarev: What an extraordinarily attractive person he was!

In the struggle for a just life and people's truth, Kosarev, a boy from a poor working-class family in the Moscow suburbs, went a long and difficult way from an auxiliary worker at a pre-revolutionary factory to the recognized leader of the youth.

Kosarev is credited with playing a leading part in getting Soviet officials to abandon the military uniforms that were standard in the 1920s.

[9] As a self-styled "diligent student of the great Stalin," Kosarev oversaw a purge in which 141,337 people were expelled from the Komsomol for "hostile activity" in 1936–1938,[2] 72,000 of them in nine months of 1937.

Her letter was discussed at an extraordinary four-day plenum of Komsomol's Central Committee attended by Stalin and other members of the Politburo, at which Kosarev and his principal allies, Valentina Pikina and Serafim Bogachev were removed from office.

"[13] – but he later implied that the subsequent decision to arrest Kosarev was not made by him, but by Lavrentiy Beria, who took over control of the NKVD from Yezhov in August 1938.

[15] Kosarev's wife, Maria, was the daughter of the Georgian Old Bolshevik, Viktor Naneishvili (1878–1940), who was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kyrgyz Republic from 1924 until it was renamed Kazakhstan in 1925.

Their daughter Yelena was brought up by grandparents, but was arrested a few months after leaving school, sentenced to ten years' exile, and sent to join her mother in Norilsk.

[11] Kosarev had an affair with the film star, and Komsomol member, Valentina Serova, who was 20 at the time of his arrest, and was fortunate to escape being implicated.