Andrei Zhdanov

The Soviet leadership signs a treaty with the Finnish Democratic Republic, 1939 (standing from left to right are Andrei Zhdanov, Klim Voroshilov, Stalin and Otto Kuusinen while Vyacheslav Molotov is seated)

Andrei Zhdanov was born in Mariupol, in Ukraine, where his father was a schools inspector. His maternal grandfather was the former rector of the Moscow Theological Academy. [2] He studied at the Moscow Commercial Institute. In 1914, he was drafted into the Russian army, graduated from an officers' school, and served in the reserves. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1915. In 1917, he was chairman of the Shadrinsk committee of the RSDLP(b). He was a political commissar in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He was elected chairman of the Tver soviet in 1923. In 1924-34, he was First Secretary of the Nizhny Novgorod provincial party committee.[3]

Zhdanov's first major promotion came at the end of the 17th Congress of the CPSU, in February 1934, when he was transferred to Moscow as a Secretary of the Central Committee, responsible for ideology.. In this capacity, he inserted his protege Aleksandr Shcherbakov as Secretary of the Soviet Writers union, and he gave the opening address to the first Soviet Writers' Congress in August 1934. In his speech, as well as paying tribute to "the guiding genius of our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin", and repeating Stalin's famous line that writers "engineers of human souls", he declared that the only good literature was political:

Our Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being 'tendentious'. Yes, Soviet literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not class literature, not tendentious, allegedly non-political.[4]

Zhdanov's second big promotion followed the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, when he succeeded Kirov as First Secretary of the Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) provincial party, and was co-opted as a candidate member of the Politburo. Early in 1935, he and the head of the Leningrad NKVD, Leonid Zakovsky, organised the deportation of 11,702 so-called 'Leningrad aristocrats' - ie people who had belonged to the nobility or middle class before the revolution. They also hunted any current or former party member suspected to having supported Leon Trotsky, or the former Leningrad party boss, Grigory Zinoviev.

Zhdanov has been described by John Arch Getty as a key figure in the Terror, advocating an approach that would make the party a vehicle for political education, ideological agitation, and cadre preparation on a mass scale.[5] Zhdanov's encouragement of rank-and-file mobilisation helped create momentum for the Terror.[6] Though somewhat less active than Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov, Zhdanov was a major perpetrator of the Great Terror and personally approved 176 documented execution lists.[7]

On holiday with Stalin in August 1936, he co-signed the telegram which brought about the dismissal of the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, who was accused, among other failings, of not having impeded Zhdanov and Zakovsky in their purge of the Leningrad party organisation.[8] During a Central Committee plenum in March 1937, Zhdanov announced that all provincial party secretaries were to be subject to re-election - a device used to remove them. Zhdanov was the only provincial party leader anywhere in Russia to remain in post throughout the Great Purge. In May 1937, he called leaders of the Leningrad party together to tell them that the long-serving second secretary of the provincial party, Mikhail Chudov, and the former Mayor of Leningrad, Ivan Kodatsky, had been arrested. When an Old Bolshevik, Dora Lazurkina went up to him afterwards to vouch for Kodatsky, Zhdanov warned her that such talk "will end badly for you". She was arrested, and survived 17 years in the Gulag.[9]

In September 1938, Zhdanov was appointed head of the reorganised Central Committee Directorate for Propaganda and Agitation, which brought all branches of the news media and arts under centralised party control.[10] He was also Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR from July 1938 to June 1947, and from 1938 was on the military council of the Soviet Navy.

His rise coincided with the fall of Yezhov. At the 18th Congress of the CPSU, Zhdanov noted that ‘other means apart from repression’ could be used to enforce ‘state and labour discipline’.[11] gave a key speech in which he proposed 'to abolish mass Party purges...now that the capitalist elements have been eliminated', declaring that the purges had been co-opted by 'hostile elements' to 'persecute and ruin honest people.[12][13]

At the conclusion of the Congress, in March 1939 Zhdanov was promoted to full membership of the Politburo. He was still one of four secretaries of the Central Committee - the others being Stalin, Andrey Andreyev, and Georgy Malenkov - but Malenkov was not a Politburo member of the Politburo, which meant that Zhdanov had replaced Lazar Kaganovich as Stalin's deputy in the party apparatus, and appeared to be his most likely successor.

On 29 June 1939, he had a signed article in Pravda in which he expressed what he called his "personal" view - "with which my friends do not agree" - that the UK and France did not seriously want a military alliance with the Soviet Union. In retrospect, this was the first public hint that the USSR would be prepared, three months later, to sign up to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Zhdanov was very publicly associated with the decision to invade Finland in November 1939. In December, he signed the 'treaty' between the USSR and Finland's 'government in exile", headed by Otto Kuusinen. AS the Leningrad party boss, and the official overseeing the navy, he had an interest in increasing the Soviet presence in the Baltic sea, at the expense of Finland, Estonia and Latvia.[14] The final peace treaty between Finland and the USSR was signed by Zhdanov, on 12 March 1940.

In June 1940, Zhdanov was sent to Estonia[15] to supervise the establishment of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and its annexation by the Soviet Union. He was one of those accused during the United States House of Representatives' 1953–1954 Kersten Committee investigation into the annexation of the Baltic states.[16]

The Finnish debacle weakened Zhdanov's political standing. In September 1940, he was removed from direct control of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, which was taken over by Georgy Aleksandrov, an ally of his rival Malenkov. It was undermined further by the German invasion of the USSR, because he had been so publciy associated with the failed pact with Hitler. He was excluded from the State Defence Committee (GOKO) which directed the war effort, and which was initially controlled by Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria. According to the historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko :

Beria and Malenkov zealously sawed away at the chair holding Andrei Zhdanov, the first in line to succeed Stalin. They laid the groundwork for his transfer to the doomed city of Leningrad. No place was found for Zhdanov, Stalin's favourite, even when the State Defence Committee was revamped.[17]\

Along with Zhukov, Zhdanov took a leading role during the siege of Leningrad in World War II.[18] In August 1941, he created a City Defence Council, but was ordered by Stalin to disband it.[17] When the siege was lifted, he was not officially given credit for saving the city.

After the cease-fire agreement between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed in Moscow on 4 September 1944, Zhdanov directed the Allied Control Commission in Finland until the Paris peace treaty of 1947. This meant that he had to spend several months in Helsinki, and relinquish his position as head of the Leningrad party organisation, which he had held for nine years - though he was able to leave it in the hands of his ally, Alexey Kuznetsov]. In January 1945, when Pravda celebrated the lifting of the siege of Leningrad, it made special of the fact that Malenkov and Molotov had been dispatched to the city in 1941, implying that they shared the credit with Zhdanov.

Zhdanov made a political comeback during 1946, when his main rival Malenkov temporarily lost his position as a party secretary. For the next two years, he was delegated by Stalin to direct the Soviet Union's cultural policy, and to handle relations with the Eastern European states that were under or coming under communist control. He formulated what became known as the Zhdanov Doctrine ("The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best"). In December 1946, he launched the attack on Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, two writers living in Zhdanov's former Leningrad fiefdom. He described Akhmatova - argubly then the greatest living Russian poet - "half nun, half whore."

In 1947, he organized the Cominform, designed to coordinate and control the communist parties around the world. At a famous speech at Szklarska Poręba in September 1947 Zhdanov warned his fellow communists that the world was now split into two hostile camps and that the Cominform was needed to oppose the ‘frank expansionist programme’ of the US.[19]

In January 1948, he presided over a three day conference in the Kremlin, to which more than 70 composers, musicians and music critics, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, Nikolai Myaskovsky were summoned to be lectured by Zhdanov on why they should avoid "formalism" is music. A persistent story is that Zhdanov played the piano during the conference, to demonstrate how music should be written, but years later this story was furiously denied by Shostakovich, who attributed it to "toadies".[20] Zhdanov's cultural policy rested on the USSR 'critically assimilating the cultural heritage of all nations and all times’ to take what was most inspiring'.[21]