25 Facts About Dmitri Shepilov

Dmitri Shepilov joined the abortive plot to oust Nikita Khrushchev from power in 1957, and was denounced and removed from power.

Dmitri Shepilov was born in Askhabad in the Transcaspian Oblast of the Russian Empire in a working-class family of Russian ethnicity.

Dmitri Shepilov graduated from the Law Faculty of the Moscow State University in 1926 and was sent to work in Yakutsk, where he worked as a deputy prosecutor and acting prosecutor for Yakutia.

In 1937 Dmitri Shepilov became a Doctor of Science and was made the Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Dmitri Shepilov taught economics in Moscow's colleges between 1937 and 1941.

Between May 1945 and February 1946, Dmitri Shepilov was one of the top Soviet officials in Vienna during the early stages of the Soviet occupation of eastern parts of Austria.

In February 1946, Dmitri Shepilov was appointed deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Soviet Army's Main Political Directorate.

Dmitri Shepilov was appointed deputy chief of the Department on 18 September 1947.

Since the new department head, Mikhail Suslov, had other responsibilities, Dmitri Shepilov had almost complete control of the Department's day-to-day operations.

Dmitri Shepilov selected Shostakovich's Eighth and Ninth Symphonies and Prokofiev's opera War and Peace as the worst examples of what was wrong with Soviet music.

When in April 1948 Dmitri Shepilov approved Yuri Zhdanov's speech critical of Soviet biologist and Stalin favorite Trofim Lysenko, it started an intense political battle between Andrei Zhdanov on the one hand and his rivals who were using the episode to discredit Zhdanov.

Dmitri Shepilov survived the next round of the intra-Party struggle associated with the removal and later execution of the Politburo member Nikolai Voznesensky.

On 18 November 1952, after the 19th Communist Party Congress, Dmitri Shepilov was appointed editor-in-chief of Pravda.

Dmitri Shepilov was made a Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences the same year.

In February 1955 Malenkov was ousted as prime minister while Dmitri Shepilov was elected one of the Secretaries of the Central Committee on 12 July 1955.

Dmitri Shepilov retained his Pravda post and became a senior Communist theoretician, contributing to Khrushchev's famous "secret speech" denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956.

In July 1955 Dmitri Shepilov traveled to Egypt for talks with the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and secured an arms deal, which meant de facto Soviet recognition of Egypt's military regime and paved the way for subsequent Soviet-Egyptian alliance.

On 27 February 1956, after the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress, Dmitri Shepilov was made a candidate member of the Central Committee's Presidium.

On 1 June 1956, Dmitri Shepilov replaced Vyacheslav Molotov as the Soviet foreign minister.

In early June 1956 Dmitri Shepilov went back to Egypt and offered Soviet assistance in building the Aswan Dam, which was eventually accepted after a competing American-World Bank offer was withdrawn in July 1956 in the context of general deterioration of Western-Egyptian relations.

On 27 July 1956, one day after Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, Dmitri Shepilov met the Egyptian ambassador to the Soviet Union and offered general support for Egypt's position, which Khrushchev made official in his 31 July speech.

On 14 February 1957 Dmitri Shepilov was made Secretary of the Central Committee responsible for Communist ideology and the next day, Andrei Gromyko replaced him as the Soviet foreign minister.

Dmitri Shepilov was ousted from the Central Committee on 29 June 1957 and vilified in the press as a member of the "Anti-Party Group" along with Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich, the only 3 other Soviet leaders whose participation in the coup attempt was made public at the time.

When Khrushchev was ousted as the Soviet leader in October 1964, Dmitri Shepilov began working on his memoirs, a project which he continued intermittently until circa 1970.

Dmitri Shepilov's papers were lost after his death at age 89 in Moscow, but were eventually found and published in 2001.