Georgy Malenkov

(b. Orenburg, Russia, 8 Jan. 1902; d. Moscow, 23 Jan. 1988) Russian; Politbureau member 1941 – 57, Deputy Prime Minister 1946 – 53, Prime Minister 1953 – 5 From a middle-class background, Malenkov joined the Communist Party in 1920 and worked in the Central Committee apparatus after graduation from Moscow Higher Technological Institute in 1925. He became a close associate of Stalin and Beria and was heavily involved in the collectivization campaign and the purges of the 1930s. He became a Central Committee member in 1939 and candidate member of the Politbureau and State Defence Committee member in 1941. In 1946 he became a full member of the Politbureau and deputy chair of the Council of Ministers and after Zhdanov's death in 1948 was regarded as Stalin's natural successor, confirmed by his delivery of the General Report to the 19th CPSU Congress in 1952.

After Stalin's death Malenkov was briefly both chair of the Council of Ministers and party secretary, but soon ceded the latter post, considered less important, to Khrushchev. Together with Beria he launched a reform programme known as the "New Course", reviving the idea of "peaceful coexistence", laying more stress on agriculture and consumer goods and repudiating the "Doctors' Plot" of 1952. However, he was outmanœuvred by Khrushchev, who stole his liberal policies and managed to install his ally, Bulganin, as premier in February 1955. Malenkov, still a member of the Presidium (Politbureau), mobilized the state apparatus against Khrushchev, defeating him in the Presidium in 1957. However, Khrushchev appealed successfully to the Central Committee and ousted the "Anti-Party Group", including Malenkov, from the Presidium and the Central Committee. Malenkov was exiled as manager of a hydro-electric plant in Kazakhstan, but returned to a long retirement in Moscow. Not just a pen-pusher, as depicted by Khrushchev, he was an able and tough politician who started the post-Stalin liberalization.

Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov (1902-1988) emerged briefly after the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 as the head of the Soviet government and leader of its Communist Party. A quintessential apparatchik whose claim to power rested largely on his devoted service to Stalin, Malenkov was soon outmaneuvered by Nikita Khrushchev and forced to resign his positions. Some historians have credited him with proposing initiatives which were later adopted by Soviet leaders, including the last head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Malenkov was born on January 8, 1902, in the town of Orenburg in the Southern Urals. Although much of his biography is obscure, it is believed he grew up in a reasonably well-off white collar family which found itself dislocated during the revolution and civil war at a time when Georgy Maksimilianovich was an impressionable teenager. In 1918, at the age of 16, he joined the Red Army. He apparently served as a political commissar of some sort in Turkestan. Like others of his generation, he was rewarded after demobilization by being sent to the Bauman Higher Technical School in Moscow, from which he graduated in 1925. His first position thereafter was as a clerk or secretary in the Communist Party's Central Committee apparatus in Moscow.

In this minor but centrally located post Malenkov soon distinguished himself as an able administrator and loyal, even slavish, Stalinist. He is reported to have imitated the increasingly powerful dictator in dress and appearance and in any event became closely identified in Central Committee bureaucracy with Stalin's policies, as opposed to those of others in the party leadership. Largely for these reasons, in all likelihood, Stalin made him his personal secretary in 1934, on the eve of the Great Purges. From this position, Malenkov himself soon amassed enormous power, directing the appointment and removal of personnel and becoming deeply involved in the purge process. Many regarded him as one of Stalin's principal "triggermen." From 1939 until 1953 he served as secretary of the Central Committee. He was also deputy chairman, under Stalin, of the Council of Ministers and made the leading speech at the 19th Party Congress in 1952, shortly before Stalin's death.

Malenkov was not unintelligent. He understood the need for reform as he came to power after Stalin's death in March 1953 and quickly promised an improvement in material conditions. He also took a leading role in arresting Lavrenti Beria, head of the dreaded secret police. The "thaw" of 1954-1955 is largely associated with his name. For all his experience in the party machinery, however, Malenkov could not prevent himself from being edged aside by Nikita Khrushchev. Within weeks of Stalin's death he "requested" to be relieved of the "heavy burden" of first secretary in favor of Khrushchev, retaining his less powerful post as Council of Ministers' chairman, but he had difficulty holding this position as well. In 1955, confessing his "insufficient experience" and his "guilt and responsibility" for administrative failures, particularly in the area of Soviet agriculture, he was demoted to the minor post of minister of hydroelectric stations.

It was Malenkov's close identification with Stalin and the purges which made him a real liability for the Khrushchev regime. After the famous "Secret Speech" in February 1956 in which Khrushchev publicly exposed the "crimes of the Stalin era" for the first time, Malenkov knew his days in office were numbered. In the summer of 1957, consequently, he joined with Molotov, Kaganovich, and others in an abortive effort to drive Khrushchev from power. Denounced as a ringleader of the "anti-Soviet bloc," he was stripped of all important positions and sent to Kazakhstan as head of the Ust-Kamenogorsk hydroelectric station. His plaintive "apologies" for "incorrect thinking" hardly earned him respect. The Soviet Union was liberalizing, and he was a relic of a past many hated or wanted to forget. His heavy-set, pudgy visage (which some regarded at the time of his leadership as the West's most effective anti-Communist propaganda) quickly faded from popular consciousness. His orders as plant director were apparently ignored, leading him to resign his post in humiliation and disgrace. In April 1964 he was ousted from the party. From then on he lived in obscurity, spending time at his Moscow apartment until his death on February 1st, 1988. Some of Malenkov's proposals - such as his statement that war between the Soviet Union and America was not inevitable and that greater emphasis should be placed on increasing production of food and consumer goods, rather than heavy industry - were accepted by Krushchev and Gorbachev

Further Reading

There is no biography of Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov in English. Students might consult one of several general texts, however, to follow his career in the party apparatus, including Leonard Schapiro, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1960); and Wolfgang Leonard, The Kremlin Since Stalin (1962); see also R. W. Petybridge, A History of Postwar Russia (London, 1966), especially chapter 4; and the excellent collection of essays edited by Stephen Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Robert Sharlet, The Soviet Union Since Stalin (1980). As with other Soviet leaders, the best source for Malenkov's public speeches and other writings during his years in power is the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, issued weekly since 1949 and with quarterly and cumulative indexes; Malenkov's obituary was in the February 2nd edition of New York Times.

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(1902 - 1988), prominent Soviet party official.

Georgy Maximilyanovich Malenkov was born in Orenburg on January 13, 1902. In 1919 he joined the Red Army, where he worked in the political administration at various levels during the Russian civil war. In April 1920, he became a member of the Bolshevik Party, and during the following month he married Valentina Alexeyevna Golubtsova, a worker in the Central Committee (CC) apparatus.

Malenkov's career during the 1920s was typical of many during that period. He was a ruthless party official without any clear political views. He studied at the Moscow Higher Technical Institute between 1921 and 1925, during which time he was a member of a commission investigating "Trotskyism" among fellow students. In 1925 he became a technical secretary of the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee.

During the early 1930s he worked in the Moscow party committee as the head of the section for mass agitation, conducting a purge of opposition members. Between 1934 and 1939 he ran the party organization for the Central Committee and reviewed party documents in preparation for the Great Purge beginning in 1936. Malenkov took an active role in various aspects of this purge, supervising particularly harsh actions in Belarus and Armenia in 1937.

In 1937 Malenkov was appointed a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (he was promoted to the Presidium in 1938), and in this same year became the deputy to Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD. By 1939 Malenkov was also a member of the party Central Committee (CC), and shortly he became the head of the administration of party cadres and a CC secretary.

Before the outbreak of the war with Germany, Malenkov became a candidate member of the Politburo. During the war, he supplied planes to the Red Air Force, and he appears to have undertaken his tasks efficiently. Josef Stalin relied on Malenkov increasingly after 1943. In that year Malenkov headed a committee of the Soviet government for the restoration of farms in liberated areas, and after mid-May 1944, he was the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (second only to Stalin himself). From March 18, 1946, Malenkov was a member of the ruling Politburo.

During the ascendancy of Andrei Zhdanov after the war, Malenkov's career briefly declined. After the exposure of a scandal in the aviation industry, he lost both his deputy chairmanship of the government and his role as CC secretary controlling party personnel, in March and May 1946, respectively. Thanks to the intervention of Lavrenty Beria, however, he was able to recover both positions by August. In 1948 he took over the position of ideological secretary of the CC and was also given responsibility for Soviet agriculture, at that time the most backward sector of the Soviet economy.

During the late Stalin period, Malenkov once again played a leading role in new purges, including the Leningrad Affair and the exposure of the "Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee." The aging leader entrusted him to present the main report at the Nineteenth Party Congress (the first party congress in thirteen years). With Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, Malenkov became the chairman of the Council of Ministers (prime minister) and the main party secretary. On March 14, however, the latter position was given to Khrushchev.

Malenkov joined with Khrushchev to overcome a putsch by Beria in 1953, but then a power struggle between the two leaders developed. Malenkov eventually had to make a public confession regarding his failure to revive Soviet agriculture. By February 1955, he was demoted to a deputy chairman of the government and given responsibility over Soviet electric power stations. Malenkov and former old-guard Stalinists Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov resented Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of February 1956. In 1957 the three engineered a majority vote within the Presidium for Khrushchev's removal. Khrushchev, however, was able to reverse the vote in a CC plenum, which saw the defeat of the so-called Antiparty Group. On June 29, Malenkov lost his positions in the Presidium and the Central Committee.

Though he was still relatively young, Malenkov's career was effectively over. He became the director of a hydroelectric power station in Ust-Kamengorsk, and subsequently of a thermal power station in Ekibastuz. In 1961, the Ekibastuz city party committee expelled him from membership, and Malenkov retired on a pension until his death in Moscow on January 14, 1988. He is remembered mainly as a loyal and unprincipled Stalinist with few notable achievements outside of party politics.

Bibliography

Ebon, Martin. (1953). Malenkov: A Biographical Study of Stalin's Successor. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Radzinsky, Edward. (1996). Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Moscow's Secret Archives. New York: Doubleday.

—DAVID R. MARPLES

Malenkov, Georgi Maksimilianovich (gāôr'gē mäksĭmĭlyä'nəvĭch məlyĭnkôf') , 1902–88, Soviet Communist leader. He rose to prominence through the party secretariat and was a trusted aide of Joseph Stalin. In 1946, he became a full member of the politburo and a deputy premier. He succeeded Stalin as premier in Mar., 1953, and was also very briefly first secretary of the Communist party. However, Nikita Khrushchev replaced him as party head. Malenkov's premiership was marked by a conciliatory foreign policy and by the curtailment of the power of the secret police. In Feb., 1955, he was forced to resign, assuming blame for the failure of the government's agricultural policy; he was succeeded by Nikolai Bulganin, whom Khrushchev supported for the post. In 1957, Malenkov was removed from all important posts for his role in the “antiparty faction” opposing Khrushchev. He was expelled from the party in 1961.

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