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Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov [b] (8 January 1902 [O.S. 26 December 1901] [1] – 14 January 1988) [2] was a Soviet politician who briefly succeeded Joseph Stalin as leader of the Soviet Union after his death in March 1953.
Stalin's early policies pushed for rapid industrialisation, nationalisation of private industry [14] and the collectivisation of private plots created under Lenin's New Economic Policy. [15] As leader of the Politburo, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power by 1938 after the Great Purge , a series of campaigns of political murder, repression ...
After Stalin died in March 1953, he was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Georgy Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union. However the central figure in the immediate post-Stalin period was the former head of the state security apparatus, Lavrentiy Beria.
Lenin died on 21 January 1924. Stalin was given the honour of organizing his funeral. Upon Lenin's death, Stalin was officially hailed as his successor as the leader of the ruling Communist Party and of the Soviet Union itself. Against Lenin's wishes, he was given a lavish funeral and his body was embalmed and put on display.
Beria, as first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and an influential Politburo member, saw himself as Stalin's successor, while wider Politburo members had contrasting thoughts on future leadership. On 26 June 1953, Beria was arrested and held in an undisclosed location near Moscow. Accounts of his downfall vary considerably.
In the wake of Lenin's death, a power struggle emerged to become his successor: alongside Stalin was Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky. [204] Stalin saw Trotsky—whom he personally despised [ 205 ] —as the main obstacle to his dominance, [ 206 ] and during Lenin's illness had formed an unofficial ...
Zhdanov was considered Stalin's most likely successor but died before him. Zhdanov joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and quickly rose through the party ranks. A close associate of Stalin, he became a secretary of the Central Committee in 1934, and later that year he was promoted to Leningrad party chief following the assassination of Sergei Kirov.
Stalin used Khrushchev to keep commanders on a tight leash, while the commanders sought to have him influence Stalin. [57] As the Germans advanced, Khrushchev worked with the military to defend and save Kiev. Handicapped by orders from Stalin that under no circumstances should the city be abandoned, the Red Army was soon encircled by the Germans.