Stalin's successor ruled the Soviet Union for days before rivals clipped his power
When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, Georgy Malenkov inherited both the premiership and the top party secretaryship. Nine days later his colleagues forced him out of the Secretariat, opening the door for Nikita Khrushchev. By 1957 a failed plot had cost Malenkov his seat at the top, and he spent his last decades in obscurity.
Born in Orenburg in 1902, the son of a prosperous farmer with Macedonian ancestry, Malenkov volunteered for the Red Army in 1918 and joined the Communist Party in 1920, serving as a commissar on a propaganda train in Turkestan. There he began a lifelong, never-registered partnership with Valeriya Golubtsova, whose mother had studied alongside Lenin, a link that helped both careers; she later ran the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. He never finished his engineering degree.
Stalin spotted him in 1924 and placed him in the Orgburo, where he oversaw party membership files, some two million of them over a decade. That role made him a central organiser of the Great Purge: he travelled to Armenia, Belarus and other regions to purge local officials and took part in brutal interrogations. His friendship with Lavrentiy Beria was forged during the repressions in Yerevan. In 1938 he helped topple the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov.
During the Second World War he sat on the five-man State Defense Committee, overseeing aircraft production and early nuclear work. He ran the missile programme with the young engineer Dmitri Ustinov as deputy, absorbing the German V2 industry moved from Peenemunde and laying groundwork that led to Sputnik. He favoured technical skill over ideological loyalty when hiring, which set him against Andrei Zhdanov, who insisted that correct ideology came before science. After the war he helped demote Marshal Georgy Zhukov, accusing him of Bonapartism.
Zhdanov's death in 1948 left Malenkov Stalin's favourite, and he helped suppress the Leningrad party leaders whose wartime fame threatened Moscow's primacy. After losing the premiership in February 1955, he joined the so-called Anti-Party Group that tried to unseat Khrushchev in 1957. Its failure ended his career: expelled from the Presidium and, by 1961, from the party, he lived quietly until his death in January 1988.
Source: Georgy Malenkov
