an ideological crackdown in August 1946, denouncing deviations by some literary journals and harshly assailing prominent writers. During Zhdanov’s campaign, Malenkov lost his leadership posts and fell into Stalin’s disfavor, while Zhdanov became viewed as Stalin’s most likely successor.
Zhdanov’s role in the harsh postwar ideological crackdown earned him the reputation of the regime’s leading hardliner; the wave of persecution of literary and cultural figures became known as the Zhdanovshchina. In June 1947 Zhdanov denounced ideological errors and softness toward the West in Soviet philosophy. At a September 1947 conference of foreign communist parties, Zhdanov laid out the thesis that the world was divided into two camps: imperialist (Western) and democratic (Soviet). Zhdanov’s pronouncements fostered development of the Cold War and an assertion of basic hostility between Soviet and Western ideas.
However, the worst excesses of the Zhdanovshchina ironically were committed after Zhdanov’s death and were directed against Zhdanov’s allies. Zhdanov refused to back biologist Trofim Ly-senko’s attacks on modern genetics, and Zhdanov’s son, who was head of the Central Committee’s Science Department, actually denounced Lysenko’s ideas in April 1948 and was later forced to recant publicly. In July 1948 Zhdanov was sent off for an extended vacation, during which he died on August 31, 1948. Malenkov returned to power in mid-1948, and, as Zhdanov was dying in August 1948, Lysenko was given free reign in science and
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initiated the condemnation of genetics and other allegedly pro-Western scientific ideas. In 1949 a campaign against Jews as cosmopolitans began. Also in 1949 Zhdanov’s proteges in Leningrad were purged (the Leningrad Case), many of them eventually executed. Zhdanov himself was spared public disgrace, unlike his proteges and his Leningrad party organization, which was cast into disfavor for years. Zhdanov continued to be treated as a hero, and when Stalin concocted the Doctors’ Plot in 1952, he cast Zhdanov as one of the victims of the Jewish doctors, who allegedly had poisoned the Leningrad leader.
Although the symbol of intolerance in literature and culture and of hostility toward the West, Zhdanov was probably no more hard-line than his rivals. His denunciations of ideological deviations appeared largely motivated by his struggle to retain Stalin’s favor. But Stalin turned to a crackdown and a break with the West and drove the Zhdanovshchina into its extremes of anti-Semitism, Lysenkoism, and the execution of Leningrad leaders and Zhdanov proteges. See also: JEWS; LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH; MALENKOV, GEORGY MAXIMILYANOVICH; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Graham, Loren. (1972). Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union. New York: Knopf. Hahn, Werner G. (1982). Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-53. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Medvedev, Zhores. (1969). The Rise and Fall of T.D. Ly-senko. New York: Columbia University Press.
(1851-1881), Russian revolutionary narodnik (populist) and one of the leaders of the People’s Will party.
Andrei Zhelyabov was born in the village of Sultanovka in the Crimea to the family of a serf. He graduated from a gymnasium in Kerch with a silver medal (1869) and attended the Law Department of the Novorossiysk University in Odessa. He was expelled in November of 1871 for being involved in student-led agitation, and was sent home
for one year. Upon returning to Odessa, in 1873 and 1874 he was a member of the Chaikovsky circle and spread revolutionary propaganda among workers and the intelligentsia. In November 1874, he was arrested but bailed out before the trial. Zhelyabov faced charges of revolutionary propaganda as part of the Trial of 193 (1877- 1878) in St. Petersburg. He was declared innocent on the basis of insufficient evidence. After his release, he lived in Ukraine, where he spread revolutionary propaganda among the peasants.
Disappointed with the ineffectiveness of his propaganda, Zhelyabov concluded that it was necessary to lead a political struggle. In June 1879 he took part in the Lipetsk assembly of terrorist politicians and was one of the authors of the formulation of the necessity of violent revolt through conspiracy. He joined the populist organization Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) and became one of the leaders of the Politicians’ Faction. After the split of Zemlya i Volya in August 1879, Zhelyabov joined the People’s Will and became a member of its executive committee. On August 26, 1879, he took part in the session of the executive committee where emperor Alexander II was sentenced to death. He supervised the preparation of the assaults on Alexander II near Alexandrovsk in the Yekater-inoslav province in November 1879, where an attempt was made to blow up the tsar’s train. Zhelyabov also supervised the assault on the tsar in the Winter Palace on February 17, 1880, and an unsuccessful attempt to blow up Kamenny Most (Stone Bridge) in St. Petersburg while the tsar was passing there in August 1880.
Zhelyabov took part in the devising of all program documents of the party. He is also credited with the creation of the worker, student, and military organizations of the People’s Will. He was one of the main organizers of the tsar’s murder on March 13, 1881, but on the eve of the assault he was arrested. On March 14, he submitted a plea to associate him with the tsar’s murder. During the trial, Zhelyabov, who refused to have a lawyer, made a programmatic speech to prove that the government itself, with its inappropriately repressive means of dealing with peaceful propagandists of socialist ideas, forced them to take the path of terrorism. Zhelyabov was sentenced to death and hanged on April 15, 1881, at the Semenovsky parade ground in St. Petersburg. See also: ALEXANDER II; LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY; PEOPLE’S WILL, THE
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Figner, Vera. (1927). Memoirs of a Revolutionist. New York: International Publishers. Footman, David. (1968). Red Prelude: A Life of A. I. Zhelyabov. London: Barrie The Cresset Press. Venturi, Franco. (1983). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The Women’s Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1919-1930).
In November 1918 Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Konkordia Samoil-ova, Klavdia Nikolayeva, and Zlata Lilina organized the First National Congress of Women Workers and Peasants. This was not actually the first national women’s congress, as Russian feminists had held a huge conference in St. Petersburg in December 1908. Kollontai and her comrades, however, explicitly rejected any parallels to the earlier conference, arguing that they sought not to separate women’s issues from men’s but rather to weld and forge women and men into the larger socialist liberation movement. Despite serious ambivalence over whether to create a separate women’s organization, the Congress passed a resolution requesting the party Central Committee to organize “a special commission for propaganda and agitation among women.” The organizers limited their designs for this commission, however, initially claiming that it would serve “merely as a technical apparatus” for implementing Central Committee decrees. This was not, they insisted, a feminist organization.
The Central Committee now sanctioned the formal creation of women’s commissions at the local and central levels. In September 1919 the Central Committee passed a decree upgrading the commissions to the status of sections (otdely) within the party committees, thus creating the zhenotdel, or women’s section.
Several factors played into the creation of the women’s sections. The top leadership of the party, including Vladimir Ilich Lenin, were well aware of the German Women’s Bureau and International Women’s Secretariat created by Clara Zetkin and the German Social Democratic Party. Many of the
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top women Bolsheviks (especially Kollontai and Armand) had begun their social activism by working among women, while others (including Krupskaya, Samoilova, Nikolayeva, and Lilina) had worked on the party’s journal The
