In the second half of the 1960s - 1970s, there was not a person in the Soviet Union who did not know who he was - Alexey Nikolaevich Kosygin. In Kremlin offices, in the corridors of union and republican ministries and departments, in student classrooms, in research laboratories and institute smoking rooms, in tiny kitchens in residential areas of megacities and regional centers, they argued about his economic reform. Few people understood the essence, and therefore many questions arose. What prompted the Soviet prime minister to begin transforming the economic mechanism of the Soviet Union? Which way to go? Will the complex economic system ultimately be reformed? Will everything lead to its complete “revolution”? Or, as in the 1920s, will everything end in a few years, because the reforms threaten the basic (ideological) principles of the existence of the USSR? The author of a biographical study about A. N. Kosygin turned to hitherto little-known archival documents, memoirs and periodicals. The result of meticulous work was a fairly objective look at both the life and work of the statesman, and at a number of the most important events in the history of the entire country, to which he was most directly related.