The Russian dictator Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, his successor Georgy Malenkov was a child of Macedonian immigrants – the Malenkov family.
As a follower of Stalin in 1937 he participated in the “purges” of Belarus and Armenia and in 1942 he was responsible for the air defense of Stalingrad.
After Stalin’s death in 1953 he became Prime Minister, reformed agriculture and pursued a relatively mild course towards the West, but was defeated in the 1955 power struggle with Bulganin and Khrushchev.
In 1961 he was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), but retained his post as power plant director in Kazakhstan.
In an obituary for Malenkow, published by Spiegel on February 8, 1988, the German medium described Malenkow as a “desk mass murderer and later a friend of the Germans”.
Georgi Maximilianowitsch Malenkov, or in short: Georgy Malenkov
Georgi Maximilianowitsch Malenkov (Russian: Георгий Максимилианович Маленков, transliteration: Georgij Maksimilianovič Malenkov, English short form: Georgy Malenkov) born on December 26, 1901; passed on January 14, 1988 in Moscow, was a Soviet politician and from 1953 to 1955 the Chairman of the Council of Government (Prime Minister) of the USSR.
Malenkov was born in Orenburg in the Russian Empire. His paternal ancestors were Macedonians from the Ohrid area who fled from the Vilayet Manastir during the Ottoman occupation of Macedonia. The family name was Malenkov.
Some of his ancestors served as officers in the Russian Imperial Army. His father was a wealthy farmer in the Orenburg province. The young Malenkov occasionally helped his father sell the harvest. His mother was the daughter of a blacksmith and the granddaughter of an Orthodox priest.
Malenkov graduated from the Orenburg high school just a few months before the Russian Revolution of 1917 and in 1918 volunteered in the Red Army at the age of 18 to fight with the communists against the armed forces of the White Movement in the Russian civil war. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1920. He worked as a political commissar in a propaganda train in Turkestan during the civil war, where he broke the resistance of the Muslims.
He then studied electrical engineering at the Moscow Technical University, reported Trotskyist fellow students as a member of a review commission, and married the Stalinist functionary Valeryi Golubtsova, who urged him to join the party apparatus. Golubtsova later became the director of the Electrotechnical Institute herself. They had three children, a daughter (Valentina) and two sons (Andrej and Georgij)
Member of the State Defense Committee
Malenkov got into the personnel department of the Central Committee. In 1934 he became their boss when his superior Nikolai Jeschow transferred to party control and later to the head of the secret police. In 1939 Malenkov himself became the Central Committee secretary.
With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Malenkov became a member of the State Defense Committee. He took part in the work of many commissions established on an ad hoc basis. Among other things, he traveled to Stalingrad in August 1942 to inspect the city’s defense.
His most important area of responsibility, however, was the supervision of the Soviet fighter aircraft construction. For his achievements in this area, he was awarded the prestigious Soviet medal “Hero of Socialist Labor” in 1943.
Anecdote: In Stalingrad he accused an aviator major of having “forgotten to fight” – it was none other than Stalin’s son Vasily, who was 21 years old at the time. “In the last fight none of the 25 airmen in your regiment shot down a single German. How are we supposed to understand that?” Malenkov is said to have asked reproachfully.
After the war, Malenkov headed the committee for the dismantling of the German economy in the former Soviet Zone. But his work was criticized by rivals within the party as unsatisfactory and the committee was soon dissolved.
Also after the Second World War, Malenkov became a full member of the Soviet Politburo and Vice of Prime Minister Stalin. Apparently he liked him more and more. At his last party congress in 1952, Stalin gave him the main speech, so Malenkov was de facto named as his successor.
Stalin died in the following spring, Malenkov made the first funeral speech. His fellow leaders handed him over to Stalin’s position of power in the government and elected him Prime Minister of the Soviet Union.
Anecdote: US Ambassador Charles Bohlen found Malenkov sympathetic because he “stood out from other Soviet leaders because he did not drink so much”.
Malenkov died on January 14, 1988, his body was buried far from the Kremlin wall in an unknown cemetery according to the Christian rite.
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