Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin

Bulganin's ascent was a product of the terror. In July 1937 he was appointed Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR right after the arrest of the previous incumbent, Daniil Sulimov, and at the October plenum that year he was moved from candidate to full member of the Central Committee. English Wikipedia characterises him as 'a loyal Stalinist' who rose through the Soviet hierarchy during Stalin's purges and was promoted rapidly as other leaders fell victim to the Great Purge of 1937-1938. His earlier Moscow rise belongs to the same frame: in the summer of 1918 in Nizhny Novgorod he worked with Lazar Kaganovich, the local communist leader, in imposing the Red Terror, worked with him again in Turkestan in 1920, and became Moscow City Soviet chairman in 1931 soon after Kaganovich was put in charge of the Moscow party organisation. In September 1938 he became Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and head of Gosbank.

His wartime assignment is read the same way. According to English Wikipedia, his role was to ensure that none of the genuine wartime commanders, particularly Marshal Zhukov, became powerful enough to threaten Stalin, and his first posting was as chief political commissar on the Western Front under Marshal Timoshenko. On 3 March 1947 a civilian political figure who had never commanded troops was appointed Minister of the Armed Forces, an appointment connected with Stalin's wish to keep control of the army after the war and to avoid the strengthening of popular wartime commanders.

The Leningrad Affair is the case in which he took part directly in Politburo-level interrogation. In the late-1940s to early-1950s trials against party and state leaders connected with Leningrad, the accused were charged with forming an 'enemy group' inside the party, with wrecking and subversive work and with corruption. Central figures included Central Committee secretary Aleksei Kuznetsov, Gosplan chairman Nikolai Voznesensky, RSFSR premier Mikhail Rodionov and Leningrad party chief Pyotr Popkov; although the death penalty had been abolished in 1947, they were sentenced to death on 29-30 September 1950 and shot immediately. Smirtyukov relates that Central Committee staff and Politburo members performed the interrogators' role when the Leningrad leaders were arrested, and that Bulganin himself had to interrogate Aleksandr Voznesensky, brother of Gosplan chairman N. A. Voznesensky. In Bulganin's own words, Voznesensky rushed at him shouting that he was innocent and that Stalin would now learn the truth, and Bulganin answered by kicking him and saying 'Tambovsky volk tebe tovarishch!' ('the Tambov wolf is your comrade'). Bulganin explained that he knew Beria and Malenkov were sitting in the darkness in the corner of the room watching everything, and that had he not struck Voznesensky he would have found himself in the neighbouring cell. Aleksandr Alekseevich Voznesensky (5 March 1898 - 28 October 1950), an economist, rector of Leningrad State University from 1941 to 1947 and RSFSR Minister of Education from 1948 to 1949, was arrested on 19 August 1949 and shot on 28 October 1950; he was rehabilitated on 14 May 1954, and after his execution members of his family were repressed, including his 84-year-old mother. In 1954 the convicted were rehabilitated and the charges against them were declared fictitious, with responsibility for their prosecution placed on MGB minister Viktor Abakumov. Historians have suggested possible causes including their behind-the-scenes confrontation with the Malenkov-Beria group, the suppression of an internal 'Russian party', and real corruption in the Leningrad leadership; because the main document arrays remain closed, no full scholarly study of the case's causes and course has yet been made.

The Zhukov affair is the third strand. Smirtyukov, asked directly whether Bulganin's respectful postwar relations with Zhukov spared him, states that this did not prevent Bulganin from taking part in the harassment of Zhukov after the war, because he as usual without objection carried out the leadership's will. Smirtyukov describes how Bulganin, while Stalin was withdrawing from day-to-day management, carried out the instructions of Beria and Malenkov and did much harm out of fear of that pair. The same witness explains that Bulganin presided with ease over institutions as different as Gosbank and the Ministry of Defence mainly because he transmitted to subordinates Stalin's instructions embodied in Politburo decisions and then monitored their strict execution. Smirtyukov's judgement is that Bulganin's role on the political scene was that of an unprotesting executor who, having played it, turned out to be needed by no one. This is one participant's assessment, set beside the CIA-based and Sudoplatov portraits already in the record.

After Stalin's death, Bulganin formed a duo with Khrushchev, known as 'B&K'. Elevated to Chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1955 after Malenkov's ouster, Bulganin became the face of Thaw-era Soviet diplomacy, touring Yugoslavia, India and Britain alongside Khrushchev. But in June 1957, when Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich attempted to remove Khrushchev in the 'Anti-Party Group' crisis, Bulganin tilted toward the plotters. Khrushchev, with Marshal Zhukov's help, convened the Central Committee and reversed his defeat; Bulganin was forced to confess his betrayal publicly. He held on for a time, but the relationship broke irreparably after a late-1957 rally where Bulganin, returning from a Thailand visit, received louder applause than Khrushchev. In March 1958 Bulganin was dismissed as premier, with Khrushchev taking the post himself. Demoted first to head Gosbank, then exiled to chair the Stavropol Economic Council, Bulganin was stripped of his Marshal's rank in November 1958 and reduced to colonel-general. He retired on a pension in 1960 and lived out a lonely old age in Moscow.