The first loser of the age when losers stopped dying
October 1952, the Nineteenth Party Congress. Stalin sat silent; from the rostrum it was Malenkov who delivered the Central Committee report. The hall stirred. Everyone read the signal.
Keeper of Stalin’s paperwork and first in the line of succession. As premier after Stalin’s death he was the first leader to talk of consumer goods and lower taxes. But Khrushchev held the party machine, and in 1957 the “Anti-Party Group” label sent him to manage a power station in Kazakhstan. Demotion instead of a bullet: first beneficiary of the new rule, he lived another thirty years.
Career Timeline
- 1939–45Cadres in the Secretariat; aircraft production on the wartime GKO
- 1953.3–55Premier: consumer goods, lower taxes, “no victors in nuclear war”
- 1957Falls as ringleader of the Anti-Party Group
- 1957–68Manages the Ust-Kamenogorsk power station in Kazakhstan
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarGKO member in charge of aircraft production
- 1949–1950The Leningrad AffairPurge driverA rival of the Zhdanov network, he drove the case forward.
- 1952–1953The Doctors’ PlotParty to the reversalAs part of the new leadership after Stalin, he took part in ending the campaign.
- 1950–1953The Korean WarChairman of the USSR Council of Ministers who, after Stalin's death, decided to end the warOn 19 March 1953, just two weeks after Stalin died, he chaired the Council of Ministers resolution that approved draft letters to Mao and Kim Il Sung directing a shift to active negotiation.
- 1953The Fall of BeriaChair of the PresidiumAs head of government, he chaired the session that arrested Beria.
- 1955The Founding of the Warsaw PactSoviet Premier, 1953–1955Malenkov publicly warned that nuclear war would destroy civilization, and tested some détente against Molotov's hard line of trying to dissolve NATO. His February 1955 ouster ended that opening.
- 1956.02The Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret SpeechAgainst the demotionOne of the leaders whose signatures were on the repression documents, he opposed making the criticism public.
- 1957The Anti-Party GroupAnti-Party GroupAfter defeat he was demoted to manage a power station in Kazakhstan.
August 8, 1953: a New Course from the Supreme Soviet Rostrum
Georgy Malenkov, born in Orenburg, served as a political worker in the civil war and then climbed the party apparatus quietly, the very type of the machine cadre. In the 1930s he headed the Central Committee's Department of Leading Party Organs (ORPO), master of the personnel files of the country's cadres, and from that position was also involved in the regional purges of the Great Terror. During the war he sat on the State Defense Committee with responsibility for aircraft production, and after it he was one of the organizers of the Leningrad affair of 1949. At the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952 it was Malenkov, not Stalin, who delivered the Central Committee report: a signal of the succession.
When Stalin died in March 1953, Malenkov became chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, head of the government. On August 8 that year, from the rostrum of the Supreme Soviet, he gave a speech that turned the direction of the postwar economy: weight would shift from heavy industry alone toward consumer goods, the agricultural tax would be cut sharply, procurement prices paid to the kolkhozes raised, and arrears written off. The countryside remembered the speech; peasants were heard to say that when Malenkov came, they ate pancakes.
In March 1954 he became the first Soviet leader to state publicly that a world war in the nuclear age would mean "the destruction of world civilization". Criticized by his colleagues as an ideological error, the formula soon had to be softened, but it anticipated the understanding later codified as peaceful coexistence. The brief Malenkov era shows that the change of course was already being prepared before de-Stalinization had a name.
June 1957: the "Anti-Party Group" and a Power Station in Kazakhstan
Malenkov's premiership did not last two full years. As Khrushchev consolidated his hold on the party apparatus, in February 1955 Malenkov resigned the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers with a self-criticism over agricultural policy, demoted to deputy premier and minister for power stations. In June 1957, together with Molotov and Kaganovich, he assembled a majority of the Presidium and moved to remove Khrushchev. But Khrushchev succeeded in carrying the question to a full Central Committee plenum, and as members flown in on military aircraft arranged by Zhukov assembled, the balance reversed. Malenkov's group was branded the "Anti-Party Group" and expelled from the leadership.
What followed tells the historical meaning of the episode. The defeated were not shot. Malenkov was sent to Kazakhstan to direct the Ust-Kamenogorsk hydroelectric station and then the Ekibastuz thermal power plant. A man who had been head of government of a superpower spent the 1960s managing provincial power stations; expelled from the party in 1961, he returned to Moscow, lived out a quiet pensioner's life, and died in January 1988.
Malenkov's life compresses the change in the grammar of Soviet politics after Stalin. He was himself a man of the apparatus implicated in the Great Terror and the Leningrad affair, yet the power struggle he lost in 1957 ended in demotion, not execution. His brief experiment with consumer goods and peace left heirs in the Khrushchev era and, further on, in the economic debates of the reform years.