Mikhail Suslov

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov held the Soviet Union's ideological line for nearly four decades, yet he remains one of the most obscure figures of the Cold War era. Born in 1902 in the village of Shakhovskoye in Saratov Governorate, he rose from rural obscurity to become, by the Brezhnev years, what one observer described as the "pope" of orthodox communism in the Eastern Bloc. He outlasted Stalin. He helped remove Khrushchev. He blocked Brezhnev from consolidating personal power. And when he died in office on the 25th of January 1982, his death was seen as the opening shot in the succession battle that would reshape the Soviet Union. How did a quiet, sickly student who kept quotations from Lenin and Marx filed in cardboard boxes end up as the second most powerful man in the Kremlin? And what does his career reveal about how ideology functioned as a weapon inside the Soviet system itself?

• 2. The Card-Index Scholar

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  Suslov studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy between 1924 and 1928, and then continued as a graduate student at the Institute of Red Professors. Classmates remembered him as unsociable, modest, and relentlessly serious. He kept a complete record of the writings and speeches of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin organized in boxes of cards and file cabinets, stored in a tiny room in a communal apartment. That habit turned out to be his first real career break. Stalin urgently needed Lenin's opinion on a narrow economic question and sent his secretary Lev Mekhlis to find it. Mekhlis, who had been a classmate of Suslov's, went straight to him and found the quote almost immediately. Stalin was astonished at the speed of the retrieval. Upon learning how it was done, Stalin had Suslov promoted to a secretary of the Rostov Regional Committee in 1937. It was a remarkable ascent built not on charm or connections but on the patient accumulation of canonical text. In 1931, Suslov had already traded teaching for the party apparatus, taking up a role adjudicating disciplinary cases and appeals against expulsion on the Party Control Commission. By 1933 and 1934, he was directing purge commissions in the Ural and Chernigov provinces, work organized under Lazar Kaganovich. Writer Yuri Druzhnikov would later contend that Suslov helped set up show trials and expelled members judged to be Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and other deviationists. Historian Roy Medvedev noted that although the mass repressions of 1937-1938 certainly smoothed the path for Suslov's rapid promotion, direct evidence of his personal involvement in those campaigns remained unclear.

• 3. War and the Baltic Shadow

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  On the Eastern Front, Suslov served on the Military Council of the North Caucasian Front and led the Stavropol Krai Headquarters of the Partisan Divisions after the Germans occupied the area. He spent much of the occupation mobilizing workers to resist the invaders and kept close contact with the Red Army throughout. Soviet historiography painted his guerrilla years as a success, but participants gave a different account: organizational problems, they said, significantly reduced battlefield effectiveness. Suslov also spent much of this period suffering from tuberculosis, which he had contracted in his youth and which the damp partisan forests made worse. The illness left a mark on him for life. Fearing further relapses, he wore galoshes, a hat, and a raincoat at all times for the rest of his life, including in the heat of summer, which made him a standing joke among colleagues in Brezhnev's Politburo. When Soviet forces drove back toward Berlin in 1944, Suslov took charge of the Central Committee Bureau for Lithuanian Affairs, a post he held until 1946. Anti-Soviet samizdat literature from the peak of his power in the 1970s accused him of personal responsibility for the deportation and killing of nationalist Lithuanians who opposed Soviet re-entry into the Baltic states. The charge was never officially resolved, but it followed his reputation into old age. His next assignment after the war would place him at the center of Soviet ideological machinery in Moscow, far from the forests and the front lines.

• 4. Ideology as Instrument

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  By 1946 Suslov was in Moscow as a member of the Orgburo and head of the Central Committee's Foreign Policy Department. Within a year he was running the Department for Agitation and Propaganda. On the 26th of November 1946, he sent a letter to Andrei Zhdanov accusing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of spying. The letter was well received among Soviet leadership and became the basis for the prosecution of the committee during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. At the height of that campaign, Suslov purged Jews from media and public institutions. Upon Zhdanov's death in August 1948, Suslov succeeded him as Central Committee Secretary of Ideology, the most powerful cultural gatekeeper in the Soviet system. From September 1949 to 1950 he edited Pravda, the central party newspaper. Historian Roy Medvedev speculated, based on documents found in Stalin's safe after his death, that Stalin may have considered Suslov a kind of secret designated successor. What is known is that Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's feared secret police chief, ranked Suslov first on the list of people he wanted to eliminate before his own political downfall. Suslov's authority did not survive Stalin's death entirely intact. He lost his seat on the Presidium in 1953 and spent several years rebuilding. By 1955 he had recovered enough to regain a seat in the Presidium, bypassing the usual candidate membership stage. The 20th Party Congress in 1956 brought Khrushchev's Secret Speech, and Suslov delivered his own ideological report on the 16th of February, criticizing Stalin's cult of personality in formal party language, though his commitment to genuine de-Stalinization would prove thin.

• 5. Opposing Khrushchev

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  During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Suslov and Anastas Mikoyan operated near Budapest to direct Soviet troop activities and assist the new Hungarian leadership. Both men attended the Politburo meeting of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party at which Janos Kadar was elected General Secretary, and both acknowledged in a telegram to Moscow that the situation had deteriorated, while expressing satisfaction with the removal of Erno Gero. The Supreme Soviet presidium criticized their concessions to the new government, and Suslov eventually backed military intervention. His relationship with Khrushchev was growing more contentious by the year. In June 1957 he backed Khrushchev in the struggle against the Anti-Party Group led by Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Dmitry Shepilov. Mikoyan later wrote that he persuaded Suslov to support Khrushchev by arguing that Khrushchev would win regardless. By October of that year, Suslov turned and accused Defense Minister Georgy Zhukov of "Bonapartism" at the Central Committee plenum that stripped Zhukov of his posts. The removal effectively placed the armed forces under firm party control. Suslov's ideological objections to Khrushchev hardened over the MTS reform in 1958, when Khrushchev proposed dissolving the state organizations that owned farm machinery and transferring those assets to the collective farms. In Marxist-Leninist doctrine, cooperative ownership ranked below state ownership. Suslov refused to credit Khrushchev publicly as the reform's architect when he spoke to the Supreme Soviet in March 1958, avoiding his name entirely. At the 21st Party Congress in January 1959, Suslov invoked Marx and Lenin directly to challenge Khrushchev's claim that the Soviet Union had advanced from a socialist to a communist stage of development, arguing that such a transition could not occur within a single seven-year plan. He opposed Khrushchev's attempts at rapprochement with Yugoslavia and his de-Stalinization campaign at home. By the early 1960s, Suslov led what became known as the "Moscow faction" inside the Central Committee, the organized opposition to Khrushchev's rule. After the failure of the 1960 U-2 incident and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis weakened Khrushchev's position, Suslov used the openings to place anti-Khrushchev members into Politburo seats. A campaign to remove Khrushchev was formally set in motion in 1964. Suslov had fallen seriously ill during a trip to China the previous year, so Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin led the actual operation. Suslov's intellectual role in building the case against Khrushchev was, by that point, already complete.

• 6. The Second Secretary

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  After Khrushchev's ouster in October 1964, a troika took formal control: Brezhnev as First Secretary, Kosygin as Premier, and Nikolai Podgorny as CC Secretary. Suslov ranked fourth in the Politburo hierarchy, and by 1965 he was elevated to Second Secretary, the most senior official in the party apparatus below the First Secretary. For the following decade, Suslov was one of only four people who simultaneously held seats in both the Secretariat and the Politburo, alongside Brezhnev, Andrei Kirilenko, and Fyodor Kulakov. He used that position to block Brezhnev's attempt to absorb Kosygin's role as head of government in 1970, a move that would have re-created the one-man rule Suslov had spent his career opposing. He received the informal title of Chief Ideologue of the Communist Party during these years and devoted considerable energy to memorializing Lenin, Marx, and Engels. Growing anxious that the Soviet Union was losing its leading role in the international communist movement, he became an outspoken opponent of political reform anywhere in the Eastern Bloc. He chaired the Politburo Commission established on the 25th of August 1980 to handle the Polish crisis, which had seriously weakened the authority of the Polish United Workers' Party. The commission included KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and Konstantin Chernenko. When the commission considered military intervention on the 28th of August, Polish First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski argued that troops would make the situation worse. Suslov agreed and stated directly: "if troops are introduced, that will mean a catastrophe." He instead pressed the Polish leadership to declare martial law.

• 7. Final Days and Succession

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  In January 1982, Yuri Andropov told Suslov that Semyon Tsvigun, the First Deputy Chairman of the KGB, had shielded Brezhnev's children Galina and Yuri from corruption investigations. Suslov confronted Tsvigun and threatened him with expulsion from the Communist Party. Tsvigun died on the 19th of January 1982 before he could respond to the challenge. Two days later, Suslov suffered a coronary thrombosis. He died on the 25th of January 1982 at 16:05 from arteriosclerosis and diabetes. He was buried on the 29th of January at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in one of the twelve individual tombs located between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin Wall. His death was immediately understood as the starting gun for the succession battle that had been building for years. Andropov moved into Suslov's seat in the Secretariat and proceeded to sideline both Kirilenko and Chernenko during the final months of Brezhnev's rule. Among the decorations Suslov accumulated over his lifetime were two Hero of Socialist Labour awards, five Orders of Lenin, one Order of the October Revolution, and the Karl Marx Gold Medal from the USSR Academy of Sciences. His wife Yelizaveta, who died in 1972, had herself suffered severely from diabetes and ignored her doctors' advice on the matter. Their son Revoly, born in 1929 and named after the Russian Revolution, and daughter Maya, born in 1939 and named after May Day, survived him. Suslov had expressed gratitude to American physician Bernard Lown for treating Yelizaveta, but refused to meet Lown in person because he was a citizen of what Suslov called an "imperialistic" country.