Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov

Malenkov's position did not harden immediately after the war. Over the "Aviators' Affair", the accusation that defective aircraft had been systematically supplied, he was removed from the Central Committee Secretariat in April-May 1946 and his Politburo standing dropped. He headed the Special Committee on jet technology in 1946-1947 before restoring his place as one of Stalin's principal subordinates in 1948.

His main postwar rival was Andrei Zhdanov. The "Zhdanovshchina" stressed ideological purification against Malenkov's pragmatist faction, which favoured promoting technological experts. Zhdanov sought to reassert Kremlin control over technocrats and provincial party bosses, but the united opposition of Malenkov, the technocrats, the provincial bosses and the key ministries doomed the attempt, and he pivoted to purifying arts and culture instead. His death in 1948 restored Malenkov to Stalin's favour.

The 1953 USNI Proceedings profile independently corroborates this postwar succession struggle. By war's end Malenkov stood just below Zhdanov and Molotov in Stalin's favour, and his drop from fourth place on the 1946 Politburo list to last in 1947 coincided with the struggle against Zhdanov. The same profile records that he was appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee Secretariat in 1947; other sources place him as a candidate member of the Politburo in 1946 and as a Central Committee secretary in 1948. Malenkov became a full Politburo member in 1946 and in 1948 succeeded Zhdanov as Second Secretary, the position that made him the presumptive successor.

Shortly after the war Malenkov also moved against figures regarded as Soviet war heroes, above all Marshal Georgy Zhukov, accusing him of counter-revolutionary behaviour and selfish "Bonapartism"; Zhukov was demoted and posted to a lower command in Odessa. Konstantin Rokossovsky too came under the same pressure. After this attack Malenkov's strength with Stalin increased.

That Malenkov, not Stalin, delivered the Central Committee report at the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952 was the outcome of this preparation; Stalin spoke only a short closing speech on 14 October. The accumulation of these postwar years made him the heir and led to his premiership after Stalin's death.

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.

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.