Georgi M. Malenkov

Premier of the Soviet Union (1953-1955)

• Born: January 8, 1902
• Birthplace: Orenburg, Russia
• Died: January 14, 1988
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Malenkov was a close associate of Joseph Stalin in his bloody terror against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet society in general. In 1953, he was Stalin’s immediate successor as premier of the government and first secretary of the Communist Party, positions that he soon lost in the power struggle with Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Early Life

Georgi Maksimilianovich Malenkov (gah-OHR-jee mahk-sih-MIH-lah-noh-vihch muhl-YIHN-kuhf) was born in the Ural Mountains region of southeastern European Russia traditionally inhabited by Cossacks. The city of his birth is now called Chkalov. Little is known of Malenkov’s childhood. His family appears to have been of the lower white-collar class. Official biographical notes about Malenkov never included personal data about him, as was the custom for political figures of the years of Joseph Stalin’s rule.

While still in his teens Malenkov became active in politics during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. In 1919, he was appointed an officer in charge of political affairs (commissar) in a unit of the Bolshevik Red Army fighting in Turkestan. He became a member of the Communist Party at the age of eighteen. After the Bolsheviks had secured their power by triumphing over the assorted “white” armies of their opponents, Malenkov was enrolled in a technical institute in Moscow. While still in school, he married Valeria Alekseevna Golubtsova, a worker in the office of the Central Committee of the party. Through his wife, Malenkov established connections that permitted him to gain employment by the committee after his graduation in 1925. In a short time, he became a personal secretary to Stalin at a time when Stalin was nearing his victory in the contest for supreme political power.

By 1930, Malenkov had taken up the work that was to bring him the great influence that he exercised in Soviet politics. He became chair of the Organization Bureau of the party in the city of Moscow, and in 1934 he became chief of the department, supervising party organizations throughout the Soviet Union. Thus Malenkov commanded the party’s personnel network that stretched over the country and facilitated communist control of the economic and governmental structures of the Soviet Union. From 1936 through 1940, he was chief editor of the party journal devoted to organizational work, Partiinoe stroitel’stvo (party structure).

Life’s Work

Malenkov parlayed the information that he acquired through his responsibilities for party organizational work into arbitrary control over the lives of tens of thousands of communists. In 1934, he became chief aide to Nikolai Ezhov, chair of the disciplinary arm of the party, the Control Commission. Ezhov soon was to assume the top post in the political police and give his name to the worst months of Stalinist terror, the Ezhovshchina, or “the evil era of Ezhov,” by which the period of 1936-1938 often is named. In that time, Malenkov remained at Ezhov’s side. After Nikita S. Khrushchev exposed the crimes of the purge years, one party offical reported that Malenkov personally had participated in the interrogation under torture and eventual elimination of as many as thirty-five hundred Armenian communists in 1937. He and Ezhov were partners in a similarly brutal and thorough purge of the Belorussian party organization.

Malenkov continued his speedy ascent in the party power hierarchy even after Ezhov was executed and replaced by Lavrenti Beria. In 1939, Malenkov was appointed to the party secretariat, retaining his responsibility for party personnel. At this time an important debate began over principle that was to govern an intense personal rivalry between Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov. Malenkov advocated close practical supervision by the party over economic activity, while Zhdanov argued for governmental supervision of the economy with the party’s efforts devoted to ideological education of society. By early 1941, it was evident that Malenkov had won this contest, for the time being, when he emerged from the shadows of the party apparatus to make his first important public speech before the party. At the Nineteenth Party Conference in February, he pronounced a harsh criticism of government officials who supervised economic matters but were themselves incompetent for their offices. In the aftermath of the speech, a number of apparently influential communist politicians were demoted, and Malenkov was promoted to nonvoting (candidate) membership in the Politburo, the small committee that exercised effective power in the country.

After German armies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Malenkov was made one of the five members of the Committee of State Defense, headed by Stalin. Malenkov demonstrated considerable managerial skill as the chief of aircraft and tank manufacturing in the country. The armed force that his planes and tanks were able to direct against the Germans in a very short time was one important factor in the Soviet Union’s being able to recover from the devastating blow initially delivered by Adolf Hitler’s forces. In little more than two years, the invaders were turned back by Soviet mechanized might. As they retreated, it became Malenkov’s duty to supervise the economic rehabilitation of liberated regions, a task in which he exercised enormous authority over all aspects of citizens’ lives.

In March, 1946, Malenkov became a full voting member of the Politburo, and in October he was appointed one of eight deputy premiers of the country. In 1947, however, his ascent to the pinnacle of power was halted temporarily as he neared the top. Intense rivalry for the favor of the aging Stalin as he marked his successor resulted in Malenkov’s being relieved briefly of his seat on the secretariat. For a time, the influence of Zhdanov dominated, a situation signaled by the name often given to the years 1947-1948, “Zhdanovshchina,” a period of severe cultural repression in the Soviet Union and expansion of Stalinist control in Eastern Europe. Although he remained on the Politburo, Malenkov’s influence waned, and he was saddled with the apparently thankless task of supervising the perpetually deficient agricultural sector of the economy.

Malenkov demonstrated his ability to play the ruthless game of party politics, with the support of Beria. Together they manufactured the “Leningrad affair,” which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists who were associates of Zhdanov in the Leningrad Party organization. Zhdanov himself died in August, 1948. An element of mystery surrounded the death that remains to be cleared up. What is certain is that Zhdanov’s demise led to Malenkov’s emergence as one of Stalin’s two most intimate associates in power (along with Viacheslav Molotov). The aggressively anti-Semitic Malenkov accused Jewish physicians of poisoning Zhdanov, a lie that was exposed after the death of Stalin, whose own hatred of Jews Malenkov manipulated to his own advantage.

That Malenkov had won the status of heir-apparent to Stalin seemed especially clear when in 1952 he was given the responsibility of planning the Nineteenth Party Congress, the first convocation of this highest formal authority of the party to have been made since 1939. Malenkov delivered the principal speech of the congress in October. When Stalin died less than five months later, in March, 1953, Malenkov reaped the fruits of his status by assuming the supreme offices in government and party that Stalin had held.

After only ten days, Malenkov surrendered his post of first secretary of the party and remained the premier. His power as leader of the government was contested by Beria, but Malenkov eventually eliminated the police chief, who was executed in June. Thereupon Malenkov promoted his “new course,” a combination of a conciliatory posture toward the West, symbolized in the ending of armed conflict in Korea, and a shift of some industrial resources away from production of heavy equipment into consumer goods and housing.

Khrushchev soon emerged as Malenkov’s chief rival. Khrushchev pried power out of Malenkov’s hands, in part by placing on him blame for the “Leningrad affair” and for enormous failures in Soviet agriculture. On January 25, 1955, Malenkov resigned the premiership, fatuously citing his “lack of experience.” He retained for a time some influence within the party because he was a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee, a body that substituted for the Politburo between 1952 and 1966. Khrushchev forced him to surrender this position in 1957 after Malenkov joined an unsuccessful conspiracy to oust Khrushchev from his post of first secretary.

Malenkov was exiled to the job of managing a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan. Such a fate for one who had lost a bold political gambit was far more merciful than the vengeance that he had visited on thousands of communists. Four years later he resigned, complaining about the insurbordination of his underlings. Almost simultaneously he was expelled from the Communist Party after the public de-Stalinization of the Twenty-second Party Congress of 1961. Malenkov was punished for his participation in an “antiparty group,” namely those who had sought to remove Khrushchev from his secretaryship in 1957. For the next twenty-seven years Malenkov lived in idle obscurity in a comfortable Moscow apartment. Persistent rumors circulated that he became a regular frequenter of Orthodox churches, but confirmation of these is lacking. His funeral in January, 1988, was a very private affair.

Significance

Because the brutality of the Stalinist regime is one of the salient features of the twentieth century and because Malenkov was closely implicated in that brutality, he must be recognized as an important figure of the time. It cannot be said that Malenkov made an identifiable contribution to humanity or that he even had the personal ability to do so. What he did, he did because he was Stalin’s intimate. It seems that he excelled only as an agent for the leader to whom he gave total devotion. Although he manifested some hints of possessing real managerial skill, in actual practice, when Stalin was gone, Malenkov proved unable to retain the enormous power that had passed into his hands as holder of the highest offices of the second most powerful country of the world. Some observers have suggested that his “new course” set important precedents for the de-Stalinization that Khrushchev began and Mikhail Gorbachev brought to fruition. Such a claim carries only tentative conviction and probably represents the best that can be said of a man whose record of inhumanity would require much more to redeem it.

Bibliography

Hahn, Werner G. Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-1953. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982. A study that portrays Malenkov as more brutal than Zhdanov and explains his triumph over him. This interpretation is somewhat at variance with the more common view that Malenkov was more of a moderate pragmatist than the ideological dogmatist that Zhdanov was.

McNeal, Robert H. Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988. Because no book-length biography of Malenkov is available in any language, information about him can be gleaned most successfully from biographies of his mentor, of which this one is among the best.

Medvedev, Roy. All Stalin’s Men. Translated by Harold Shukman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Chapter 6, “G. M. Malenkov: The ’Heir’ That Never Was,” is the most detailed biography of Malenkov in English, written by a man who has been the most outspoken anti-Stalinist Soviet historian of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Let History Judge. Translated by George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. The most detailed and authoritative history of the Stalinist era of Soviet history. The first edition of the book, published in New York in 1971, was denied publication in the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era. The second, considerably enlarged, edition benefited from the liberalization of the Gorbachev era.

Paxton, John. Leaders of Russia and the Soviet Union: From the Romanov Dynasty to Vladimir Putin. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. Includes a profile of Malenkov.

Rush, Myron. Political Succession in the U.S.S.R. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. A political science comparison of the way successors to Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev emerged that casts light on the failure of Malenkov to retain power.

Young, Gordon. Stalin’s Heirs. London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953. A dated, but useful, account from the period in which Malenkov emerged to the exercise of political power in his own right.

Zubkova, Elena. “The Rivalry with Malenkov.” In Nikita Khrushchev, edited by William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason. Translated by David Gehrenbeck, Eileen Kane, and Alla Bashenko. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. This essay about the two Soviet leaders’ rivalry is included in a collection of essays about Nikita S. Khrushchev.