Andrei Zhdanov

Encyclopedia : A : AN : AND : Andrei Zhdanov

Andrei Zhdanov

Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (Андре́й Алекса́ндрович Жда́нов) (February 26 [O.S. February 14] 1896–August 31, 1948) was a Soviet politician.

Zhdanov joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and rose through the party ranks, becoming the party leader in Leningrad after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934. He was a strong supporter of socialist realism in art.

During the Great Patriotic War Zhdanov was in charge of the defense of Leningrad. After the cease-fire agreement between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed in Moscow on September 4, 1944, Zhdanov headed the Allied Control Commission in Finland until the Paris peace treaty of 1947.

In 1947, he organized the Cominform, designed to coordinate the communist parties of Europe. He died in 1948 in Moscow of heart failure; Nikita Khrushchev recalled in Khrushchev Remembers that Zhdanov could not control his drinking, and that in his "last days", Stalin would shout at him to stop drinking and insist that he drink only fruit water (Simon Sebag Montefiore, in "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar", ISBN 1400042305. This author also alleges that Stalin himself was responsible for Zhdanov's death). Stalin had talked of Zhdanov being his successor but Zhdanov's ill health gave his rivals, Beria and Malenkov, an opportunity to undermine him.

He also became an in-law of Stalin when his son Yuri married Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.

Until the late 1950s, his ideological code, known as Zhdanovism, defined cultural production in the Soviet Union. Zhdanov intended to forge a new philosophy of art-making for the entire world. His method reduced the whole domain of culture to a straightforward, scientific chart, where a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value. Roland Barthes summed up the core doctrine of Zhdanovism this way: "Wine is objectively good…[the artist] deals with the goodness of wine, not with the wine itself."

In the 1950s there was a creative explosion in Soviet art—abstract and formal work.

His birth-place Mariupol' was re-named Zhdanov at Stalin's instigation in 1948; in 1989 the name reverted to Mariupol.

Andrei Zhdanov

See also