Georgy Aleksandrov

Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov (March 22, 1908 (Old Style), Saint Petersburg - July 7, 1961 (New Style, Moscow) was a Marxist philosopher and a Soviet politician.

Biography

Childhood and Education

Aleksandrov was born in a worker's family in Saint Petersburg, but became homeless during the Russian Civil War. In 1924-1930, he studied Communist philosophy in Borisoglebsk and Tambov and then transferred to the Moscow Institute of History and Philosophy. After graduating in 1932, Aleksandrov remained with the Institute for graduate studies, eventually becoming a professor, a deputy director and the Institute's Scientific Secretary.

Communist Official

In 1938, at the height of the Great Purge, Aleksandrov was made deputy head of the Publishing Department of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In 1939 he was appointed deputy head of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee's Propaganda and Agitation Department and at the same time put in charge of the Central Committee's Moscow-based Higher Party School, which he headed until 1946.

In September 1940 Aleksandrov was made head of the Central Committee's Propaganda and Agitation Department, replacing Andrei Zhdanov [See "Pravda", September 7, 1940, quoted in Sanford R. Lieberman. "The Party under Stress: The Experience of World War II" in "Soviet Society and the Communist Party", ed. Karl W. Ryavec, University of Massachusetts Press, 1978, ISBN 0-87023-258-4, p. 196] who, as a Secretary of the Central Committee, retained overall supervision over Communist propaganda in the USSR. In 1941 Aleksandrov was also made a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee and, on March 19, 1946, a member of its Orgburo. In 1946 he was also elected a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

1947 Demotion

Throughout his career, Aleksandrov was closely associated with Georgy Malenkov, who was one of Joseph Stalin's closest advisors. Once Malenkov began to lose influence to Andrei Zhdanov in 1946, Aleksandrov's position became shaky as well. In June 1947, Aleksandrov's textbook "History of Western European Philosophy" (1945) was denounced on Stalin's orders for overvaluing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's contributions and underestimating the contributions made by Russian philosophers. Aleksandrov lost his Propaganda and Agitation Department position to Mikhail Suslov and his supporters were purged. Nonetheless, Aleksandrov retained his Orgburo post and was made Director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy. He remained there even after Zhdanov's demotion and subsequent death in 1948 and Malenkov's return to power.

After Stalin

When Malenkov became the next Soviet prime minister after Stalin's death in March 1953, he made Aleksandrov his minister of culture on March 9, 1954. After Malenkov lost his position in a power struggle with the Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khruschev in February 1955, Aleksandrov was fired on March 10, 1955. He was sent to Minsk, where he was put in charge of the section of dialectical and historical materialism of the Belarus Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy and Law. He spent the rest of his life working on sociology and its history and died in Moscow in 1961 at age 53.

Notes

References

* K.A. Zalessky. "Imperiya Stalina: Biograficheskij entsiklopedicheskij slovar", Moscow, Veche, 2000.