1.
Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev
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Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev was a Soviet Communist politician who rose to power during the rule of Joseph Stalin, joining the Politburo as a candidate member in 1926 and as a full member in 1932. Andreyev also headed the powerful Control Commission of the Soviet Communist Party in 1930 and 1931 then again continuously from 1939 until 1952. After the death of Stalin Andreyev was removed from the Politburo, andrey Andreyevich Andreyev was the son of a peasant peasant family. Andreyev left the village to work as a worker, assuming a position in a munitions factory during World War I. Andreyev was married to Dora Khazan, who was a student along with Stalins second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, together the couple had two children, a son named Vladimir and a daughter named Olga. Andreyev joined the Bolshevik Party in 1914 and he was a member of the Politburo from 1932 until 1952. Andreyev was a Chairman of the Soviet of the Union from 1938 until 1946 and directed the partys powerful Control Commission during 1930-1931, in 1949 he was briefly Peoples Commissar for Agriculture. This was also the year of the Leningrad case for which Andreyev built up a case against Nikolai Voznesensky, Andreyev was dismissed from Politburo in 1952, although he remained a vice-premier of the Soviet government. Andreyev fell from grace in 1953 following the Central Committee Plenary Meeting (convened immediately after Lavrentiy Berias dismissal, after 1953 Andreyev was made a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a largely ceremonial position. Andrey Andreyev died 5 December 1971, Andreyev is remembered for having loved the music of Tchaikovsky, mountaineering, and nature photography. During his life Andreyev was four times awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution and he is the namesake of the AA-20 locomotive, which he is credited for sponsoring as the head of the Soviet railway system from 1931 to 1935
2.
Andrei Zhdanov
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Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov was a Soviet politician. After World War II, he was thought to be the successor-in-waiting to Joseph Stalin and he was Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet from 20 July 1938–20 June 1947. In June 1940, he was sent to Estonia to supervise the establishment of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Zhdanov took a leading role during the Siege of Leningrad during World War II. After the cease-fire agreement between Finland and the USSR was signed in Moscow on 4 September 1944, Zhdanov directed the Allied Control Commission in Finland until the Paris peace treaty of 1947, Zhdanov was appointed by Joseph Stalin to direct the Soviet Unions cultural policy in 1946. His first action was to censor Russian writers such as Anna Akhmatova and he formulated what became known as the Zhdanov Doctrine. During 1946–1947, Zhdanov was Chairman of the Soviet of the Union, in 1947, he organized the Cominform, designed to coordinate and control the communist parties around the world. In February 1948, he initiated purges among musicians, widely known as a struggle against formalism, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian and many other composers were reprimanded during this period. In June 1948, Stalin sent Zhdanov to the Cominform meeting in Bucharest, the purpose of the meeting was to condemn Yugoslavia, but Zhdanov took a more restrained line, in contrast to his co-delegate and rival Georgy Malenkov. This infuriated Stalin, who removed Zhdanov from all his posts, Zhdanov was transferred to a sanatorium, where he died. It is possible that his death was the result of an intentional misdiagnosis, Stalin had talked of Zhdanov being his successor but Zhdanovs ill health gave his rivals, Lavrentiy Beria and Georgy Malenkov, an opportunity to undermine him. He was one of those accused during the U. S. House of Representatives Kersten Committee investigation into the annexation of the Baltic States in 1953. Originating in 1946 and lasting until the late 1950s, Zhdanovs ideological code, known as the Zhdanov doctrine, Zhdanovism or zhdanovshchina, Zhdanov intended to create a new philosophy of artistic creation valid for the entire world. His method reduced all of culture to a sort of chart, Zhdanov and his associates further sought to eliminate foreign influence from Soviet art, proclaiming that incorrect art was an ideological diversion. The one sentence that came to define Zhdanovshchina was “The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best and this policy officially ended in 1952, seen as having a negative impact on culture within the USSR. On 20 February 1948, Zhdanovshchina shifted its focus towards anti-formalism and that April, many of the persecuted composers were pressed into repenting for displaying “formalism” in their music in a special congress of the Union of Soviet Composers. These composers were not rehabilitated by the Soviet Union until 28 May 1958, Zhdanovs son, Yuri, married Stalins daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, in 1949. That marriage ended in divorce in 1950, the name reverted to Mariupol in 1989, and the monument was dismantled in 1990. Zhdanov Doctrine Socialist realism Engineers of the human soul Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, shiela Fitzpatrick, On Stalins Team, The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics
3.
Lazar Kaganovich
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Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was a Soviet politician and administrator and one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin. At his death in 1991, he was the last surviving Old Bolshevik, the Soviet Union itself outlived him by a mere five months. Kaganovich was born in 1893 to Jewish parents in the village of Kabany, Radomyshl uyezd, Kiev Governorate, early in his political career, in 1915, Kaganovich became a Communist organizer at a shoe-factory where he worked. Circa 1911 he entered the Bolshevik party, in 1915 Kaganovich was arrested and sent back to Kabany. During March–April 1917 he served as the Chairman of the Tanners Union, in May 1917 he became the leader of the military organization of Bolsheviks in Saratov, and in August 1917, he became the leader of the Polessky Committee of the Bolshevik party in Belarus. During the October Revolution of 1917 he led the revolt in Gomel, in 1918 Kaganovich acted as Commissar of the propaganda department of the Red Army. From May 1918 to August 1919 he was the Chairman of the Ispolkom of the Nizhny Novgorod gubernia, in 1919–1920, he served as governor of the Voronezh gubernia. In May 1922, Stalin became the General Secretary of the Communist Party and this department was responsible for all assignments within the apparatus of the Communist Party. Working there, Kaganovich helped to place Stalins supporters in important jobs within the Communist Party bureaucracy, in this position he became noted for his great work capacity and for his personal loyalty to Stalin. He stated publicly that he would execute any order from Stalin. In 1924 Kaganovich became a member of the Central Committee, from 1925 to 1928, Kaganovich was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR. He was given the task of ukrainizatsiya - meaning at that time the building up of Ukrainian communist popular cadres and he also had the duty of implementing collectivization and the policy of economic suppression of the kulaks. He opposed the more moderate policy of Nikolai Bukharin, who argued in favor of the integration of kulaks into socialism. As Secretary, he endorsed Stalins struggle against the so-called Left and Right Oppositions within the Communist Party, in 1934, at the XVII Congress of the Communist Party, Kaganovich chaired the Counting Committee. He falsified voting for positions in the Central Committee, deleting 290 votes opposing the Stalin candidacy and his actions resulted in Stalins being re-elected as the General Secretary instead of Sergey Kirov. By the rules, the candidate receiving fewer opposing votes should become the General Secretary, before Kaganovichs falsification, Stalin received 292 opposing votes and Kirov only three. However, the result saw Stalin with just two opposing votes. In 1930 Kaganovich became a member of the Soviet Politburo and the First Secretary of the Moscow Obkom of the Communist Party and he later headed the Moscow Gorkom of the Communist Party
4.
Georgy Malenkov
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Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician and Communist Party leader. His family connections with Vladimir Lenin sped his promotion in the party and this brought him into close association with Joseph Stalin, and he was heavily involved in the purges of the 1930s. During World War II, he was given responsibility for the Soviet missile program. His two-year term ended in failure and he was expelled from the Politburo in 1957. In 1961 he was expelled from the party and exiled to Kazakhstan, Malenkov was born at Orenburg in the Russian Empire. His paternal ancestors were from the area of Ohrid, then in the Ottoman Vilayet of Manastir, some of them served as officers in the Russian Imperial Army. His father was a farmer in Orenburg province. Young Malenkov occasionally helped his father to do business selling the harvest and his mother was the daughter of a blacksmith and the granddaughter of an Orthodox priest. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1920, Golubtsova and Malenkov never officially registered their union and remained unregistered partners for the rest of their lives. Valeria Golubtsova joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1920 and her personal views were described as anti-semitic by her co-workers. This connection helped both Golubtsova and Malenkov in their communist career, later Golubtsova was the director of the Moscow Energy Institute, a center for nuclear power research in USSR. After the Russian civil war, Malenkov quickly built himself a reputation of a tough communist Bolshevik and he was promoted in the Communist party ranks and was appointed Communist secretary at the military-based Moscow Higher Technical School in the 1920s. Around this time, Malenkov forged a friendship with Vyacheslav Malyshev. In 1924, Stalin noticed Malenkov and assigned him to Orgburo of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, in 1925, Malenkov worked in the staff of the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Malenkov was in charge of keeping records on the members of the Soviet communist party – two million files were made under his supervision during the ten years. In this work Malenkov became closely associated with Stalin and was heavily involved in the treason trials during the purging of the party. In 1938 he was one of the key figures in bringing about the downfall of Yezhov, in 1939 Malenkov became the head of the Communist partys Cadres Directorate, which gave him control over personnel matters of party bureaucracy. During the same year he became a member and a Secretary of the Central Committee
5.
Lev Mekhlis
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Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis was a Soviet politician. Born in Odessa, Mekhlis finished six classes of Jewish commercial school and he worked as a schoolteacher in 1904-1911. In 1907–1910 he was a member of the Zionist workers movement Poale Zion, in 1911, he joined the Russian Army, where he served in the second grenadier artillery brigade. In 1912, he obtained the rank of bombardier and he served in the artillery in the First World War. In 1918 he joined the Communist Party and until 1920 he did work in the Red Army. In 1921–1922, he was the manager of administrative inspection in the Peoples commissariat of worker-peasant inspection, in 1922–1926, he was the assistant to the secretary and the manager of the bureau of the secretariat of the Central Committee, in effect Stalins personal secretary. In 1926–1930 he took courses at the Communist Academy and in the Institute of Red Professors, from 1930 he was the head of the press corps Central Committee, and simultaneously a member of the editorial board, and then the editor in chief of the newspaper Pravda. In 1937–1940, he was the deputy of the Peoples Commissar of Defense, from 1939 he was the member of Central Committee the CPSU, in 1938–1952 he was a member of the Orgburo of the Central Committee, in 1940–1941 Peoples Commissar of State Control. In June 1941 he was assigned by the chief of main political administration. Mekhlis was named army commissar of the 1st rank, which corresponded to the title of General of the Army, in 1942 he was the representative of the Stavka of supreme commander-in-chief at the Crimean Front, where he constantly disputed with General Dmitry Timofeyevich Kozlov. The leaders of the staff of the Front did not know whose orders to carry out – the commanders or Mekhlis’s. The commander of the North-Caucasian Front, Marshal Semyon Budyonny, also could not control Mekhlis, Mekhlis, during a stay at the post of the representative of Stavka, was occupied by the fact that he wrote sufficiently critical reports to senior officers. So he attempted through the Stavka to replace the front commander, Kozlov, at the same time in reports to Stalin he attempted to distance himself from the failures which the Crimean Front suffered, and to lay the entire responsibility on the front commander. In regard to this, Stalin sent a telegram to Mekhlis, in which he subjected to his criticism for similar behavior, Crimean front. Mekhlis, Your code message #254 received and your position of a detached observer who is not accountable for the events at the Crimean Front is puzzling. Your position may sound convenient, but it positively stinks and you, along with the commanding officers, will answer for failing to reinforce the left flank of the Front. It seems that you still have not figured out that we sent you to the Crimean Front not as a government auditor and you demand that Kozlov be replaced, that even Hindenburg would be an improvement. Yet you know well that Soviet reserves do not have anyone named Hindenburg
6.
Joseph Stalin
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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues
7.
Nikolay Shvernik
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Nikolay Mikhailovich Shvernik was a Soviet politician and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from March 19,1946 until March 15,1953. Though the titular Soviet head of state, Shvernik had, in fact, Shvernik was born in St. Petersburg and joined the Bolsheviks in 1905. In 1924 he became a Peoples Commissar in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, in 1927 he was demoted and sent to the Urals to head the local party organization. Stalin found him a loyal supporter of his policy of rapid industrialisation and he resumed his rise in the party becoming a member of the Orgburo and the party Secretariat. He also served as first secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions from July 1930 to March 1944, as such, Shvernik presided over the 1931 Menshevik Trial, in which fourteen Russian economists came up for trial on charges of treason. During the Second World War Shvernik was responsible for evacuating Soviet industry away from the advancing Wehrmacht and he was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR from 1943 to 1946. In 1946 he became Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and he only became a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in 1952 but was demoted in 1953 when the body was reduced in size. Following the death of Stalin, Shvernik was removed as president of the USSR. Shvernik returned to his work as the chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, in 1957, Shvernik again became a full member of the Presidium and remained on the body until he retired in 1966
8.
Nikolai Bulganin
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Bulganin was born in Nizhny Novgorod, the son of an office worker. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and was recruited in 1918 into the Cheka, the Bolshevik regimes political police, after the Russian Civil War, he became an industrial manager and worked in the electricity administration until 1927. He was director of the Moscow electricity supply in 1927–1931, in 1931–1937, Bulganin was chairman of the executive committee of the Moscow City Soviet. In 1934, the 17th Congress of the Communist Party elected Bulganin a candidate member of the Central Committee, a loyal Stalinist, he was promoted rapidly as other leaders fell victim to Joseph Stalins Great Purge of 1937–38. In July 1937, he was appointed Prime Minister of the Russian Republic and he became a full member of the Central Committee later that year and, in September 1938, became Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union and head of the State Bank of the USSR. During World War II, Bulganin played a role in the government and Red Army. He was given the rank of Colonel-General and was a member of the State Defense Committee and he was appointed Deputy Commissar for Defence in 1944 and served as Stalins principal agent in the High Command of the Red Army. In 1946 he became Minister for the Armed Forces and was promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union and he also became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Communist Party. He was again Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, under Stalin, in 1948 he became a full member of the Politburo. After Stalins death in March 1953, Bulganin moved into the first rank of the Soviet leadership and he was an ally of Nikita Khrushchev during his power struggle with Georgy Malenkov, and in February 1955 he succeeded Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union. He was generally seen as a supporter of Khrushchevs reforms and destalinization and he and Khrushchev travelled together to India, Yugoslavia and Britain, where they were known in the press as the B and K show. In his memoirs, however, Khrushchev recounted that he believed that he couldnt rely on fully, the threatening letters actually helped the British and French at the United Nations, since they ensured that all of NATO was committed to defend the UK and France from a Soviet attack. By 1957, however, Bulganin had come to share the doubts held about Khrushchevs reformist policies by the group led by Vyacheslav Molotov. In June, when the tried to remove Khrushchev from power at a meeting of the Politburo. When the dissenters were defeated and removed from power, Bulganin survived for a while, but in March 1958, at a session of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev forced his resignation. He was appointed chairman of the Soviet State Bank, a job he had two decades before, but in September Bulganin was removed from the Central Committee and deprived of the title of Marshal. He was dispatched to Stavropol as chairman of the Regional Economic Council, a token position, nikolai Bulganin at Find a Grave
9.
Vasili Kuznetsov (politician)
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Kuznetsov was born in Sofilovka, Kostroma Governorate. He joined the Communist Party in May 1927 and he took a break from his engineering education when he went to the United States to study metal processing at Carnegie Mellon University from 1931 to 1933. Kuznetsov held a variety of government and Communist Party positions beginning in 1940 and he was Chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities from 12 March 1946 to 12 March 1950. In 1955 he became First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, on 7 October 1977 he was elected as First Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a position he held until 18 June 1986. Upon the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko and he retired in 1986 and died in Moscow on 5 June 1990. Nikolai A. Zenkovič, Samye zakrytye ljudi i, encyclopedia of biographies, OLMA-Press, Moscow,2002, ISBN 5-94850-035-7, pp. 298–292
10.
Nikolai Patolichev
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Nikolai Semyonovich Patolichev was Minister of Foreign Trade of the USSR from 1958 to 1985. Prior to that, he was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia from 1950 to 1956, after working in factories, he became a Komsomol activist. From an early age, Joseph Stalin had taken an interest in Patolichev, nikolais father, Semyon Patolichev, had been a good friend of Stalins before he was killed in the Polish-Soviet War in 1920. Nikolai Patolichev joined the Communist Party in 1928 in the city of Dzerzhinsk as a Komsomol, Patolichev was promoted to first secretary of the Yaroslavl Oblast Party Committee in January 1939. The following March, at the 18th Party Congress, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In February 1941, at the 18th All-Union Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on 28 December 1941, Patolichev was relieved from duties in Yaroslavl and transferred to Chelyabinsk. Chelyabinsk, known as Tankograd during the Great Patriotic War, was an industrial center that contributed greatly to the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. In February 1946 Patolichev was recalled to Moscow to head the Organization and Instruction Department of the Central Committee and his role was expanded on 6 May 1946, when he was made a secretary of the Central Committee, taking the place of Georgy Malenkov, who was temporarily demoted. In August, Patolichev became chief of the reorganized Organizational-Instructional department, in the fall of 1946, he became first deputy chairman of the Council for Collective Farm Affairs under his mentor, chairman Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev. His responsibilities in Moscow now included the incongruously combined affairs of agriculture and cadres, on 3 March 1947, Patolichev and Lazar Kaganovich were sent by Stalin to Ukraine to help Nikita Khrushchev, who had fallen into disfavor. Kaganovich took over Khrushchevs post of First Secretary, with Patolichev becoming Central Committee secretary for agriculture, the two did not work well together, and Patolichev requested that Stalin reassign him. He was removed from his posts on the Orgburo and Secretariat on 24 May 1947, Patolichev next became first secretary of the Rostov Oblast and City Party Committees, serving from August 1947 to June 1950. According to historian Evan Mawdsley, Patolichev. recovered from this exile in 1950, in one of the intervals of a Supreme Soviet meeting Stalin called him in and asked him if he wanted to be first secretary of the Belorussian SSR, Patolichev agreed. In the late Stalin years it was not unusual to appoint ethnic Russians to leading posts in the non-Russian republics, Patolichev succeeded Nikolai Gusarov as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia on 31 May 1950. In October 1952, Patolichev delivered one of the speeches at the 19th Party Congress and was re-elected to the Central Committee as a full member. At the Central Committee plenum that followed the 19th Congress, he was elected candidate member of the enlarged Presidium of the Central Committee. On 5 March 1953, Patolichev was removed from the Central Committee Presidium in the reorganization that followed Stalins death, at Lavrenty Berias instigation, in June 1953 the Presidium attempted to remove Patolichev as first secretary in Byelorussia and replace him with an ethnic Belarusian, Mikhail Zimyanin. At the contentious plenum of the Byelorussian Central Committee that followed, the delegates rallied behind Patolichev and rejected the Presidiums decree and he was later replaced as first secretary in Byelorussia by ethnic Belarusian Kirill Mazurov, and in July 1956 became first deputy minister of Foreign Affairs
11.
Mikhail Suslov
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Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov was a Soviet statesman during the Cold War. He served as Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1965, Suslov was responsible for party democracy and the power separation within the Communist Party. His hardline attitude toward change made him one of the foremost anti-reformist Soviet leaders, born in rural Russia in 1902, Suslov became a member of the All-Union Communist Party in 1921 and studied economics for much of the 1920s. He left his job as a teacher in 1931 to pursue politics full-time, Suslov impressed the Soviet leadership to such an extent in the pre-Eastern Front Soviet Union that he was made First Secretary of Stavropol Krai administrative area. During the war, Suslov headed the local Stavropol guerrilla movement and he became a member of the Organisational Bureau of the Central Committee in 1946 and, four years later, was elected to the Presidium of the All-Union Communist Party. Suslov lost much of the recognition and influence he had earned following the reshuffle of the Soviet leadership after Stalins death, however, by the late 1950s, Suslov had risen to become the leader of the hardline opposition to Nikita Khrushchevs revisionist leadership. After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Suslov supported the establishment of a collective leadership and he also supported inner-party democracy and opposed the reestablishment of the one-man rule as seen during the Stalin and Khrushchev Eras. During the Brezhnev Era, Suslov was considered to be the Partys Chief Ideologue and his death on 25 January 1982 is viewed as starting the battle to succeed Leonid Brezhnev in the post of General Secretary. Suslov was born in Shakhovskoye, a locality in Pavlovsky District, Ulyanovsk Oblast. Suslov began work in the local Komsomol organisation in Saratov in 1918, after working in the Komsomol for nearly three years, Suslov became a member of the All-Union Communist Party in 1921. After graduating from the rabfak, he studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy between 1924–1928, in 1931 he abandoned teaching in favour of the party apparatus. He became an inspector on the Communist Partys Party Control Commission and on the Peoples Commissariat of the Workers and his main task there was to adjudicate on large numbers of personal cases, breaches of discipline, and appeals against expulsion from the party. In 1933 and 1934 Suslov directed a commission charged with purging the party in the Ural, the purge was organised by Lazar Kaganovich, then Chairman of the Soviet Control Commission. On the orders of Joseph Stalin, Suslov purged the city of Rostov in 1938, Suslov was made First Secretary of the Stavropol Krais Communist Party in 1939. On the Eastern Front in World War II, Suslov was a member of the Military Soviet of the Northern Group of Forces, according to Soviet historiography, Suslovs years as a guerrilla fighter were highly successful, however, testimonies from participants differ from the official account. These participants claim that there were a number of problems which reduced their effectiveness on the battlefield. During the war, Suslov spent much of his time mobilising workers to fight against the German invaders, the guerrilla movement he led was operated by the regional party cells. During the liberation of the Northern Caucasus, Suslov maintained close contact with the Red Army, during the war, Suslov supervised the deportations of Chechens and other Muslim minorities from the Caucasus
12.
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
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The history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is generally conceived as also covering that of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from which it evolved. The history of the regional and republican branches of the party does however differ from the all-Russian, over twenty Party organizations were represented. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks the conference had, therefore, moreover, the conference declared the Mensheviks expelled from the party. Stalin and Sverdlov won election to the Central Committee despite their non-attendance at the conference, the elected alternate members of the Central Committee included Mikhail Kalinin. For the direction of work in Russia a practical center was set up, with Stalin at its head. Sverdlov, Spandaryan, S. Ordzhonikidze, M. Kalinin and Goloshchekin, I hope you will rejoice with us over the fact. In the summer of 1912, Lenin moved from Paris to Galicia in order to be nearer to Russia. An important instrument used by the Bolshevik Party to strengthen its organizations and to spread its influence among the masses was the Bolshevik daily newspaper Pravda and it was founded, according to Lenins instructions, on the initiative of Stalin, Olminsky and Poletayev. Pravda was intended as a legal, mass working-class paper founded simultaneously with the new rise of the revolutionary movement and its first issue appeared on May 51912. Previous to the appearance of Pravda, the Bolsheviks already had a newspaper called Zvezda. Zvezda had played an important part at the time of the Lena events and it printed a number of political articles by Lenin and Stalin. But the Party felt that with the revolutionary upsurge, a weekly newspaper no longer met the requirements of the Bolshevik Party, according to the analysis of the Party leadership, a daily mass political newspaper designed for the broadest sections of the workers was needed. Whilst the average circulation of Pravda was 40,000 copies per day, the circulation of Luch, in Moscow, the party launched Nash Put as a workers newspaper in September 1913. It was banned after just a few editions were published, another legally functioning central organ of the Party was the Bolshevik group in the Fourth State Duma. In 1912 the government decreed elections to the Fourth Duma, the RSDLP decided to participate in the elections. The RSDLP acted independently, under its own slogans, in the Duma elections, the slogans of the Bolsheviks in the election campaign were a democratic republic, an 8-hour day and the confiscation of the landed estates. The elections to the Fourth Duma were held in the autumn of 1912, in reply, the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP, on Stalins proposal, called upon the workers of the large factories to declare a one-day strike. Placed in a position, the government was forced to yield
13.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
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The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, abbreviated in English as CPSU, was the founding and ruling political party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The party was founded in 1912 by the Bolsheviks, a group led by Vladimir Lenin which seized power in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917. The party was dissolved on 29 August 1991 on Soviet territory soon after a failed coup détat and was abolished on 6 November 1991 on Russian territory. The highest body within the CPSU was the party Congress, which convened every five years, when the Congress was not in session, the Central Committee was the highest body. Because the Central Committee met twice a year, most day-to-day duties and responsibilities were vested in the Politburo, the Secretariat, and the Orgburo. The party leader was the head of government and held the office of either General Secretary, Premier or head of state, or some of the three offices concurrently—but never all three at the same time. The CPSU, according to its party statute, adhered to Marxism–Leninism, a based on the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. The party pursued state socialism, under which all industries were nationalized, a number of causes contributed to CPSUs loss of control and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some historians have written that Gorbachevs policy of glasnost was the root cause, Gorbachev maintained that perestroika without glasnost was doomed to failure anyway. Others have blamed the stagnation and subsequent loss of faith by the general populace in communist ideology. The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the worlds first constitutionally socialist state, was established by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Immediately after the Revolution, the new, Lenin-led government implemented socialist reforms, including the transfer of estates, in this context, in 1918, RSDLP became Russian Communist Party and remained so until 1997. Lenin supported world revolution he sought peace with the Central Powers. The treaty was voided after the Allied victory in World War I, in 1921, Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy, a system of state capitalism that started the process of industrialization and recovery from the Civil War. On 30 December 1922, the Russian SFSR joined former territories of the Russian Empire in the Soviet Union, on 9 March 1923, Lenin suffered a stroke, which incapacitated him and effectively ended his role in government. He died on 21 January 1924 and was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, after emerging victorious from a power struggle with Trotsky, Stalin obtained full control of the party and Stalinism was installed as the only ideology of the party. The partys official name was All-Union Communist Party in 1925, Stalins political purge greatly affected the partys configuration, as many party members were executed or sentenced for slave labour. Happening during the timespan of the Great Purge, fascism had ascened to power in Italy, seeing this as a potential threat, the Party actively sought to form collective security alliances with Anti-fascist western powers such as France and Britain
14.
Komsomol
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The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, usually known as Komsomol, was a political youth organization in the Soviet Union. It is sometimes described as the division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, although it was officially independent and referred to as the helper. The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban centers in 1918, during the early years, it was a Russian organization, known as the Russian Young Communist League, or RKSM. During 1922, with the unification of the USSR, it was reformed into an all-union agency and it was the final stage of three youth organizations with members up to age 28, graduated at 14 from the Young Pioneers, and at nine from the Little Octobrists. Before the February Revolution of 1917 the Bolsheviks did not display any interest in establishing or maintaining a youth division, after the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 ended, the Soviet government under Lenin introduced a semi-capitalist economic policy to stabilize Russia’s floundering economy. This reform, the New Economic Policy, introduced a new policy of moderation and discipline. Lenin himself stressed the importance of education of young Soviet citizens in building a new society. The first Komsomol Congress met in 1918 under the patronage of the Bolshevik Party, Party intervention in 1922-1923 proved marginally successful in recruiting members by presenting the ideal Komsomolets as a foil to the bourgeois NEPman. However, the party was not very successful overall in recruiting Russian youth during the NEP period and this came about because of conflict and disillusionment among Soviet youth who romanticised the spontaneity and destruction characteristic of War Communism and the Civil War period. They saw it as their duty, and the duty of the Communist Party itself, however, the NEP had the opposite effect, after it started, many aspects of bourgeois social behavior began to reemerge. The contrast between the Good Communist extolled by the Party and the bourgeois capitalism fostered by NEP confused many young people, as a result, there was a major slump in interest and membership in the Party-oriented Komsomol. In March 1926, Komsomol membership reached a NEP-period peak of 1,750,000 members, only when Stalin came to power and abandoned the NEP in the first Five Year Plan did membership increase drastically. The youngest people eligible for Komsomol membership were fourteen years old, the upper age-limit for ordinary personnel was twenty-eight, but Komsomol functionaries could be older. Younger children joined the allied Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, while membership was nominally voluntary, those who failed to join had no access to officially sponsored holidays and found it very difficult to pursue higher education. The Komsomol also served as a pool of labor and political activism. Active members received privileges and preferences in promotion, for example, Yuri Andropov, CPSU General Secretary in succession to Leonid Brezhnev, achieved political importance through work with the Komsomol organization of Karelia in 1940-1944. At its largest, during the 1970s, the Komsomol had tens of millions of members, the government, unions and the Komsomol jointly introduced Centers for Scientific and Technical Creativity for Youth. At the same time, many Komsomol managers joined and directed the Russian Regional, folklore quickly coined a motto, The Komsomol is a school of Capitalism, hinting at Vladimir Lenins Trade unions are a school of Communism
15.
Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization
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The Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization was a mass youth organization of the Soviet Union for children of age 10–15 that existed between 1922 and 1991. Similar to the Scouting organisations of the Western world, Pioneers learned skills of social cooperation, after the October Revolution of 1917, some Scouts took the Bolsheviks side, which would later lead to the establishment of ideologically altered Scoutlike organizations, such as ЮК and others. During the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1921, most of the Scoutmasters and many Scouts fought in the ranks of the White Army and those Scouts who did not wish to accept the new Soviet system either left Russia for good or went underground. However, clandestine Scouting did not last long, Komsomol persistently fought with the remnants of the Scout movement. This organization would properly educate children with Communist teachings, on behalf of the Soviet Government Nadezhda Krupskaya was one of the main contributors to the cause of the Pioneer movement. In 1922, she wrote an essay called Russian Union of the Communist Youth and boy-Scoutism. as the organizational motto and slogan. Thereby they suggested to use the system as a foundation of the new communist organization for children. The main contribution of the scoutmasters was the introduction of the new expression system scouting into the discourse on communist childrens, by doing so they avoided the dissolution of the scout organization as it would happen sooner or later to any organization opposed to the Komsomol. May 19,1922 was later on considered the birthday of the All-Union Pioneer Organization, by October 1922 pioneer units nationwide were united to form the Spartak Young Pioneers Organization, which was named after V. I. Lenin by a decision of the Central Committee of Komsomol of January 21,1924, since March 1926 it bore the name Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization. By the middle of 1923 it had 75,000 members, among other activities, Young Pioneer units, helped by the Komsomol members and leadership at all levels, played a great role in the eradication of illiteracy since 1923. Membership was at 161,000 in the beginning of 1924,2 million in 1926,13.9 million in 1940, and 25 million in 1974. Many Young Pioneer Palaces were built, which served as community centers for the children, with rooms dedicated to various clubs, thousands of Young Pioneer camps were set up where children went during summer vacation and winter holidays. All of them were free of charge, sponsored by the government, during World War Two the Pioneers worked hard to contribute to the war effort at all costs. One of them widely known, for his resistance in Kerch. Its main grouping of members until 1942 was the Young Pioneer detachment, from 1942 to October 1990 the detachment was made up of children belonging to the same class within a school, while a school was referred to as a Young Pioneer group. At age 15, Young Pioneers could join Komsomol, with a recommendation from their Young Pioneer group, the main governing body was the Central Soviet of the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union, which worked under the leadership of the main governing body of Komsomol. Its official newspaper was Pionerskaya Pravda, there were two major revisions of them, in 1967 and 1986
16.
Pravda
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The newspaper began publication on 5 May 1912 in the Russian Empire, but was already extant abroad in January 1911. It emerged as a newspaper of the Soviet Union after the October Revolution. The newspaper was an organ of the Central Committee of the CPSU between 1912 and 1991, in 1996 there was an internal dispute between the owners of Pravda International and some of the Pravda journalists which led to Pravda splitting into different entities. After a legal dispute between the parties, the Russian court of arbitration stipulated that both entities would be allowed to continue using the Pravda name. Though Pravda officially began publication on 5 May 1912, the anniversary of Karl Marxs birth, its origins back to 1903 when it was founded in Moscow by a wealthy railway engineer. Pravda had started publishing in the light of the Russian Revolution of 1905, during its earliest days, Pravda had no political orientation. Kozhevnikov started it as a journal of arts, literature and social life, Kozhevnikov was soon able to form up a team of young writers including A. A. Bogdanov, N. A Rozhkov, M. N Pokrovsky, I. I Skvortsov-Stepanov, P. P Rumyantsev, lunts, who were active contributors on social life section of Pravda. Later they became the board of the journal and in the near future also became the active members of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Because of certain quarrels between Kozhevnikov and the board, he had asked them to leave and the Menshevik faction of the RSDLP took over as Editorial Board. But the relationship between them and Kozhevnikov was also a bitter one, the Ukrainian political party Spilka, which was also a splinter group of the RSDLP, took over the journal as its organ. Leon Trotsky was invited to edit the paper in 1908 and the paper was moved to Vienna in 1909. By then, the board of Pravda consisted of hard-line Bolsheviks who sidelined the Spilka leadership soon after it shifted to Vienna. Trotsky had introduced a format to the newspaper and distanced itself from the intra-party struggles inside the RSDLP. During those days, Pravda gained an audience among Russian workers. By 1910 the Central Committee of the RSDLP suggested making Pravda its official organ, finally, at the sixth conference of the RSDLP held in Prague in January 1912, the Menshevik faction was expelled from the party. The party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin decided to make Pravda its official mouthpiece, the paper was shifted from Vienna to St. Petersburg and the first issue under Lenins leadership was published on 5 May 1912. It was the first time that Pravda was published as a political newspaper
