Dmitri Trofimovich Shepilov

Dmitri Shepilov was a rare scholar among the party leadership. An economist trained in the law faculty of Moscow University, he led the compilation of the political economy textbook; in 1941, though exempt from service, he volunteered for the people's militia and finished the war as a political officer with the rank of major general. After the war he rose through the party's propaganda apparatus and edited Pravda from 1952. That Stalin prized his pen and erudition in the economic discussions of his last years is a central episode of Shepilov's own memoirs.

In June 1956 he succeeded Molotov as Foreign Minister. His first major destination was Cairo. He attended the celebrations marking the completed withdrawal of British forces from the Suez base, conferred with Nasser, and conveyed Soviet willingness to help build the Aswan High Dam, showing an Egypt hemmed in by Western financial blockade that another option existed. Having visited Cairo the year before as editor of Pravda, he was no stranger to the stage. The mark of his short tenure was the turn away from the Europe-centered diplomacy of the Molotov era toward drawing the new states of the decolonizing world into the horizon of Soviet foreign policy.

When the Suez crisis broke in the autumn of 1956 he represented the USSR at the Suez Canal conference in London and defended Egypt's sovereignty. Past that harsh season, in which the Hungarian events and the Suez war overlapped, the ministry passed to Gromyko in February 1957 and Shepilov returned to the Central Committee Secretariat. His term had lasted barely half a year, but the opening to the third world became a constant of Soviet diplomacy for decades after.

On June 18, 1957, a majority of the party Presidium, centered on Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, moved to remove Khrushchev. In four days of Presidium argument Shepilov too sided with the majority, criticizing Khrushchev's arbitrary style and the signs of a new personality cult. But with the help of Zhukov and Serov, provincial Central Committee members were flown to Moscow on military aircraft, and the Central Committee plenum that opened on June 22 reversed the field. The victorious Khrushchev camp fixed on the losers the official designation: "the anti-party group of Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Shepilov who joined them."

The phrase fastened Shepilov's name to history. Unlike the core three he bore no responsibility for the purges of the Stalin era and was no ringleader of the plot, but the single trailing word "joined" gave Russian a standing joke, that Shepilov had the longest surname in Russia, since "AndShepilovWhoJoinedThem" was pronounced as one name. He lost every post and was sent to direct economics research at the Kirghiz Academy of Sciences in Frunze, later returning to Moscow to work in the state archives administration. In 1962 he was expelled from the party altogether.

Here too the distance from the 1930s is unmistakable: no one in the defeated "anti-party group" was arrested or shot. Shepilov passed quiet decades as a researcher among the archives, was readmitted to the party in 1976, and died at ninety in 1995, after the Soviet Union itself was gone. His memoirs appeared in 2001 under the title Neprimknuvshii, "The Man Who Did Not Join", a title that overturned the label he had carried all his life, and the book stands among the most vivid insider testimonies of the late Stalin and Khrushchev leadership.