Mikhail Suslov
Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov (Russian: Михаил Андреевич Суслов; November 21, 1902 - January 26, 1982) was a Soviet politician and ideologist, and a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - having joined the party in 1921.
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 became a member of control commissions that supervised Stalinist purges in the Urals and the Ukraine. 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 All-Union 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 narrow group of like-minded individuals: Lithuania will be without Lithuanians.
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.
He was later a prime mover behind the coup that removed Khrushchev and installed Leonid Brezhnev in October 1964. 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.
A curious rumor circulated about Suslov: presumably, when Stalin was nervous, he would call Suslov in his office so he could relax by kicking Suslov's buttocks. Considered the power behind the throne during much of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, he is alternatively called the "Grey Eminence"[1] or a "Communist Warwick"[2] by historians.
Suslov was the political patron of both Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as lesser known Communist officials Boris Ponomarev and Aleksei Yepishev.
He is buried next to Stalin at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.