Georgy Malenkov

Biography

Georgy Malenkov was born in Orenburg in 1902. He volunteered for the Red Army in 1918, joined the Communist Party in 1920 and served as a political commissar during the Civil War. In the 1920s he did party work at the Moscow Higher Technical School, where he never finished his degree, and from 1925 he worked on the staff of the Central Committee's Orgburo, keeping the party's membership records.

That post tied him closely to Stalin. He took a direct part in the purges of the 1930s, travelling to several republics and regions to remove local party cadres, and in 1939 he became head of the party's personnel directorate and a Central Committee secretary. During the Second World War he sat on the State Defence Committee, where he oversaw aircraft production, and he served as a deputy premier. He became a full Politburo member in 1946 and, after Andrei Zhdanov's death in 1948, the party's second secretary. In 1949 he led the purge of the Leningrad party leadership.

When Stalin died in March 1953, Malenkov succeeded him as chairman of the Council of Ministers, but within days his colleagues forced him to give up the party secretariat to Nikita Khrushchev. He joined in the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria that June, argued for more consumer goods and for peaceful coexistence with the West, but was forced to resign as premier in February 1955, staying on as a deputy premier.

In June 1957 he joined Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich in a failed attempt to remove Khrushchev, after which the 'Anti-Party Group' was expelled from the leadership. He was sent to run a hydroelectric plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk and was expelled from the party in 1961. In later life he turned to the Orthodox Church. He died in Moscow in 1988.