Word: malenkov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years later Malenkov was appointed to the all-powerful Politburo. It was a long way up, but not quite the top yet. The war carried him there: when Comrade Stalin became Generalissimo Stalin, he gave most of his purely party functions and many of his home-front tasks to Malenkov. More & more, while Stalin ran the war, Malenkov ran Russia...
...young secretary's duties were expanded to include several important executive posts (organizing secretary, Moscow Party Committee, 1930-34; personnel chief, All-Union Party Central Committee, etc.), but he managed to remain the eyes & ears of Stalin. During the gory purges of the 1930s, Malenkov's inexhaustible memory worked late hours behind the scenes. He kept his own head so carefully below the parapet that in 1939, when Malenkov was chosen to make a minor report to the 18th Party Congress, his name was still virtually unknown to all except a few high party officials...
Setback. Now his head was over the parapet, and now the snipers had something to shoot at. Even in Russia, seniors, pushed aside, resent young upstarts. Molotov, for one, could bear him a grudge because Malenkov exposed Mrs. Molotov's inefficiency. She lost her job first as head of the Cosmetics Trust, then as head of the Fish Industry. Kaganovich, a ranking Politburocrat and a Jew, could resent Malenkov's ill-concealed antiSemitism. But Malenkov, unlike Judy Holliday (see CINEMA), was not born yester day: he cultivated one mighty friend in the Politburo, Lavrenty Beria, head...
...felt, and failed to conceal, an utter contempt for the Old Bolsheviks' sentimental, old-grad memories and their pious reverence for the prophets Marx and Engels. "It is impossible to believe," wrote a British observer, "that there is no contempt in [Malenkov's] eye as he watches older men putting themselves through absurd and elaborate contortions to reconcile what is with what was supposed to be. His is the world that is." Apparently he did not mind being considered a heretic by such passionately doctrinaire Marxists as Andrei Zhdanov (touted frequently in the mid-'40s as Stalin...
This proclamation cost Malenkov his job as party secretary and resulted in a vigorous campaign by Zhdanov for the revival of strict Marxist orthodoxy in the party. But Malenkov had bet on the right horse. Zhdanov died unexpectedly-in 1948. Soon afterwards, most of his partisans lost their jobs. The Five-Year-Planner Vosnesensky, Zhdanov's most ardent disciple, was liquidated so completely that his name was erased from the Soviet history books. Since then, Malenkov has apparently had a clear track...