Andrei Zhdanov

For more information on Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, visit Britannica.com.

(b. 27 Feb. 1896; d. 31 Aug. 1948) Russian; First Secretary of the Leningrad Party 1934 – 48, Central Committee Secretary for Ideology 1944 – 8 Zhdanov was of middle-class origin, the son of a school-inspector. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and participated in the October Revolution. In the Russian Civil War he was a commissar attached to the Red Army. In 1924 he became head of the party in Novgorod and in 1928 went to the Volga region to supervise the collectivization of agriculture. In 1934 Zhdanov became secretary of the Central Committee and, after Kirov's murder, head of the Leningrad Party. He supervised a bloody purge in the city. In 1935 he became a candidate member of the Politburo and a full member in 1939. In 1940 he oversaw the brutal Sovietization of Estonia immediately after its conquest. As head of the City Defence Council he played a major role in the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944. In 1944 he became Central Committee Secretary responsible for ideology. In the immediate post-war years Zhdanov's influence within the Soviet Union was second only to Stalin's. He led a campaign for the purification of Soviet society from the influence of Western cultural and scientific influence, strictly enforcing the principles of "Socialist Realism" in the arts, and attacked the famous writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova in 1946. In 1947 he presided over the Szklarska Poręba conference which resulted in the Soviet Bloc's declaration of ideological war on the West and the creation of the Cominform. He was noted for the violence of his anti-Western rhetoric. Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, and an extensive purge of the Leningrad party organization followed. In 1953 Stalin accused a group of Jewish doctors of his murder.

(1896 - 1948), Soviet political leader.

Andrei Zhdanov was one of Stalin's most prominent deputies and is best known as the leader of the ideological crackdown following World War II. After the assassination of Leningrad leader Sergei Kirov in 1934, Zhdanov became head of the Leningrad party organization. Also in 1934 he became a secretary of the party's Central Committee and in 1939 a full Politburo member. He spent most of World War II leading Leningrad, which was besieged by Hitler's troops.

Zhdanov was transferred to Moscow in 1944 to work as Central Committee secretary for ideology and began playing a growing leadership role, which intensified his rivalry with Central Committee Secretary Georgy Malenkov. Zhdanov, as chief of the Central Committee's Propaganda Department, became identified with official ideology, while Malenkov, chief of the party's personnel and industrial departments, was identified with management of party activity and industry. In the maneuvering between these leaders, Zhdanov scored a victory over his rival by starting an ideological crackdown in August 1946, denouncing deviations by some literary journals and harshly assailing prominent writers. During Zhdanov's campaign, Malenkov lost his leadership posts and fell into Stalin's disfavor, while Zhdanov became viewed as Stalin's most likely successor.

Zhdanov's role in the harsh postwar ideological crackdown earned him the reputation of the regime's leading hardliner; the wave of persecution of literary and cultural figures became known as the Zhdanovshchina. In June 1947 Zhdanov denounced ideological errors and softness toward the West in Soviet philosophy. At a September 1947 conference of foreign communist parties, Zhdanov laid out the thesis that the world was divided into two camps: imperialist (Western) and democratic (Soviet). Zhdanov's pronouncements fostered development of the Cold War and an assertion of basic hostility between Soviet and Western ideas.

However, the worst excesses of the Zhdanovshchina ironically were committed after Zhdanov's death and were directed against Zhdanov's allies. Zhdanov refused to back biologist Trofim Lysenko's attacks on modern genetics, and Zhdanov's son, who was head of the Central Committee's Science Department, actually denounced Lysenko's ideas in April 1948 and was later forced to recant publicly. In July 1948 Zhdanov was sent off for an extended vacation, during which he died on August 31, 1948. Malenkov returned to power in mid-1948, and, as Zhdanov was dying in August 1948, Lysenko was given free reign in science and initiated the condemnation of genetics and other allegedly pro-Western scientific ideas. In 1949 a campaign against Jews as cosmopolitans began. Also in 1949 Zhdanov's proteges in Leningrad were purged (the Leningrad Case), many of them eventually executed. Zhdanov himself was spared public disgrace, unlike his proteges and his Leningrad party organization, which was cast into disfavor for years. Zhdanov continued to be treated as a hero, and when Stalin concocted the Doctors' Plot in 1952, he cast Zhdanov as one of the victims of the Jewish doctors, who allegedly had poisoned the Leningrad leader.

Although the symbol of intolerance in literature and culture and of hostility toward the West, Zhdanov was probably no more hard-line than his rivals. His denunciations of ideological deviations appeared largely motivated by his struggle to retain Stalin's favor. But Stalin turned to a crack-down and a break with the West and drove the Zhdanovshchina into its extremes of anti-Semitism, Lysenkoism, and the execution of Leningrad leaders and Zhdanov proteges.

Bibliography

Graham, Loren. (1972). Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union. New York: Knopf.

Hahn, Werner G. (1982). Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946 - 53. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Medvedev, Zhores. (1969). The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press.

—WERNER G. HAHN

Andrei Zhdanov

Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov (Russian: Андре́й Алекса́ндрович Жда́нов; February 26 [O.S. February 14] 1896, Mariupol – August 31, 1948, Moscow) was a Soviet politician.

Contents 1 Life 2 Ideology 3 The City of Zhdanov 4 References 5 See also 6 External links

Life

A typical list from the Great Purge signed by Zhdanov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Molotov

Zhdanov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) in 1915 and rose through the party ranks, becoming the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) leader in Leningrad after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934. He was a strong supporter of socialist realism in art.

Zhdanov was Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet July 15, 1938–June 20, 1947.

Though somewhat less active than Molotov, Stalin, Kaganovich and Voroshilov, Zhdanov was a major perpetrator of the Great Terror, who personally approved 176 documented execution lists.^[1]

In June 1940, he was sent to Estonia^[2] to supervise the establishment of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and its annexation into the USSR.

During the Great Patriotic War, Zhdanov was in charge of the defence of Leningrad. After the cease-fire agreement between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed in Moscow on 4 September 1944, Zhdanov headed the Allied Control Commission in Finland until the Paris peace treaty of 1947.

In 1946, Zhdanov was put in charge of the Soviet Union cultural policy by Joseph Stalin. His first action (in December 1946) was to censor Russian writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko (Zhdanov Doctrine).

1946–1947 Zhdanov was Chairman of the Soviet of the Union.

In 1947, he organized the Cominform, designed to coordinate the communist parties of Europe. In February 1948, he initiated purges in the musical area, widely known as a struggle against formalism. Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian and many other composers were reprimanded during this period. He died in 1948 in Moscow of heart failure; Nikita Khrushchev recalled in Khrushchev Remembers that Zhdanov could not control his drinking, and that in his "last days", Stalin would shout at him to stop drinking and insist that he drink only fruit juice.^[3] Simon Sebag-Montefiore and others allege that Stalin himself was responsible for Zhdanov's death, citing Zhdanov's inability to coordinate a Communist takeover in Finland as cause. ^[4] Stalin had talked of Zhdanov being his successor but Zhdanov's ill health gave his rivals, Beria and Malenkov, an opportunity to undermine him.

His son, Yuri (1919-2006), married Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, in 1949. The marriage was brief and ended in divorce in 1950. They had one daughter, Ekaterina.

He was one of the main accused people during the U.S. House of Representatives' Kersten Committee investigation in 1953.^[5]

Ideology

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Until the late 1950s, Zhdanov's ideological code, known as Zhdanovism or zhdanovshchina, defined cultural production in the Soviet Union. Zhdanov intended to forge a new philosophy of art-making for the entire world. His method reduced the whole domain of culture to a straightforward, scientific chart, where a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral vlate 1950s, Zhdanov's ideological code, known as Zhdanovism or zhdanovshchinaalue. Roland Barthes summed up the core doctrine of Zhdanovism this way: "Wine is objectively good... the artist deals with the goodness of wine, not with the wine itself." Zhdanov and his associates further sought to eliminate foreign influence from Soviet art, proclaiming that "incorrect art" was an ideological diversion. ^[6]

In the 1950s, following Zhdanov's death, there was a creative explosion in Soviet art—abstract and formal work.

The City of Zhdanov

His birth-place, Mariupol, was re-named Zhdanov at Stalin's instigation in 1948, and a monument of Zhdanov was erected in the central square of the city in his honor. In 1989 the name reverted to Mariupol, and the monument was dismantled in 1990.

Political offices
Preceded by None	Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Russia 1938 – 1947	Succeeded by Mikhail Tarasov
Preceded by Andrey Andreyev	Chairman of the Soviet of the Union 1946 – 1947	Succeeded by Ivan Parfenov

References

1. ^ http://stalin.memo.ru/images/intro1.htm
2. ^ "Analytical list of documents, V. Friction in the Baltic States and Balkans, June 4-September 21, 1940" (html). Telegram of German Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenburg) to the German Foreign Office. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/nsr/nsr-05.html#14. Retrieved 2007-03-03. 
3. ^ Simon Sebag Montefiore, in "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar", ISBN 1-4000-4230-5
4. ^ untitled
5. ^ The Iron Heel, TIME Magazine, December 14, 1953
6. ^ Stites, Richard. Soviet Popular Culture. Cambridge University Press: 1992. 117.

See also

• Zhdanov Doctrine
• Socialist realism
• Engineers of the human soul

External links

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov

v • d • e Heads of state of the Russian SFSR Chairman of Central Executive Committee (1917–1938) Lev Kamenev • Yakov Sverdlov • Mikhail Vladimirsky • Mikhail Kalinin Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (1938) Andrei Zhdanov Chairman of Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1938–1990) Alexey Badayev • Ivan Vlasov • Nikolay Shvernik • Ivan Vlasov • Mikhail Tarasov • Nikolay Ignatov • Nikolay Organov • Nikolay Ignatov • vacant • Mikhail Yasnov • Vladimir Orlov • Vitaly Vorotnikov Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (1990–1991) Boris Yeltsin President of the Russian SFSR (1991) Boris Yeltsin Italics indicates Acting Chairman

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