Georgi Malenkov

Biography

Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov (8 January 1902 [O.S. 26 December 1901] – 14 January 1988) was a Soviet politician who succeeded Joseph Stalin as Premier and the overall leader of the Soviet Union in March 1953. Shortly thereafter, Malenkov entered into a power struggle with the party's First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, that culminated in his removal from the premiership in 1955 as well as the Central Committee Presidium in 1957. Georgy Malenkov served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and joined the Communist Party in 1920. Beginning in 1925, he served in the staff of the party's Organizational Bureau (Orgburo), where he was entrusted with overseeing member records. In this role, Malenkov was heavily involved in facilitating Stalin's purges of the party's ranks during the 1930s. By 1939, he became a member of the Central Committee Secretariat. During World War II, Malenkov was appointed to the State Defense Committee where he was charged with overseeing aircraft and missile production. After the war's end, he became a full member of the Politburo in 1946. Later in 1948, Malenkov succeeded Andrei Zhdanov as Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Upon Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Malenkov succeeded him as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the highest-ranking Secretary of the Central Committee. On 14 March, his colleagues within the Politburo (then known as the Presidium) forced him to give up his membership in the Secretariat, thereby allowing Nikita Khrushchev to become the party's acting First Secretary. Subsequently, Malenkov contented himself with serving as the Presidium's highest-ranking member and chairman until eventually being eclipsed by Khrushchev as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. After being compelled to leave office as Premier in February 1955, he conspired with other members of the Presidium to remove Khrushchev from the Soviet leadership. When the attempted coup by the so-called "Anti-Party Group" failed in 1957, Malenkov was dismissed from the Presidium and expelled from the party altogether by 1961. He kept a low profile for the rest of his life and died in 1988 of natural causes.