Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev
Andrey Andreyev | |
---|---|
Андрей Андреев | |
Grigol Ordzhonikidze | |
Succeeded by | Jānis Rudzutaks |
Senior Secretary of Cadres of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union | |
In office 3 April 1935 – 18 March 1946 | |
Preceded by | Lazar Kaganovich |
Succeeded by | Georgy Malenkov |
Personal details | |
Born | Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev 30 October 1895 (1918–1961) |
Central institution membership
Other offices held
| |
Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev (
In 1952, Andreyev was removed from the Politburo and placed in a largely ceremonial position as a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
Biography
Early years
Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev was born in the
During World War I, he worked as a hospital administrator, while carrying on illegal political work. He was a member of the Petrograd committee of the Bolsheviks in 1915–16, and one of the organisers of the wave of strikes that preceded the fall of the Tsar. After the February revolution, he helped found the Petrograd Metal Workers' Union.[2] He was in the crowd that welcomed the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin on his return from exile in April 1917. At the Bolshevik conference that same month, he was one of the younger delegates who backed Lenin's call for a second revolution.
Union leader
Andreyev spent the early part of the Russian civil war as a trade union and Communist Party organiser in the Urals, where he oversaw the nationalisation of the factories, and for ensuring that the new Soviet republic was supplied with metal and food. He was posted in 1919 to Ukraine as the leader of the metal workers' union, and a member of the All-Russian Central Trade Union Council (TUC).
In the latter part of 1919, Lenin came up against heavy opposition from the trade unions, who wanted democratic control of industry, which Lenin believed would undermine efficiency and delay economic recovery. In January 1920, he was outvoted in a meeting of the communist 'fraction' of the All-Russian TUC. Throughout, Andreyev was one of the minority who supported Lenin's line.[3]
His reward was to be appointed head of the railway workers' union, and at the 9th Communist Party Congress in March 1920 he was one of three union leaders, along with
During 1920–21, the Central Committee was split 10–9 over the role of the unions. The minority, led by Leon Trotsky, proposed that they be incorporated in the state; the majority, led by Lenin and including Joseph Stalin, argued for their continued existence, under party control. Andreyev was the only leading trade unionist to support the minority line[4] - surprisingly, in view of his later career. (He was the only former member of that committee apart from Stalin still alive after the Great Purge: all the others who had not died in the meantime were killed.)
Andreyev was dropped from the Central Committee in March 1921, but when the TUC had its next congress, in May 1921, he loyally supported the party leadership against a campaign led by the veteran revolutionary David Riazanov, who called for union leaders to be elected rather than appointed by the party. Tomsky and Rudzutaks were sacked, temporarily, for failing to block this proposal, whilst Andreyev was made a secretary of the TUC, and at the 11th party congress in April 1922, he was restored to membership of the party's Central Committee.[5] He retained his membership for the next 40 years. He was also co-opted onto the Orgburo, which was dominated by Stalin, the newly appointed General Secretary.
In May 1923, Andreyev was a member of the small Communist delegation at the Congress of the Second International. A fellow delegate, the French communist Alfred Rosmer, remembered him as "a friendly and modest companion, who didn't mind us joking about his name".[6]
Party official
Shortly after Lenin's death, in June 1924, Andreyev was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. From that date Andreyev was a loyal supporter of Stalin and part of the inner core of the Stalinist faction. He was one of five hard line Stalinists who were raised to candidate membership of the Politburo in July 1926, a few months before Trotsky was expelled from the same body.
In 1925, when the People's Commissar for Finance,
From January 1928 to December 1930, Andreyev was based in Rostov in south Russia, as First Secretary of the North Caucasus territory party committee. In this capacity, he was responsible for the seeing through the forcible collectivisation of agriculture in one of Russia's main grain-producing regions. At the outset, he seemed hesitant about forcing the pace: as late as October 1929, he forecast that it would be impossible to complete the changeover to collective agriculture before the end of the First five-year plan in 1933.[8] His complaints about the difficulty of achieving the grain deliveries Stalin demanded almost caused a rift, when Stalin lost his temper with Andreyev - but then, unusually, apologised.[9]
By December, Andreyev had committed the regional party to a target of complete collectivisation by the spring 1931. In January 1930, he announced that they had been too modest, and would complete the process during that year. As part of the process, the North Caucasus
By February, 80 per cent of the rural population of the North Caucasus had been herded onto collective farms, but the result was armed rebellion by thousands of peasants, which was put down by the Red Army, and which forced a partial retreat by the authorities. Within two months, the proportion of peasants on collective farms had fallen to 67 per cent.[11]
In December 1930, Andreyev was recalled to Moscow and appointed Chairman of the Central Control Commission, which was responsible for party discipline, and chairman of Rabkrin. In September 1931, he volunteered to take the additional post of People's Commissar for Transport, after the Politburo had heard a report on the serious state of the railways.[1] He relinquished the chairmanship of the Control Commission on 4 February 1932, when he became a full member of the Politburo.
In March 1935, Andreyev was reappointed a secretary of the Central Committee, in the wake of the assassination of
Role in the 1930s purges
During the
. Sometimes, he accused local party leaders of arresting the wrong people, who were released. More often, his arrival meant arrests and executions. He always stayed in telegram communication with Stalin, who always approved all his recommended lists of party members to be expelled and/or arrested.Early in January 1937, he arrived in Rostov to organise the removal of Boris Sheboldayev, his successor as regional party in the renamed Azov-Black Sea territory, who was accused of excessive leniency because he had allowed former oppositionists such as Alexander Beloborodov and Nikolai Glebov-Avilov to hold responsible jobs in the region. Sheldboldayev temporarily saved himself by apologising, and was transferred to another post, only to be arrested later and shot.[14]
In Saratov, where he arrived on 20 July, his main target was the local head of the NKVD Yakov Agranov, who was arrested and shot, along with the second secretary of the regional communist party and others. Some people whom Agranov had had arrested were released. At the same time, Andreyev and identified 20 employees of the Machine Tractor Stations who were "working very obstructively". Stalin replied with a telegram the same day, saying they should all be shot.[15] In total, in the wake of his visit, 430 people were shot.
In Kuybyshev, he ordered the local party boss, Pavel Postyshev, to step up the hunt for hidden enemies, after which Postyshev disbanded most of the local party branches and had 3,300 party members arrested.[16] By the end of 1937, it was decided that Postyshev had gone too far, and Andreyev was assigned the job of collecting names of people wrongfully expelled from the Kuibyshev party, after which Postyshev was arrested and shot.[17]
When Andreyev arrived in Tashkent, in September 1937, the founder of the Uzbek communist party,
In March 1938, an official of the USSR Writers' Union approached Andreyev about finding work for the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was in Moscow, but unemployed. Andreyev refused.[20] Mandelstam was arrested and died in the gulag.
In October 1940, he issued an order that a recently published book of poems by Anna Akhmatova was banned and all copies were to be seized. in 1940, Akhmatova had suddenly been granted official recognition, having been prevented from publishing any of her work for 15 years. Andreyev's order meant that "Akhmatova's nine months a published poet again had come to an end".[21]
In November 1938, Andreyev supervised the changes at the headquarters of the NKVD, in which Lavrentiy Beria was confirmed as its new head in place of Nikolai Yezhov,[22] who was arrested and shot. Also in November, he chaired a session of the Central Committee of Komsomol, the communist youth league, at which most of its leaders were sacked, and later arrested and shot.[23]
Later career
In 1939, Andreyev resumed his former position as Chairman of the Central Commission, combining that with his continued role as party secretary and Politburo member. He was also
After the war, Andreyev appeared to recover his position. In March 1946, he was appointed a Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, responsible for agriculture, while Malenkov was temporarily removed from his role as party secretary, and a protégé of Andreyev,
However, by the summer of 1947, both Malenkov and Khrushchev had recovered their positions, while Andreyev was ill. His doctors proscribed cocaine, to which he became addicted.[26] In December 1949, he was replaced by Khrushchev as the party secretary in charge of agriculture. Although still nominally a member of the Politburo, he was in reality excluded from the party leadership in what Khrushchev later described, somewhat hypocritically, as one of Stalin's "most unbridled acts of willfulness".[27]
According to Sergo Mikoyan, son of Andreyev's contemporary and colleague,
Family
Andreyev was married to Dora Khazan (1894-1961), who was a student along with Stalin's second wife,
He later married Zinaida Ivanovna Desyatova. They had two daughters, Tatyana and Valentina. He has three grandchildren - Kochergin Ilya N., Kharlamov and Ivan V. Kharlamov Xenia Vyacheslavovna.[citation needed]
Death and legacy
Andreyev was formally removed from the Politburo, after 20 years, at the 19th party congress in October 1952. After Stalin's death, he was briefly brought back as Chairman of the Central Commission, in 1954–56, and was made a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,
Andreyev is remembered for having loved the music of
During his life Andreyev was four times awarded the
Footnotes
- ^ a b "Lenin's Comrade in Arms: The 90th anniversary of the birth of A.A.Andreyev". Pravda. 30 October 1985.
- ^ Schmidt, Otto; Bukharin, Nikolai, eds. (1926). Большая советская энциклопедия Vol. 2. Moscow. p. 732.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Schapiro, Leonard (1965). The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, Political Opposition in the Soviet State: First Phase, 1917-1922. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. pp. 230, 233.
- ^ Schapiro, Leonard. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. pp. 271, 275, 279, 282, 286, 288.
- ^ Schapiro, Leonard. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. pp. 334, 338, 367.
- ISBN 0-906224-37-3.
- Carr, E.H.(1970). Socialism in One Country, volume 1. Penguin. p. 423.
- ISBN 0-674-81480-0.
- ISBN 0-75381-766-7.
- ISBN 9780691192727.
- Davies, R.W.The Socialist Offensive. pp. 177, 214, 258–59, 442.
- ISBN 0-300-07772-6.
- ISBN 0-75381-766-7.
- ISBN 0-300-07772-6.
- ISBN 0-75381-766-7.
- ^ Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government. p. 807.
- ^ Getty, J. Arch; Naumov, Oleg. The Road to Terror. p. 499.
- ^ Conquest, Robert (1971). The Great Terror, Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. London: Penguin. pp. 517–18.
- ^ "Андреев Андрей Андреевич". БИОГРАФИЧЕСКИЙ УКАЗАТЕЛЬ. hrono.ru. Retrieved 26 August 2018.
- ISBN 0-00-262501-6.
- ISBN 978-1-62097-079-9.
- ^ Getty, J. Arch; Naumov. The Road to Terror. p. 542.
- ^ Medvedev, Roy (1976). Let History Judge, The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. Spokesman. p. 209.
- ^ a b c Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015; pg. 317.
- ISBN 0-75381-766-7.
- ISBN 0-75381-766-7.
- ^ Khrushchev, Nikita. "Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U." Marxist Internet Archive.
- ^ a b Zalessky, K.A. "Андрей Андревич Андреев и его могила (Andrei Andrevich Andreyev and his grave)". Российский некрополь (Russian Necropolis). Retrieved 26 August 2018.
- ^ Medvedev, Roy (1989). Let History Judge.
- ^ Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and its Members, 1917–1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; pg. 145.
- ISBN 0-75381-766-7.