During the early 1930s he worked in the Moscow party committee as the head of the section for mass agitation, conducting a purge of opposition members. Between 1934 and 1939 he ran the party organization for the Central Committee and reviewed party documents in preparation for the Great Purge beginning in 1936. Malenkov took an active role in various aspects of this purge, supervising particularly harsh actions in Belarus and Armenia in 1937.
In 1937 Malenkov was appointed a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (he was promoted to the Presidium in 1938), and in this same year became the deputy to Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD. By 1939 Malenkov was also a member of the party Central Committee (CC), and shortly he became the head of the administration of party cadres and a CC secretary.
Before the outbreak of the war with Germany, Malenkov became a candidate member of the Politburo. During the war, he supplied planes to the Red Air Force, and he appears to have undertaken his tasks efficiently. Josef Stalin relied on Malenkov increasingly after 1943. In that year Malenkov headed a committee of the Soviet government for the restoration of farms in liberated areas, and after mid-May 1944, he was the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (second only to Stalin himself). From March 18, 1946, Malenkov was a member of the ruling Politburo.
During the ascendancy of Andrei Zhdanov after the war, Malenkov’s career briefly declined. After the exposure of a scandal in the aviation industry, he lost both his deputy chairmanship of the government and his role as CC secretary controlling party personnel, in March and May 1946, respectively. Thanks to the intervention of Lavrenty Beria, however, he was able to recover both positions by August. In 1948 he took over the position of ideological secretary of the CC and was also given responsibility for Soviet agriculture, at that time the most backward sector of the Soviet economy.
Georgy Malenkov, Soviet prime minister, 1953-1955. COURTESY
OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
During the late Stalin period, Malenkov once again played a leading role in new purges, including the Leningrad Affair and the exposure of the “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.” The aging leader entrusted him to present the main report at the Nineteenth Party Congress (the first party congress in thirteen years). With Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Malenkov became the chairman of the Council of Ministers (prime minister) and the main party secretary. On March 14, however, the latter position was given to Khrushchev.
Malenkov joined with Khrushchev to overcome a putsch by Beria in 1953, but then a power struggle between the two leaders developed. Malenkov eventually had to make a public confession regarding his failure to revive Soviet agriculture. By
MALEVICH, KAZIMIR SEVERINOVICH
February 1955, he was demoted to a deputy chairman of the government and given responsibility over Soviet electric power stations. Malenkov and former old-guard Stalinists Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov resented Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of February 1956. In 1957 the three engineered a majority vote within the Presidium for Khrushchev’s removal. Khrushchev, however, was able to reverse the vote in a CC plenum, which saw the defeat of the so-called Antiparty Group. On June 29, Malenkov lost his positions in the Presidium and the Central Committee.
Though he was still relatively young, Malen-kov’s career was effectively over. He became the director of a hydroelectric power station in Ust-Kamengorsk, and subsequently of a thermal power station in Ekibastuz. In 1961, the Ekibastuz city party committee expelled him from membership, and Malenkov retired on a pension until his death in Moscow on January 14, 1988. He is remembered mainly as a loyal and unprincipled Stalinist with few notable achievements outside of party politics. See also: ANTI-PARTY GROUP; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; LENINGRAD AFFAIR; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ebon, Martin. (1953). Malenkov: A Biographical Study of Stalin’s Successor. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Radzinsky, Edward. (1996). Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Moscow’s Secret Archives. New York: Doubleday.
class. Deviations from that official style were the products of subordinate classes. All art, prior to the rule of the proletariat, therefore, manifested the ideology of some class. But the revolution would bring about the destruction not merely of the bourgeoisie, but of all classes as such. Consequently, the art of the proletarian revolution must be the expression of not merely another style but of absolute, eternal, “supreme” values.
Constructivism was brought into Soviet avant-guard architecture primarily by Vladimir Tatlin and Malevich. Malevich’s “Arkhitektonica,” Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (the “Tatlin Tower”), and El Lissitsky’s “Prouns” shaped in large measure the conceptualizations of the modernist architects as they sought a means to combine painting, sculpture, and architecture. Tatlin’s stress on utilitarianism was challenged by Malevich’s Suprematism, which decried the emphasis of technology in art and argued that artists must search for “supreme” artistic values that would transform the ideology of the people. Malevich thus contrasted the work of engineers, whose creations exhibited simple transitory values, with aesthetic creativity, which he proclaimed produced supreme values. Malevich warned: “If socialism relies on the infallibility of science and technology, a great disappointment is in store for it because it is not granted to scientists to foresee the ‘course of events’ and to create enduring values” (Malevich, p. 36). His “White on White” carried Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion. With the turn against modern art under Josef Stalin, Malevich lost influence and died in poverty and oblivion. See also: ARCHITECTURE; CONSTRUCTIVISM; FUTURISM.
MALEVICH, KAZIMIR SEVERINOVICH
(1878-1935), founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was initially a follower of Impressionism. He was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Cubism and became a member of the Jack of Diamonds group, whose members were the leading exponents of avant-garde art in pre-World War I Russia. According to the Supre-matists, each economic mode of production generated not only a ruling class but also an official artistic style supported by that dominant social
Malevich, Kazimir. (1959) The Non-Objective World, tr. Howard Dearstyne. Chicago: P. Theobald. Milner, John. (1996). Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
A summit meeting of U.S. President George W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took place on December 2-3, 1989, on warships of the two countries anchored at Malta in the Mediterranean. The
meeting, the first between the two leaders, followed the collapse of communist bloc governments in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia (Romania would follow three weeks later). Soviet acceptance of this dramatic change, without intervention or even opposition, dramatically underscored the new outlook in Moscow.
President Bush, who had been reserved and cautious in his assessment of change in the Soviet Union during most of 1989, now sought to extend encouragement to Gorbachev. Most important was the establishment of a confident relationship and dialogue between the two leaders. No treaties or agreements were signed, but Bush did indicate a number of changes in U.S. economic policy toward the Soviet Union to reflect the new developing relationship. Malta thus marked a step in a process of accelerating change.
Two weeks after the Malta summit, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze paid an unprecedented courtesy visit to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters in Brussels. Clearly the Cold War was coming to an end. Indeed, at Malta, Gorbachev declared that “the world is leaving one epoch, the ‘Cold War,’ and entering a new one.”
Some historians have described the Malta Summit as the last summit of the Cold War; others have seen it as the first summit of the new era. In any case, it occurred at a time of rapid transition and reflected the first time when prospects for future cooperation outweighed continuing competition, although elements of both remained. See also: COLD WAR; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
