Suslov, Mikhail

Suslov, Mikhail (1902-1982), prominent figure in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) for half the life of the Soviet regime, best known for his tireless defence of orthodox Marxism.

Suslov was born in Shakhovskoye in the lower Volga River valley, the son of Russian peasants. He was drawn into the local activities of the fledgling Soviet government as a youth, joining the Young Communist League during the time of the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. He became a party member in 1921. After graduating from a special course for workers and peasants and from the preeminent Plekhanov Institute of National Economy in Moscow in 1928, he made his mark as a propagandist and a purifier of the Communist Party ranks. In the early 1930s he supervised the removal of alleged opponents of Joseph Stalin in the Urals and the Ukrainian republic. Stalin’s purges gave Suslov the opportunity to rise to Party Secretary of the Rostov region in southern Russia in 1937, and First Secretary in the neighbouring Stavropol’ region in 1939. From 1944 to 1946 he was in charge of the incorporation of the Baltic state of Lithuania into the Soviet Union.

Suslov served continuously in the top party hierarchy from 1946, when he was named head of agitation and propaganda, until the early 1980s. He was a secretary of the Central Committee from 1947 onward and chief editor of the party newspaper Pravda in 1949-1950. Suslov briefly held a seat in the ruling Presidium (renamed the Politburo in 1966) in 1952 and 1953. In the power struggle to succeed Stalin, he sided with Nikita Khrushchev and was rewarded in 1955 with Presidium membership for a second time. He backed Khrushchev in a showdown with Kremlin colleagues in 1957, but then participated in his ousting in 1964. As the supervisor of cultural and ideological affairs for the party under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev after 1964, Suslov promoted conservatism domestically and Soviet expansionism abroad. His death, hastened by a corruption scandal implicating members of the Brezhnev family, helped open the door to younger reformists.