Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Malenkov
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Georgy Malenkov

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Georgy Malenkov

Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov (8 January 1902 [O.S. 26 December 1901] – 14 January 1988) was a Soviet politician who succeeded Joseph Stalin as Premier and the overall leader of the Soviet Union in March 1953. Shortly thereafter, Malenkov entered into a power struggle with the party's First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, that culminated in his removal from the premiership in 1955 as well as the Central Committee Presidium in 1957.

Georgy Malenkov served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and joined the Communist Party in 1920. Beginning in 1925, he served in the staff of the party's Organizational Bureau (Orgburo), where he was entrusted with overseeing member records. In this role, Malenkov was heavily involved in facilitating Stalin's purges of the party's ranks during the 1930s. By 1939, he became a member of the Central Committee Secretariat. During World War II, Malenkov was appointed to the State Defense Committee where he was charged with overseeing aircraft and missile production. After the war's end, he became a full member of the Politburo in 1946. Later in 1948, Malenkov succeeded Andrei Zhdanov as Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[not verified in body]

Upon Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Malenkov succeeded him as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the highest-ranking Secretary of the Central Committee. On 14 March, his colleagues within the Politburo (then known as the Presidium) forced him to give up his membership in the Secretariat, thereby allowing Nikita Khrushchev to become the party's acting First Secretary. Subsequently, Malenkov contented himself with serving as the Presidium's highest-ranking member and chairman until eventually being eclipsed by Khrushchev as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. After being compelled to leave office as Premier in February 1955, he conspired with other members of the Presidium to remove Khrushchev from the Soviet leadership. When the attempted coup by the so-called "Anti-Party Group" failed in 1957, Malenkov was dismissed from the Presidium and expelled from the party altogether by 1961. He kept a low profile for the rest of his life and died in 1988 of natural causes.

Malenkov was born in Orenburg in the Russian Empire on January 8, 1902. His paternal ancestors were of Macedonian descent. Some of them served as officers in the Russian Imperial Army. His father was a wealthy farmer in Orenburg province. Young Malenkov occasionally helped his father to do business selling the harvest. His mother was a daughter of a blacksmith and a granddaughter of an Orthodox priest.

Malenkov graduated from Orenburg gymnasium just a few months prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In 1920, in Turkestan, Malenkov started living together with Soviet scientist Valeriya Golubtsova (15 May 1901 – 1 October 1987), daughter of Aleksei Golubtsov, former State Councilor of the Russian Empire in Nizhny Novgorod and dean of the Imperial Cadet School. Golubtsova and Malenkov never officially registered their union and remained unregistered partners for the rest of their lives. She had a direct connection to Vladimir Lenin through her mother; one of the "Nevzorov sisters" who were apprentices of Lenin and studied together with him for years, long before the Revolution. This connection helped both Golubtsova and Malenkov in their communist career. Later Golubtsova was the director of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, a centre for nuclear power research in USSR.

In 1918, Malenkov joined the Red Army as a volunteer and fought alongside the Communists against White Russian forces in the Civil War. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1920 and worked as a political commissar on a propaganda train in Turkestan during the Civil War.

After the Russian civil war, Malenkov quickly built himself a reputation of a tough communist Bolshevik. He was promoted in the Communist party ranks and was appointed Communist secretary at the military-based Moscow Higher Technical School in the 1920s. Russian sources state that, rather than continuing with his studies, Malenkov took a career of a Soviet politician. His university degree was never completed, and his records have been indefinitely classified. Around this time, Malenkov forged a close friendship with Vyacheslav Malyshev, who later became chief of the Soviet nuclear program alongside Igor Kurchatov.[citation needed]

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