Mikhail Suslov
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Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov (Russian: Михаил Андреевич Суслов; November 21, 1902 - January 25, 1982) was a Soviet statesman and ideologist, and a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - having joined the party in 1921.
Mikhail Suslov was born in the village of Shakhovskoye in the Khvalynsk district of the Saratov oblast (now the Pavlovsk region of the Ulyanov oblast).
At age 16 Suslov joined the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and became an active member of the local organization. In 1918 he worked for the Poverty Relief Committee established in his village. He joined the Party in 1921, aged 19. He studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute and the Economics Institute of the Red Professors, and taught at Moscow State University and at the Industrial Academy.
In 1931 he abandoned teaching in favour of the party apparatus. He became an inspector on the Central Control Commission of the All-Union communist party and on the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. His main task here was to adjudicate on large numbers of ‘personal cases’, breaches of discipline and appeals against expulsion from the party. In 1933–4 Suslov directed a commission charged with purging the party in the Ural and Chernigov provinces. The purge was organized by Lazar Kaganovich who was head of the Central Control Commission in the early 1930's and who never failed to take note of a conscientious worker in his commission. Suslov’s role in the repressive campaigns of 1937 and 1938 is undocumented though it is clear that these campaigns, which wiped out most of the corps of party activists, opened up the way for his rapid advancement. In 1939 he became First secretary of the Stavropol Party Committee and a member of the CPSU Central Auditing Commission. He was promoted to full member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1941, bypassing candidate membership.
During World War II, he supervised the deportations of Chechens and other Muslim minorities from the Caucasus. In 1944-1946, he chaired the Central Committee Bureau for Lithuanian Affairs. Sent to reimpose Soviet rule on Lithuania after the war, he sent whole villages to prison camps in Siberia. A widely disseminated rumor has it that after the Fourth Plenum of the Communist Party of Lithuania Suslov told a select group of like-minded individuals: Lithuania will be without Lithuanians.[citation needed]
In part because of his ruthlessness in Lithuania, in 1946 Stalin gave him a seat on the Orgburo and put him to work in the Central Committee apparatus; by 1947 he was elevated to the Party Secretariat, a body that he would serve on for the rest of his life. He gained responsibility for ideology following the death of Andrei Zhdanov in 1948, and from 1949 to 1951 he was editor-in-chief of the central Party daily Pravda.
Promoted to the Politburo (at that time called Presidium) in 1952 following the 19th Congress of the CPSU, he suffered a temporary reversal when Stalin died and was excluded from the Presidium in 1953. However, he began to recover his authority when he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Soviet of the Union in 1954. In 1955 he was again elected full member of the Presidium, bypassing the customary candidate membership.
In June 1957, Suslov backed Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev during his struggle with the "Anti-Party Group" led by Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Dmitry Shepilov. The following October he accused Defense Minister Georgy Zhukov of "Bonapartism" at the Central Committee plenum that removed him from all Party and government posts. The removal of the fiercely independent Zhukov had the effect of firmly subordinating the armed forces to Party control.
Suslov later played the pivotal role in the coup that removed Khrushchev and installed Leonid Brezhnev in October 1964. It is because of this that he is sometimes referred to as the Grey Eminence. He was in charge of Party ideology for much of his time in the Secretariat. His death is viewed by some as starting the battle to succeed Brezhnev, in which Yuri Andropov, who secured Suslov's ideology brief, sidelined Andrei Kirilenko and Konstantin Chernenko.
Suslov was the political patron of both Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as lesser known Communist officials Boris Ponomarev and Aleksei Yepishev.
At one Kremlin reception he placed tables between himself and foreign diplomats in order to stay away from them.
Suslov lived in 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, Moscow at the same building of Brezhnev and Andropov and also had a Gosdacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west moscow which named Sosnovka-1 stretched over 11.5 hectares on the Moskva River with a private beach. He had a wife, Yelizaveta Alexeyevna (d. 1972) and twin children that were born in 1929: son named Revolii and daughter named Maya, historian, lives in Austria since 1990.
Suslov died on January 25, 1982 after suffering a major stroke, that reportedly followed a heated discussion with an individual who was trying to cover up Brezhnev family scandals. He was honoured with a major state funeral and was buried next to Stalin at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
