Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov
Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov was a prominent Soviet politician born on February 26, 1896, in Mariupol, Ukraine, to a family of service nobility. His political career escalated after the assassination of Leningrad party secretary Sergei Kirov in 1934, when he was appointed to replace Kirov and undertook a purging of local party officials. During World War II, Zhdanov administered the besieged city of Leningrad with notable ruthlessness. After the war, he became a key figure in the repressive environment of Soviet society, particularly targeting the intellectual elite, which led to the term "Zhdanovshchina" to describe this period of cultural repression. His critiques of notable figures like poet Anna Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko exemplified his hard-line stance. Zhdanov struggled with alcoholism, which affected his standing within the party, and he fell out of favor with Stalin in 1947. He died of a heart attack in 1948, leaving behind a legacy of repression that lingered in Soviet culture and politics, influencing ideologies that persisted beyond his death.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov
Soviet bureaucrat
- Born: February 26, 1896
- Birthplace: Mariupol, Ukraine, Russia
- Died: August 31, 1948
- Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)
Cause of notoriety: Zhdanov led the intellectual crackdown in the Soviet Union that followed the relaxations during World War II.
Active: 1934-1947
Locale: Former Soviet Union, particularly Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg)
Early Life
Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (AN-dray al-ehk-ZAN-dro-vich ZHDAN-of) was born in the Black Sea port city of Mariupol on February 26, 1896, to a family of the hereditary service nobility. His father, like the father of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, was an inspector of schools. His mother, a graduate of the Moscow Musical Conservatory, taught her son to sing and play the piano. Thus he was the only representative of the old intelligentsia among the rude peasants of Joseph Stalin’s court. Perhaps because of that awkward class origin, he took pains to be very proper in his personal life and relationship with the dictator Stalin, to the point that other members of the Politburo scorned him as a prig.
Political Career
Although Zhdanov had held various minor positions from the beginning of the Bolshevik regime, his career really took off after the 1934 murder of Leningrad party secretary Sergei Kirov. Appointed by Stalin to take the murdered Kirov’s place, Zhdanov participated in the purging of Leningrad’s Party apparat with frantic zeal. During World War II, while Leningrad was surrounded and besieged by Nazi forces for nine hundred days, Zhdanov administered the starving city with brutal efficiency.
However, it was after the close of the war that he made his permanent mark on Soviet history. Locked in a political struggle with Georgi Malenkov for control of the overall party apparat, Zhdanov needed to prove his credentials as a doctrinaire hard-liner. As a result, he took the lead in a new wave of repressions that cracked down on the intellectual elite, particularly in Leningrad. He called poet Anna Akhmatova a “nun-harlot” and regarded Mikhail Zoshchenko’s satire “Prikliucheniia obeziany” (“The Adventures of a Monkey”) as intolerably offensive. Zhdanov also sought to portray the world as divided into two irreconcilable camps, communist and capitalist.
Always a heavy drinker, Zhdanov began to display symptoms of alcoholism, to the point that even Stalin ordered him to stop drinking. Nikita S. Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs that Zhdanov regularly drank himself under the table solely because it pleased Stalin to see him drunk. After Zhdanov argued with Stalin and fell out of favor in 1947, he went downhill quickly. Never graced with a strong constitution in spite of his burly build, Zhdanov finally succumbed to a heart attack in 1948.
Impact
Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov’s attacks on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were so critical in signaling the end of the wartime relaxation on Soviet control of literature that the subsequent repression was named the Zhdanovshchina, literally “the Zhdanov-thing,” paralleling the Yezhovshchina for the height of the 1930’s Great Terror, named for secret police chief Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov. Even after Zhdanov died, his baleful influence did not end, for accusations that he had been murdered by medical malpractice formed, in part, the foundation for claims of the “Doctor’s Plot,” which appears to have been intended as the opening round of a new cycle of purges, interrupted only by Stalin’s unexpected death on March 5, 1953. Zhdanov’s “two-camp” schema of international relations survived him in the person of ideologist Mikhail Suslov.
Bibliography
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A post-glasnost reissuing of an authoritative volume on the era.
Khrushchev, Nikita S. Khrushchev Remembers. Translated by Strobe Talbott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. A revealing primary source, although with certain predictable blind spots regarding Khrushchev’s own complicity in many of the crimes he describes.
Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Includes information on Stalin’s use of Zhdanov and other henchmen to run the Terror while deflecting attention from himself.
Rayfield, Donald. Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. New York: Random House, 2004. A study of the relationship between Stalin and his chief henchmen.