Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov

At the end of the 17th Party Congress in February 1934 Zhdanov was transferred to Moscow as a Central Committee secretary responsible for ideology, and in August 1934 he gave the opening address to the first Soviet Writers' Congress, repeating Stalin's line that writers are 'engineers of human souls' and declaring that Soviet literature is tendentious and class literature. After Sergei Kirov's assassination in December 1934 he succeeded Kirov as first secretary of the Leningrad provincial party, holding the post until January 1945, and was co-opted as a candidate member of the Politburo. Early in 1935 he and the head of the Leningrad NKVD, Leonid Zakovsky, organized the deportation of 11,702 so-called 'Leningrad aristocrats', people who had belonged to the nobility or the middle class before the revolution, and hunted current or former party members suspected of having supported opposition figures such as Trotsky or Zinoviev. In May 1937 he called Leningrad party leaders together to tell them that the provincial party's long-time second secretary, Mikhail Chudov, and the former mayor of Leningrad, Ivan Kodatsky, had been arrested; when the Old Bolshevik Dora Lazurkina went up to him afterwards to vouch for Kodatsky, Zhdanov warned her that such talk 'will end badly for you'. She was arrested and survived 17 years in the gulag.

J. Arch Getty describes Zhdanov as a key figure in the Great Purge whose encouragement of rank-and-file mobilization helped create momentum for the Great Terror. Though somewhat less active than Molotov, Stalin, Kaganovich and Voroshilov, he was a major perpetrator and personally approved 176 documented execution lists. Russian-language accounts likewise record that he became one of the Politburo members who countersigned execution lists during the Great Terror and that in autumn 1937 he was an initiator and driver of the purges. He had earlier sent a telegram to the Central Committee on the need to replace Yagoda as NKVD chief with Yezhov, and on a holiday with Stalin in August 1936 he co-signed the telegram that brought about Yagoda's dismissal; Yagoda was accused among other things of having impeded Zhdanov and Zakovsky's purge of the Leningrad party organization.

In September 1938 Zhdanov was appointed head of the reorganized Central Committee Directorate for Propaganda and Agitation, which brought all branches of the news media and arts under centralized party control, and his rise coincided with the fall of Nikolai Yezhov. At the 18th Party Congress in March 1939 he proposed abolishing mass party purges, noted that 'other means apart from repression' could be used to enforce state and labour discipline, and declared that the purges had been co-opted by 'hostile elements' to 'persecute and ruin honest people'; he was promoted to full Politburo membership at the Congress's close. Official accounting for the repressions he had helped direct came only with perestroika: in January 1989 the CPSU Central Committee resolution 'On the repeal of legal acts connected with perpetuating the memory of A. A. Zhdanov' stated that he 'was one of the organizers of the mass repressions of the 1930s-1940s against innocent Soviet citizens' and 'bears responsibility for the criminal actions and violations of socialist legality committed in that period', after which his name was removed from cities, universities and enterprises. The phase's consequences extended beyond his death: the Leningrad Affair of 1949-1950 was a purge fabricated by Stalin targeting the Leningrad leaders, Zhdanov's former allies Kuznetsov and Voznesensky among them, who had been feted as heroes after the siege. Over two thousand people were arrested and six main defendants, including Kuznetsov, Voznesensky, Popkov and Rodionov, were executed on 1 October 1950. In June 1948 Zhdanov was sent to the Cominform meeting in Bucharest, where he took a more restrained line toward Yugoslavia than his rival Malenkov, angering Stalin, who removed him from his posts and replaced him with Malenkov. He died on 31 August 1948; Russian-language sources place the death at the CC sanatorium at Valdai in Novgorod oblast, while English sources place it in Moscow.

In August 1946, Zhdanov drove the Central Committee decree on the Leningrad literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad and delivered the keynote speech himself. He branded Mikhail Zoshchenko 'scum of literature' (подонок литературы) and declared Anna Akhmatova's lyric poetry 'completely distant from the people,' publicly denouncing her as 'half nun, half harlot.' He simultaneously condemned Silver Age writers (Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, Gippius, and Sologub) as 'reactionary obscurantism and renegadism in politics and art.' In 1947 he directed the philosophical discussion that attacked Alexandrov's History of Western European Philosophy, and in early 1948 the campaign extended to music, targeting Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian for 'formalism.' This cascade of purges entered Soviet cultural history under the name Zhdanovshchina (ждановщина). George Orwell remarked: 'If in ten years we are grovelling before someone like Zhdanov, it will mean that is exactly what we deserve.'

Zhdanov's two-camps doctrine presented postwar world politics as a conflict between an imperialist and anti-democratic camp led by the United States and an anti-imperialist and democratic camp led by the Soviet Union. At the September 1947 conference of European communist parties in Szklarska Poręba, he advanced this framework, defined the Marshall Plan as an instrument for expanding American monopoly-capital influence, and called for closer international cooperation among communist parties. The Cominform, founded as a result of the conference, replaced the wartime alliance as a mechanism for information exchange and political coordination among European communist parties, linking socialist construction in Eastern Europe to a Soviet-centered international line. The doctrine treated imperialist pressure and the postwar redistribution of power in class terms, but it also compressed the complexity of international politics and the distinct conditions of each communist party into a binary confrontation. Zhdanov's role was therefore less that of a military commander than an organizer who fused party ideology and international politics into a single postwar strategy.