10 Facts About Yekaterina Furtseva

Yekaterina Alexeyevna Furtseva was a Soviet politician and member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yekaterina Furtseva was the second woman to be elected member of the CPSU Presidium and the fourth woman elected to the CPSU Secretariat.

Yekaterina Furtseva had been a minor party worker in Kursk and the Crimea, and was called to Moscow and sent to the Institute of Chemical Technology from where she graduated in 1941 as a chemical engineer.

Yekaterina Furtseva gave a speech at the 19th Congress of the CPSU in 1952, the last party congress of the Stalin era, where she was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

Under Nikita Khrushchev, who sympathized with her, Furtseva was the first secretary of Moscow Committee of the CPSU from 1954 to 1957, a job Khrushchev himself occupied in 1930s.

In 1952, Yekaterina Furtseva attacked the leading filmstar, Boris Babochkin, who was famous after starring as Vasily Chapayev.

Yekaterina Furtseva became the first woman to join the Politburo the next year.

Yekaterina Furtseva scandalized the Soviet elite by her weekend trips abroad in order to meet her lover.

In May 1960, Yekaterina Furtseva suddenly lost her position as a Secretary of the Central Committee, and was appointed USSR Minister for Culture.

Yekaterina Furtseva died in Moscow a few months later, officially of heart failure.