Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov

Mikhail Suslov was born in 1902 to a poor peasant family in Saratov province, joined the party in 1921, and passed through a workers' preparatory faculty (rabfak), the Plekhanov economics institute, and the economics section of the Institute of Red Professors, becoming one of the first generation of theoretical cadres the party raised for itself. In the 1930s he worked in the party control organs and in the regional party organizations of Rostov and Stavropol, a career that includes the responsibility implied by regional party leadership in the purge years. During the war he directed the partisan movement in the Stavropol region, and from 1944 he headed the Central Committee's special bureau for Lithuania.

In 1947 he was elected a Secretary of the Central Committee and held the post for thirty-five years, until the day he died, doubling as editor-in-chief of Pravda and overseeing Cominform affairs, in charge of the ideological sector in Stalin's last years. It was Suslov who delivered the report "The Defense of Peace and the Struggle Against the Warmongers" at the 1949 Cominform meeting. Under Khrushchev as under Brezhnev he remained the court of final appeal on Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and the "second secretary" managing propaganda, culture, education, and the international communist movement. People called him the grey cardinal.

Measured against his decades beside the summit of power, his life was strikingly austere. The out-of-fashion suits and galoshes, the official car ordered to drive below the speed limit, the habit of sending gifts back: these became legends of official Moscow. He built no personality cult, no fortune, no faction, and rarely spoke without a prepared text. In censorship and dissident affairs his hand was unbending, and that severity exacted a price from the vitality of Soviet culture. But to him it was not self-interest; it was the execution of a creed. He was the ascetic embodiment of orthodoxy, a man who gave his entire life to guarding the institutions the revolution had made.

In October 1964 Khrushchev, on holiday by the Black Sea, was summoned back to Moscow. His Presidium colleagues criticized his improvised governance, the agricultural failures, the chaos of his administrative reorganizations, and his growing cult point by point, and demanded his resignation; at the Central Committee plenum on October 14 the man entrusted with the official report ratifying the decision was Suslov. In his characteristically dry tone he read out the catalogue of Khrushchev's errors. The very man who had saved Khrushchev during the "Anti-Party Group" affair of 1957 now executed his exit.

The manner of it deserves attention. The October 1964 change of leadership took place without arrests or blood, through the procedures of the party statute, and Khrushchev retired with a pension and a dacha. That a fallen leader withdrew with his life and liberty intact was itself a measure of how far Soviet politics had traveled from the practices of the 1930s. Suslov did not want the top position for himself and threw his weight behind Brezhnev for the General Secretaryship. All his life he preferred the power of the second seat, and precisely for that reason he survived for decades as an arbiter who threatened no faction.

Throughout the Brezhnev era Suslov guarded the system's equilibrium as gatekeeper of ideology and cadres. When he died on January 25, 1982, that equilibrium itself began to shift. Into the vacant ideology secretaryship moved Andropov from the KGB that May, a transfer that effectively settled the succession after Brezhnev. The death of the grey cardinal was the signal that the door of change he had spent a lifetime sealing was coming open.