Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician who succeeded Joseph Stalin as Premier and the overall leader of the Soviet Union in March 1953. Shortly thereafter, Malenkov entered into a power struggle with the party's First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, which culminated in his removal from the premiership in 1955 as well as the Central Committee Presidium in 1957.
Georgy Malenkov served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and joined the Communist Party in 1920. Beginning in 1925, he served in the staff of the party's Organizational Bureau, where he was entrusted with overseeing member records. In this role, Malenkov was heavily involved in facilitating Stalin's purges of the party's ranks during the 1930s. By 1939, he became a member of the Central Committee Secretariat. During World War II, Malenkov was appointed to the State Defense Committee where he was charged with overseeing aircraft and missile production. After the war's end, he became a full member of the Politburo in 1946. Later in 1948, Malenkov succeeded Andrei Zhdanov as Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Upon Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Malenkov succeeded him as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the highest-ranking Secretary of the Central Committee. On 14 March, his colleagues within the Politburo forced him to give up his membership in the Secretariat, thereby allowing Nikita Khrushchev to become the party's acting First Secretary. Subsequently, Malenkov contented himself with serving as the Presidium's highest-ranking member and chairman until eventually being eclipsed by Khrushchev as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. After being compelled to leave office as Premier in February 1955, he conspired with other members of the Presidium to remove Khrushchev from the Soviet leadership. When the attempted coup by the so-called "Anti-Party Group" failed in 1957, Malenkov was dismissed from the Presidium and expelled from the party altogether by 1961. He kept a low profile for the rest of his life and died in 1988 of natural causes.
Early life and education
Malenkov was born in Orenburg in the Russian Empire on 8 January, 1902. His paternal ancestors were of Macedonian descent. Some of them served as officers in the Russian Imperial Army. His father was a wealthy farmer in Orenburg province. Young Malenkov occasionally helped his father to do business selling the harvest. His mother was a daughter of a blacksmith and a granddaughter of an Orthodox priest.Malenkov graduated from Orenburg gymnasium just a few months prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Personal life
In 1920, in Turkestan, Malenkov started living together with Soviet scientist Valeriya Golubtsova, daughter of Aleksei Golubtsov, former State Councilor of the Russian Empire in Nizhny Novgorod and dean of the Imperial Cadet School. Golubtsova and Malenkov never officially registered their union and remained unregistered partners for the rest of their lives. She had a direct connection to Vladimir Lenin through her mother; one of the "Nevzorov sisters" who were apprentices of Lenin and studied together with him for years, long before the Revolution. This connection helped both Golubtsova and Malenkov in their communist career. Later Golubtsova was the director of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, a centre for nuclear power research in USSR.Rise to the Soviet Leadership
Early Career in the Communist Party
In 1918, Malenkov joined the Red Army as a volunteer and fought alongside the Communists against White Russian forces in the Civil War. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1920 and worked as a political commissar on a propaganda train in Turkestan during the Civil War.After the Russian civil war, Malenkov quickly built himself a reputation of a tough communist Bolshevik. He was promoted in the Communist party ranks and was appointed Communist secretary at the military-based Moscow Higher Technical School in the 1920s. Russian sources state that, rather than continuing with his studies, Malenkov took a career of a Soviet politician. His university degree was never completed, and his records have been indefinitely classified. Around this time, Malenkov forged a close friendship with Vyacheslav Malyshev, who later became chief of the Soviet nuclear program alongside Igor Kurchatov.
In 1924, Stalin noticed Malenkov and assigned him to the 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.
The Great Purge
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 next ten years. In this work, he became closely associated with Stalin and was heavily involved in the treason trials during the Great Purge. Stalin sent Malenkov to various parts of the Soviet Union to purge local party cadres, including in Byelorussia, Armenia, Tatarstan, Omsk, Saratov, Tambov, Tula, and Yaroslavl. In this role, he participated in the interrogation and beating of alleged "enemies." According to Pietro Shakarian, Malenkov "theatrically declared" after one interrogation in Yerevan that "the greatest humanist Maxim Gorky once said: 'if the enemy does not surrender, destroy him.' " Dmitrii Sukhanov, Malenkov's personal assistant, later recounted that Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria "developed a close friendship" during the repressions in Yerevan and that this "formed the basis for their later political alliance."In 1938, Malenkov was one of the key figures in bringing about the downfall of Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. In 1939, he became the head of the Communist party's Cadres Directorate, which gave him control over personnel matters of party bureaucracy. During the same year, he also became a member and a Secretary of the Central Committee and rose from his previous staff position to full member of the Orgburo. In February 1941, Malenkov became a candidate member of the Politburo.
World War II
After the German invasion of June 1941, Malenkov was promoted to the State Defense Committee, along with Beria, Kliment Voroshilov, and Vyacheslav Molotov with Stalin as the committee's head. This small group held total control over all the political and economic life in the country and Malenkov's membership thus made him one of the top five most powerful men in the Soviet Union during World War II. Between 1941 and 1943, Malenkov's primary responsibility in the SDC was supervising military aircraft production as well as supervising development of nuclear weapons. In 1943, he also became chairman of a committee that oversaw the post-war economic rehabilitation of some liberated areas with the exception of Leningrad.Soviet nuclear missiles
Stalin gave Malenkov the task of building nuclear missiles in collaboration with Beria. Malenkov was appointed Chief of the Soviet Missile program, his first deputy was Dmitri Ustinov, a 33-year-old rocket scientist who later became one of the most powerful Soviet Defence Ministers. During World War II, Malenkov, Ustinov, and Mikhail Khrunichev started the Soviet missile and rocket program that soon absorbed the German missile industry. Malenkov supervised takeover of German V2 missile industry that was moved from Peenemünde to Moscow for further development that resulted in building Vostok missiles and orbiting Sputnik a few years later. At the same time, Malenkov followed Stalin's orders of building several space centers, such as Kapustin Yar near the Volga river and Khrunichev missile center in Moscow.Malenkov's main role was supervising the top staff. He took a keen interest in recruiting the most talented young engineers and scientists produced by the university system. Instead of cross-examining candidates for their loyalty to the theoretical ideology of communism, Malenkov looked for team members with strong technical skills who could invent, improve, and manufacture munitions most quickly and efficiently. He downplayed the role of the omnipresent commissars who understood little technology but were charged with ideological purification. The long-run lesson was that economic growth was the nation's highest priority.
Defeating Zhdanovshchina
"Zhdanovshchina" was the emphasis on purified communist ideology developed during the Second World War by Andrei Zhdanov. It emerged from Zhdanov's debates inside the party hierarchy opposing Malenkov's pragmatist faction. Malenkov stressed universal values of science and engineering, and proposed to promote technological experts to the highest positions in the Soviet administrative elite. Zhdanov's faction said proper ideology trumped science and called for prioritizing political education and ideological purity. However the technocrats had proven amazingly successful during the war in terms of engineering, industrial production, and development of advanced munitions.Zhdanov sought to use the ideological purification of the party as a vehicle to restore the Kremlin's political control over the provinces and the technocrats. He worried that the provincial party bosses and the heads of the economic ministries had achieved too high a degree of autonomy during the war, when the top leadership realized the urgent need for maximum mobilization of human and material resources. The highest priority in the postwar era was physical reconstruction after the massive wartime destruction. The same argument that strengthened the technocrats continue to operate, and the united opposition of Malenkov, the technocrats, the provincial party bosses, and the key ministries doomed Zhdanov's proposals. He therefore pivoted to devote Zhdanovshchina to purification of the arts and culture.
Attack on Georgy Zhukov
was the most prominent Soviet military commander during World War II, winning several critical battles, such as the Siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Battle of Berlin. Stalin, Beria, and Malenkov grew suspicious of Zhukov, worrying he possessed capitalistic tendencies, because Zhukov established a friendship with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, invited the future American president to Leningrad and Moscow, and endorsed collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union.Shortly after World War II, Malenkov sided against several who were considered Soviet war heroes, among them Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovsky, and several other popular generals. Malenkov's accusations against Zhukov were mostly based upon allegations of counter-revolutionary behavior and selfish "Bonapartism". Soon Zhukov was demoted in rank and moved to a lower position in Odessa where his only foes were local Party forces. Zhukov had his first heart attack not long after, and Malenkov's concerns about him largely faded.
After the attack on Zhukov, Malenkov gained strength and became closer to Stalin and several other top communists. In 1946, Malenkov was named a candidate member of the Politburo. Although temporarily trailing behind his rival Zhdanov, he soon returned to Stalin's favor, especially after Zhdanov's death in 1948. That same year, Malenkov became a Secretary of the Central Committee.