Word: suslov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some ways Gorbachev owes his rise to hometown connections. The future Soviet leader was born in 1931 in the fertile Stavropol region of southern Russia, where Yuri Andropov also was born and where Mikhail Suslov, the country's leading ideologist until his death in January 1982, had worked for several years. Gorbachev's first job was driving a tractor. In 1950 he made a significant leap forward by gaining entrance to Moscow State University. Admission is notoriously hard to win; unless a student is exceptionally talented, he needs family influence to enter. The farm boy apparently got his boost from...
Fedorenko told me what happened next. Mikhail Suslov and Alexei Kosygin were the prime movers against Khrushchev. Suslov seemed satisfied to be the party patriarch and main ideologist. Kosygin was happy to be Chairman of the Council of Ministers and play the major role in both domestic economic and foreign policies. But it was hard for them to agree on who should be First Secretary of the Central Committee...
Chernenko's early attempts to establish himself as a writer on ideological subjects were hampered by his lack of erudition. It is said that Mikhail Suslov, the party's chief ideologue in the post-Stalin period, had a poor opinion of Chernenko's abilities and was reluctant to let him publish articles in Kommunist, the party's main ideological publication. But after Suslov's death, in January 1982, Chernenko wrote frequently for Kommunist on general Soviet policy, especially on relations between Moscow and the foreign Communist parties. His attitude toward culture and the arts was as conservative and as ideologically...
...influence with the Kremlin's inner circle grew. In May 1982, Andropov was relieved of his position as head of the KGB and promoted to the spot on the party's powerful Central Committee Secretariat that had been left vacant by the death of Ideologist Mikhail Suslov. It was seen as a move to "launder" Andropov for the top party post. When Brezhnev died six months later, Andropov had lined up enough support to beat back the challenge of Konstantin Chernenko, who was widely believed to be Brezhnev's personal choice for the post of party General...
...most pressing vacancies are in the Politburo. At the beginning of the year, the ruling body of the Communist Party had 14 voting members, an enshrined gerontocracy whose average age was 70. The death last January of Party Ideologue Mikhail Suslov, 79, lowered the count by one, and last week, as the nation's attention was focused on Brezhnev's funeral, it was rumored that longtime Party Disciplinarian Arvid Pelshe, 83, had also died. If Party Secretary Andrei Kirilenko, 76, is on the way out, as the cold reception he was accorded at the Tammany Hall, Soviet-Style