1975–
Historian who advanced an alternative theory that corruption among Leningrad leaders provoked the late-Stalinist purge
Sushkov argued the 'Leningrad Affair' was driven not by factional rivalry but by Leningrad's leaders showing how the secret-ballot system could be voided.
Andrei Sushkov is a Russian historian of the Soviet party-state power system and the administrative practices of regional nomenklatura. Drawing on primary sources from archives in the Urals, St. Petersburg, Karelia, and other regions, he advanced an alternative interpretation of the 'Leningrad Affair': the purge was provoked not only by elite power struggles but by widespread corruption and the private appropriation of state resources among Leningrad's leaders. His 2018 monograph 'The Leningrad Affair': A General Purge of the 'Cradle of the Revolution' is regarded as the most systematic treatment of the subject, reshaping a key debate in postwar Stalinist political history.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1993–1998Student, History Faculty, Nizhny Tagil State Pedagogical Institute
- 1998–2001Doctoral student, Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of RAS
- 2003Candidate of Historical Sciences (dissertation: Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, 1957–1964)
- 2003–2004Senior lecturer, Nizhny Tagil State Social-Pedagogical Academy
- 2004–2006Researcher, Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of RAS
- 2007–현재Senior researcher, Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of RAS
Related historical events
Studying the Urals nomenklatura and the region's 'little Stalins'
A second research axis in Sushkov's work is the everyday life and administrative practices of the Urals party-state nomenklatura. He took the 'political everyday life' and managerial practices of the Soviet Urals party officialdom as his object, and consolidated the results in his 2019 book Comrade Kabakov's Empire: The Urals Party Nomenklatura in the 1930s.
The study centres on Ivan Kabakov, who headed Sverdlovsk oblast from 1929 to 1937, and his circle. Drawing on regional archival documents, Sushkov describes how Kabakov publicly backed party policy while in practice filling key posts through kinship and local ties, cultivating a personal cult around himself, systematising patron-client relations, and privately appropriating party and state property. Manor houses and banquets, a privileged system of benefits, and the laundering of funds through 'black cash boxes', front companies and accounts are offered as examples. Kononenko highlighted as the book's contribution that it treats the regional-level cadre purge, the so-called 'cadre revolution' of 1937-1938, which had remained in the shadow of the 'Great Terror'.
In Sushkov's reading, the corruption and self-cults of local party bosses were not deviations unrelated to the Stalinist system but rather the condition that brought them into conflict with the centre. He holds that the abuses of the local 'little Stalins' spread by the mid-1930s to a degree that threatened the state's existence, and that this is why the regional elite was purged on a mass scale. Kononenko confirms that such conditions were a general tendency observed in many regions, not a Sverdlovsk peculiarity.
This perspective belongs to the same line of inquiry as his work on the Leningrad Affair: analysing the administrative practices of a corrupt regional leadership as the background to repression. The interpretation is contested, however, given constraints on archival access and the nature of the records, and Sushkov himself acknowledges in his preface that physical coercion was applied to the accused, leaving open the possibility that parts of the interrogation records are false confessions.