Mikhail Suslov served as Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1965, and as unofficial chief ideologue of the party until his death in 1982.
50 Facts About Mikhail Suslov
2.
Mikhail Suslov left his job as a teacher in 1931 to pursue politics full-time, becoming one of the many Soviet politicians who took part in the mass repression begun by Joseph Stalin's regime.
3.
Mikhail Suslov was made First Secretary of Stavropol Krai administrative area in 1939.
4.
When Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Mikhail Suslov supported the establishment of a collective leadership.
5.
Mikhail Suslov supported inner-party democracy and opposed the reestablishment of the one-man rule as seen during the Stalin and Khrushchev eras.
6.
Mikhail Suslov was born in Shakhovskoye, a rural locality in Pavlovsky District, Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russian Empire on 21 November 1902.
7.
Mikhail Suslov began work in the local Komsomol organisation in Saratov in 1918, eventually becoming a member of the Poverty Relief Committee.
8.
Mikhail Suslov became an inspector on the Communist Party's Party Control Commission and on the People's Commissariat of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate.
9.
In 1933 and 1934, Mikhail Suslov directed a commission charged with purging the party in the Ural and Chernigov provinces.
10.
Author Yuri Druzhnikov contends that Mikhail Suslov was involved with setting up several show trials, and contributed to the Party by expelling all members deviating from the Party line, meaning Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and other left-wing deviationists.
11.
Mikhail Suslov gained a reputation as a unsociable, modest, and serious student who carefully studied and memorized the works and speeches of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin and became known for keeping a complete record of their statements on economic and political issues in boxes of cards and file cabinets in his tiny room in a communal apartment.
12.
Stalin immediately had Mikhail Suslov promoted to Party Secretary of Rostov and carried out a purge of the city in 1938.
13.
Mikhail Suslov spent much of his time mobilising workers to fight against the German invaders.
14.
Mikhail Suslov supervised the deportations of Chechens and other Muslim minorities from the Caucasus during the war.
15.
Mikhail Suslov later purged the Baltic region in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War.
16.
In 1946, Mikhail Suslov was made a member of the Orgburo and immediately became the Head of the Foreign Policy Department of the Central Committee.
17.
Mikhail Suslov became a harsh critic of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the post-war years.
18.
On 26 November 1946, Mikhail Suslov sent a letter to Andrei Zhdanov, accusing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of spying.
19.
In 1947, Mikhail Suslov was transferred to Moscow and elected to the Central Committee Secretariat; he would retain this seat for the rest of his life.
20.
Mikhail Suslov had the full confidence of Stalin and in 1948 he was entrusted with the task of speaking on behalf of the Central Committee before a solemn meeting on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's death.
21.
Lavrentiy Beria, who hated Mikhail Suslov, evidently felt so threatened by him that after his arrest, documents were found in Beria's safe labeling Mikhail Suslov as the No 1 person he wanted to "eliminate".
22.
In June 1950, Mikhail Suslov was elected to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
23.
Mikhail Suslov was promoted to the CPSU Presidium in 1952 following the 19th Party Congress.
24.
Mikhail Suslov suffered a temporary reversal when Stalin died and was dismissed from the Presidium in 1953.
25.
Mikhail Suslov continued to work in the Supreme Soviet, even becoming Chairman of the Commission of Foreign Affairs in the years immediately following Stalin's death.
26.
Mikhail Suslov recovered his authority in 1955 and was elected to a seat in the Presidium, bypassing the customary candidate membership.
27.
Mikhail Suslov, who supported Stalin's economic policy, regarded Khrushchev's proposal as unacceptable on ideological grounds.
28.
Unlike other Party leaders, Mikhail Suslov avoided mentioning Khrushchev as the MTS reform's initiator.
29.
Mikhail Suslov cautiously demonstrated against Khrushchev's statement that the country had developed from the socialist state of development to the higher state of communist development.
30.
Mikhail Suslov saw Khrushchev's view as flawed, and countered that his view had not been approved by the Party.
31.
Mikhail Suslov was becoming progressively more critical of Khrushchev's policies, his political intransigence, and his campaign to eliminate what was left of the Stalinist old guard.
32.
Domestically, Mikhail Suslov opposed Khrushchev's policy of de-Stalinisation and his economic decentralisation scheme.
33.
Mikhail Suslov visited the United Kingdom in 1959 as a parliamentarian for the Supreme Soviet.
34.
Mikhail Suslov was highly critical of Maoist China, as he led the Sino-Soviet Dispute and criticized Maoism in various ways under the Khrushchev administration, particularly its split from the Soviet leadership in the Socialist Camp, the rejection of the theory of Peaceful Coexistence, and Mao's support of anti-Soviet rival communist militant groups globally.
35.
Mikhail Suslov compared Mao's China to Titoist Yugoslavia and Trotskyism, and denounced him as a Bourgeois nationalist and left-deviationist.
36.
Mikhail Suslov was, alongside Premier Alexei Kosygin and First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, one of the most influential Soviet politicians of the 1960s following the ousting of Khrushchev.
37.
However, Mikhail Suslov was never interested in becoming the leader of the Soviet Union, and was content to remain the man behind the scenes.
38.
Kirilenko, Brezhnev, and Mikhail Suslov were members of an unofficial Troika within the Communist Party leadership.
39.
Mikhail Suslov was ranked fourth in the Politburo hierarchy behind Brezhnev, Podgorny and Kosygin, ahead of Kirilenko.
40.
Mikhail Suslov was opposed to any sort of anti-Soviet policies attempted by the Eastern Bloc leaders, but voted against Soviet military intervention in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1968 during the Prague Spring.
41.
Mikhail Suslov was regarded, according to Christian Schmidt-Hauer, as the "pope" for "Orthodox communists" in the Eastern Bloc.
42.
Hauer, in his book Gorbachev: The Path to Power, argues that Mikhail Suslov "was a Russian nationalist" who believed "Russia was the centre of the universe".
43.
Mikhail Suslov spent much time in memorializing the legacies of Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
44.
However, Mikhail Suslov followed the party line and supported the retreat from some of the beliefs of Marxism-Leninism.
45.
Mikhail Suslov was able to persuade Jaruzelski and the Polish leadership to establish martial law in Poland.
46.
Mikhail Suslov even threatened Tsvigun with expulsion from the Communist Party, but Tsvigun died on 19 January 1982 before he could challenge Mikhail Suslov's statement.
47.
Mikhail Suslov's death is viewed as starting the battle to succeed Brezhnev, in which Andropov, who assumed Suslov's post as the Party's Second Secretary, sidelined Kirilenko and Chernenko during the last days of Brezhnev's rule.
48.
Mikhail Suslov was awarded the highest state awards of the German Democratic Republic, the Mongolian People's Republic, and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
49.
Mikhail Suslov married Yelizaveta Alexandrovna, who worked as the Director of the Moscow Institute for Stomatology.
50.
Mikhail Suslov expressed his gratitude for Lown's work, but avoided meeting Lown in person because he was a representative of an "imperialistic" country.