18 November] 1903 – 1 October 1950) was a Soviet politician and economic planner who oversaw the running of Gosplan (the USSR's State Planning Committee) during the German–Soviet War of 1941–1945.

[1] He became directly involved in the recovery of production associated with the evacuation of industry eastwards after the start of the war.

His 1947 work The Economy of the USSR during World War II[2] (Russian: Военная экономика СССР в период Отечественной войны, lit.

From 1935 to 1937 he was the head of the Leningrad Control Commission, after which he enjoyed rapid promotion during the Great Purge, when mass arrests opened up vacancies at the most senior level.

In March 1941 Voznesensky gave up the chairmanship of Gosplan, but he was elected as a candidate member of the Politburo of the VKP (b), and he received the newly created post of Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom, roughly the Soviet Union's Cabinet of Ministers), making him of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union at the age of thirty eight.

In October 1946, in an incident that later formed part of Nikita Khrushchev's seminal Secret Speech to the 20th party congress, Voznesensky was co-opted onto the 'Politburo Commission for Foreign Affairs' whose remit was being expanded to include 'internal construction and domestic policy'[10] The implication is that Stalin created this committee as a way of excluding certain members of the Politburo from the decision-making process, including his eventual successor, Georgy Malenkov, who was temporarily out of favour.

In it, he forecast that as a result of the absorbing of Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence "the general crisis of capitalism has become more acute", that the high level of productivity achieved in the USA during the war would be followed by "a new devastating economic crisis and chronic unemployment" and that "having waxed fat on the people's blood during the Second World War, monopoly capitalism of the USA stands now at the head the anti-democratic camp ... and has become the instigator of imperialist expansion everywhere.

Historians such as Robert Conquest and Gavriel Ra'anan have interpreted the debate as part of a power struggle between Zhdanov and his main rivals in the Politburo, Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria.

[14][15] Deprived of the protection of Andrei Zhdanov, who died in August 1948, Voznesensky was the loser in a power struggle with Lavrentiy Beria and Georgy Malenkov.