Nikolay Koshman

Nikolay Pavlovich Koshman was born on 5 April 1944 in the village of Mironovka in the Novogeorgievsky district of the Kirovograd region, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He trained first as a road transport technician, graduating from the Dnipropetrovsk road transport technical school in 1962.

He then chose a military career. In 1966 he graduated with honours from the Far Eastern Military Automobile School in Ussuriysk, and in 1973 he completed the Military Academy of Logistics and Transport, specialising in the construction and restoration of railways, the field in which he would spend the next two decades.

As an officer of the Soviet Railway Troops, Koshman built railways, bridges, housing, social facilities and other engineering works in Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Far East and central Russia. He took part in the liquidation of the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and in the development of transport arteries serving the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

From 1991 he was deputy head of Russia's Railway Troops, and from 1995 to 1996 deputy director of the Federal Railway Troops Service and deputy commander for armaments. In 1996 he became an adviser to Oleg Lobov, the presidential envoy in Chechnya, and from April to November 1996 served as chairman of the government of the Chechen Republic during the First Chechen War.

In 1997 he was briefly deputy minister of railways, and from July 1997 to May 1998 he headed Rosspetsstroy, the federal special construction service. In April 1999 he became state secretary and first deputy minister of railways. On 15 October 1999, as the Second Chechen War began, he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and plenipotentiary representative of the federal government in the Chechen Republic, and from November 1999 he sat on the presidium of the government. He held the post until May 2000, acting until the end of June.

From October 2002 to April 2004 Koshman chaired Gosstroy, the State Committee for Construction and Housing and Utilities, later the federal construction agency. In July 2005 he became president of the Association of Builders of Russia, an industry body he led for many years; reports at his death differed on when he stepped down. He was also co-chair of the construction working group of the EU Russia Industrialists' Round Table and a member of the board of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. He held the rank of colonel general.

Koshman was married and had two sons. He spent most of his working life in the Russian Far East, Siberia and Moscow, and his engineering career took him from railway building sites to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and Baikonur. In interviews, including one with Vedomosti in 2003 while he chaired Gosstroy, he spoke mainly about housing reform and the construction industry.

Nikolay Koshman died suddenly on 21 October 2026, aged 82. RIA Novosti reported his death that evening, quoting a former colleague at the Association of Builders of Russia: "Nikolay Pavlovich died suddenly today, he was 82 years old." No cause of death was given. The news was also reported by Kommersant, Vedomosti and Vesti.

According to the reports, the farewell ceremony and burial were to take place at the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery, the Pantheon of Defenders of the Fatherland, in Mytishchi near Moscow.

Koshman is remembered as one of the military engineers who moved into civilian government in post-Soviet Russia, and as the official Moscow twice entrusted with rebuilding the administration of Chechnya during its two wars. As head of Gosstroy and then of the Association of Builders of Russia he became a prominent voice of the Russian construction industry. His honours included the Order of the Red Star, the Order for Service to the Homeland in the Armed Forces third class, the Order of Military Merit, and the titles of Honoured Builder, Honorary Railwayman and Honorary Builder of Baikonur.