Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Шеле́пин; 18 August 1918 – 24 October 1994) was a Soviet politician and intelligence officer. A long-time member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Shelepin served as a First Deputy Premier, a full member of the Politburo and as the chairman of the KGB from December 1958 to November 1961. Even after ostensibly leaving the KGB, he continued to hold considerable influence over the agency well until 1967 through his protégé, Vladimir Semichastny, who succeeded him as KGB Chairman.

Ambitious and well-educated, Alexander Shelepin was the leader of a hard-line faction within the Communist Party that played a decisive role in ousting Soviet premier and First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1964. Opposed to the policy of détente, he was eventually outmaneuvered by Leonid Brezhnev and gradually stripped of his power, thus failing in his ambition to lead the Soviet Union.

Alexander Shelepin was born in Voronezh on 18 August 1918 to a middle-class family, the son of Nikolai Shelepin, a railway official. A talented student, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy and then obtained a master's degree from the Moscow Institute of History. He started his political career in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) while still a student, and already in his teens he had expressed his desire to become a party leader.

Shelepin briefly served in the Red Army in 1940, during the last stages of the Winter War against Finland, and after the Nazi invasion in 1941, he helped organize the guerrilla partisan movement in the Moscow region; after the notorious execution by the Nazis of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (whom Shelepin had personally selected), he caught the eye of Joseph Stalin himself, and his political fortune was made. He became a senior official of the Komsomol, working in the All-Union Secretariat in Moscow, and was then named General Secretary of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, an international youth organization recognized by the United Nations and granted general consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. In 1952, in one of Stalin's last personnel reshuffles, Shelepin became First Secretary of the All-Union Komsomol.

Though closely identified with Stalin (and being somewhat of a favorite of his), Shelepin was not affected by De-Stalinization and the gradual consolidation of power by Nikita Khrushchev after Stalin's death in 1953. Indeed, Khrushchev personally liked Shelepin and, because of his rise through the Communist Youth League, saw him as an ally against the secret police and security agencies that had been all-powerful under Stalin. Shelepin accompanied Khrushchev on the Soviet leader's trip to the People's Republic of China in 1954, and met with Mao Zedong. Following this, he mobilized thousands of young communists in support of Khrushchev's ‘Virgin Lands’ program.

In early 1958, Khrushchev appointed Shelepin as Central Committee Secretary in charge of the Party Organs Department, and, in December 1958, Shelepin became the Chairman of the Soviet central intelligence and security service, the KGB, replacing Army General Ivan Serov. Khrushchev saw Shelepin as a very good choice for KGB chief, for several reasons; Shelepin's background completely outside state security, his higher education and intellectual approach greatly distinguished him from his predecessors, and his appointment was intended to improve the public image of the KGB.

Shelepin attempted to return state security and intelligence to its position of importance during the Stalinist era. However, the people he favored were completely different from those preferred by his predecessors. With Khrushchev's full backing, Shelepin recruited many young university graduates to the KGB (especially favoring those with a background in law and the social sciences) and he demoted or fired many career state security officers, replacing them with officials from Communist Party organizations, and, especially, from the Communist Youth League. As a result of Shelepin's ambitious policy, the KGB became a substantially different organization from the Stalin-era security services, with a more sophisticated and intellectual approach, that would be further encouraged by future Chairman Yuri Andropov.

Shelepin proposed and carried out the destruction of many documents related to the Katyn massacre of Polish officers to minimize the chance that the truth would be revealed. His 3 March 1959 note to Nikita Khrushchev, with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles and with the proposal to destroy their personal files, became one of the documents that were preserved and eventually made public.