Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik (Russian: Николай Михайлович Шверник, 19 May [O.S. 7 May] 1888 – 24 December 1970) was a Soviet politician who served as the second chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state) from 1946 until 1953. Though he was the head of state, Shvernik had very little power as Joseph Stalin, the premier at the time, had most of the power due to his position as general secretary of the CPSU, the de facto leader.

Shvernik was born in 1888 in St. Petersburg in a working-class family of Russian ethnicity. His father was a retired sergeant major, who worked in factories in St Petersburg. Reputedly, he was descended from Old Believers. Shvernik's mother was a weaver. He worked in factories as a turner, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1905. After the February Revolution in 1917, he was elected chairman of the soviet in a pipe factory in Samara, and chairman of the Samara city soviet. During the Russian Civil War, he was a political commissar in the Red Army. In 1921–23, he worked in the trade unions.

In 1923, he was appointed to the staff of Rabkrin, which was headed by Joseph Stalin, whom Shvernik loyally supported during the power struggles of the 1920s. During 1923, he was in charge of combatting the sale of moonshine vodka and cocaine, and gambling. In November 1925, at the height of the conflict between Stalin and Grigory Zinoviev, he was appointed by the Central Committee to take over as Secretary of the Leningrad provincial committee, which was Zinoviev's power base.

Shvernik was a full member of the Central Committee from December 1925 until he died 45 years later. In April 1926, he was appointed to the Secretariat, one of a team of four secretaries led by Stalin, in place of Grigory Yevdokimov, a Zinoviev supporter.

While the Central Committee and Central Control Commission were in joint session, in October 1927, debating whether to expel the leading oppositionists, including Leon Trotsky and Zinoviev, Shvernik displayed his loyalty to Stalin.

In December 1927, when there were sudden food shortages in the cities because the peasants were holding back their produce in anticipation of rising prices, Shvernik was dispatched to the Urals, as regional party secretary. He continued to support Stalin loyally through the rapid industrialisation of the soviet economy, which was opposed by almost the entire leadership of the trade unions. He was recalled to Moscow in 1929, and imposed as chairman of the Metallurgist Trade Union. From July 1930 to March 1944, he was first secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and a member of the Orgburo.

Shvernik presided over the 1931 Menshevik Trial, in which fourteen Russian economists came up for trial on charges of treason. In February 1937, he was a member of the commission that investigated Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, the two most prominent former oppositionists still living in the USSR, and voted that they should be expelled from the Central Committee, arrested, and shot.

During the Second World War, Shvernik was responsible for evacuating Soviet industry away from the advancing Wehrmacht. He was Chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities from 1938 to 1946. After creating Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices in 1942, he became chairman of it. He was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR from 1944 to 1946. In 1946 he became Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, succeeding Mikhail Kalinin. He only became a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee (then named the Presidium of the Party's Central Committee) in 1952 but was demoted in 1953 when the body was reduced in size.