Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov

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Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich (b. 26 Feb. 1896, d. 31 Aug. 1948). Soviet politician Born in Mariupol (later Zhdanov), he joined the Bolsheviks in 1915, and became an active propagandist for the party until the 1917 Russian (October) Revolution. He became a political officer in the Red Army, and in 1924 he was responsible for the Communist Party in Tver and Nizhny Novgorod. In 1934, he succeeded Kirov as chairman of the Leningrad Communist Party, and was regarded as a likely successor to Stalin. In that year, he also became a secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, and in 1939 joined the Politburo. He took an active part in Stalin's Great Purge, as well as the ruthless imposition of Soviet rule in the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) in 1940–1. He took a decisive part in the organization of the defence of Leningrad, 1941–4. He is best remembered for his cultural and ideological influence, however. He instigated a major educational reform in the Soviet Union in 1934–8, and in 1944 he became responsible for party ideology. He enforced socialist realism in the arts and a Bolshevik historiography. His vicious opposition to any Western, ‘decadent’ cultural influence led to his country's complete artistic isolation. In 1947, he became the co-founder and leader of Cominform (see Comintern).

Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov , 1896–1948, Soviet Communist leader. A loyal supporter of Stalin , he was made (1934) secretary of the Leningrad Communist party and in 1939 became a full member of the politburo, the ruling body of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. As the party boss of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), he helped defend that city in the Finnish-Russian War (1939–40) and in World War II. After the war he was instrumental in formulating an aggressive, anti-Western foreign policy, and he organized (1947) the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), aimed at better coordination of Communist efforts in Europe. Zhdanov was largely responsible for the extreme nationalism and strict political control (known as Zhdanovism) of intellectuals and the arts in the postwar period. After his death in 1948, his Leningrad party organization was purged, ostensibly for its connections with Tito of Yugoslavia, but in fact to diminish the political influence of Leningrad relative to Moscow.