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The man behind the throne
23 May 2005
Who was Mikhail Suslov? Almost no one in the West seems to know him, yet he was one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. His funeral, in 1982, was one of the largest parades ever staged in the USSR, but most onlookers in the west - those few who even noted the event shown on TV news - scratched their heads in perplexed wonder.
Who was this man? He was hardly ever seen by western eyes, just a tall, gaunt figure lurking in the background at Party events, seldom photographed (in a cult where having one’s beaming face photographed for the media at every possible occasion was almost obligatory). He was unknown for his writing outside the USSR (many Soviet leaders had prodigious bodies of works under their names, albeit often the product of state ghost writers). His narrow chest wasn’t bedecked with racks of medals and ribbons.
Yet Suslov survived four decades at the top of Soviet politics, one of the most ruthless venues for power, and prospered there. And, depending on your source, he may have been the power behind the throne for much of that period, the kingmaker who made – and unmade – some if the top Communist leaders.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Suslov was born on November 21, 1902, in Shakhovskoye, a village in Russia west of the Volga, not far from Lenin’s own birthplace. He died of a stroke (or heart attack?) on January 25, 1982, in Moscow.
Suslov joined the Communist Party in 1921 and over the next two decades, rose in the ranks until he was made a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In 1921, Suslov was sent to Moscow for his education. For a short while, he was a teacher of economics, but his real career lay in the Party ranks. He was chosen to supervise Stalin’s purges in the Urals and Ukraine in the 1930s. He was so successful in following Stalin’s wishes, he was then sent to the Caucasus where he quickly rose to become a ruling member of the local Party apparatus. When World War II broke out, Suslov was picked to supervise the deportation of ethnic minorities to Siberia.
In 1941, he was named to the party's central committee. He rose rapidly in the political hothouse. He took over the role of the Party’s leading theoretician, and was known for his strident condemnation of any deviations from Soviet policy by Party members both domestically and internationally. He was particularly vocal in his anti-Yugoslav/anti-Tito propaganda in 1948. In the post-war years, he was appointed head of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee.
In late 1944, the All-Union Communist Party denounced Lithuanian Communists for their apparent lack of zeal in implementing the land reform and "insufficient determination in uncovering Lithuanian-German bourgeois nationalists." A bureau for Lithuanian affairs was organized, with Mikhail Suslov as its chairman. Suslov’s talent for hard-line repression made him the obvious choice to re-impose Soviet rule. He proved merciless in his repression of all attempts at resistance. He sent entire villages to prison camps in Siberia.
In 1946, Suslov condemned the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), established by the Soviets in 1942 to mobilize international Jewish support for the Soviet war effort. The JAC’s leadership included the USSR’s top 25 writers, artists, doctors, scientists and government officials. After the war ended, responsibility for the JAC was transferred to Suslov. In November 1946, he made a secret report to the Politburo, warning the JAC was becoming increasingly nationalistic and Zionist in its support for ‘the reactionary idea of a single Jewish nation’. Suslov recommended the JAC should be ‘liquidated’, but Stalin was not ready to act. Events in the Middle East suggested that the Soviet regime could extend its influence, and this was not the time to alienate international Jewish
opinion.
His next step up the ladder came in 1952 when he was appointed as a secretary to the Politburo. Stalin, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Brezhnev were among his peers. His first act was to remove P.N. Fedoseev as editor of The Communist, the principal theoretical organ of the Russian CP. Suslov criticized Fedoseev for propagating the economic theories of N. Voznosensky, former head of Gosplan, but later persona non-grata in Soviet ideology and removed from his post in 1949 because Stalin had disagreed with his liberal approach to market economy.
Although his protector, Stalin, died in 1953, Suslov managed to hold onto his seat in the struggle that followed. In their book, The Unknown Stalin, Roy and Zhores Medvedev put forward the theory Suslov was Stalin’s “secret heir,” and this was exposed by Khrushchev in his “secret speech” of 1956.
In 1955, Suslov was elected a full member of the Central Committee – the Presidium. He was re-elected to the Central Committee in 1956, when Khrushchev was appointed First Secretary. He stayed in it until his death, 26 years later.
Suslov had assumed a pivotal position in the ruling clique as the party’s ruling theoretician. Suslov maneuvered behind the scenes – possibly having a lead, but hidden, hand in the coup that replaced Beria with Nikita Khrushchev in 1953. Although he was one of Stalin’s handpicked henchmen, Suslov managed deftly to survive the de-Stalinization campaign of 1956-1962 by throwing his support behind Khrushchev.
During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Suslov supervised Yuri Andropov, then the Soviet ambassador to Hungary, on how to repress the Hungarian freedom movement. After Andropov returned to Moscow, in 1957, Suslov recommended him for the job of Head of Central Committee Department for Relations with Communist and Workers Parties in Socialist Nations. Later, Suslov would pull some strings to get Andropov appointed head of the KGB.
When Khrushchev faced a conspiracy in the Politburo in 1957, Suslov helped quell the opposition. In propping up Khrushchev, the conservative Suslov further cemented his position as defender of the status quo. But he later turned on the increasingly eccentric and voluble Khrushchev, and helped organize the coup that installed Leonid Brezhnev at the top of the Politburo, in 1964.
The break between Suslov and Khrushchev likely began with Khrushchev's public declaration that the USSR had achieved socialism, in 1961, combined with Khrushchev's mishandling of the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises. As ideologue, Suslov - and many other Politburo members - did not want to announce socialism as a Soviet achievement, because it simply had not been reached. It was seen as an important stage along the journey to Communism. Worse for the nation, the growing conflict with the West was causing significant stress on the economy.
Khrushchev wanted a PR coup to boost his flagging popularity, so he overrode his party's objections and declared it. Suslov, the party’s top watchdog over ideological matters for much of his time in the Secretariat, was not impressed with Khrushchev's incursion into his realm. Khrushchev evidently thought the quiet Suslov would follow his lead, but he was wrong. Shortly after, Khrushchev was ousted and Brezhnev inserted as leader.
Officially, however, it was Khrushchev’s failed policy over the belligerent Chinese Communists that brought him down. Suslov, of course, had been the author of the policy Khrushchev had flouted (Suslov and Andrei Gromyko were the only Soviet officials who took part in all of Khrushchev’s talks with Mao Tse Tung and Zhou Enlai) . He allied with Shelepin, Brezhnev and Malinkovsky to bring him down, making a secret speech of his own in which he criticized Khrushchev’s one-man rule. Many of Khrushchev’s policies and appointments were reversed after he was ousted.
Tall, lanky and looking intellectual behind thick-framed glasses, Suslov gathered his resources quietly, didn’t make waves, and quietly put built himself a power base that lasted until his death in 1982. According to some analysts, Suslov essentially ran the Party between 1952 and 1982, although he never assumed a public face in that role. One note of interest: in the invective-dense conversations of Politburo members, Suslov was one of only three members who never cursed (Andropov and Gromyko being the other two).
As the Party ideologue, Suslov had control over much of the Party’s information flow and output, but also over the output from the intelligentsia. Writer Vasiliy Grossman submitted his novel about Stalingrad and Stalinism, Life and Fate, for publication in 1960. However, despite promises of publication, in February 1961, the KGB seized the manuscript, and confiscated all known copies from Grossman's flat. Suslov told Grossman that his novel was “more hostile to the ideals of the Russian Revolution than was Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.” He declared that Life and Fate could not be published for at least 250 years (it was published in the West in the 1980s).
After Khrushchev’s fall from power, Suslov hitched his wagon to Brezhnev’s rising star and Suslov's position as the chief ideologue was fixed in the Soviet firmament. He concentrated his attention on relations between the Soviet Communist Party and other communist parties around the world.
After Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, Suslov was able to gain almost total domination over Agitprop, tightly controlling the Party’s direction through its release of information both internally and externally. Prior to 23rd Party Congress, a power struggle broke out between Suslov and Shelepin as to which of the two might be elected as First Secretary, replacing Khrushchev. This allowed Leonid Brezhnev to move in and consolidate power, taking the position for himself.
Suslov suffered a political setback that in other Politburo men might have proved fatal when he attempted to rehabilitate Stalin in the late 1960s. Although party chief Leonid Brezhnev was generally too self-indulgent and lazy to make a serious effort to curb his other Politburo members, Suslov’s efforts upset the Central Committee elite. They, along with foremost members of the Soviet intelligentsia launched a protest that forced Brezhnev to step in and stop Suslov’s project.
Despite this setback, Suslov, an unapologetic Stalinist, retained his Politburo seat and regained his influence. He was the State’s ultra-orthodox advocate for ideological purity, increasingly rigid in his stance. Brezhnev, who disliked anything intellectual, recognized he was no innovator in Marxist-Leninist theory, and increasingly relied on Suslov’s analyses of theoretical issues. Suslov’s dogmatism and caution suited Brezhnev, although Suslov’s unyielding view often exacerbated the Soviet Union’s relations with reform-minded communist parties, such as the Yugoslav and Italian parties. Brezhnev turned to Suslov to advise him on China policy as soon as Khrushchev had been removed.
Brezhnev basically turned over the responsibility of administering the party and state apparat to Suslov, including the Department for Liaison with Socialist Countries. Suslov also managed the personnel policy, using his power to position his own people preferably ideological hardliners like himself- in key roles, and to remove those who (like Alexander Yakolev, later a Gorbachev supporters) opposed him.
Suslov spent much of the 1960s supporting, funding and encouraging Communist parties around the world, particularly those in capitalist nations looking to foment an uprising. That included supplying and arming Communist, but nationalist, German rebels in the former Saarland, in 1965. He was supportive of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, but did not get along well with Che Guevara.
In 1967, Suslov, declared that Communism had grown faster than any other ideology in history, faster than the great religions of the world had spread. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he argued, Communism had spread from Russia to the “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe and to China. By Suslov’s count, seven million Communist militants were active in 27 developed capitalist countries and in 47 national liberation movements. He predicted the excesses of capitalism would continue to push the historical dialectic in the direction of Communism, as Karl Marx had foretold.
However, Suslov is also mentioned as one of the four Politburo members (out of 11) who opposed the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
An odd occurrence happened in January, 1969. Twenty-two-year-old Viktor Ilyin apparently decided to kill Brezhnev to let Suslov take his place. On January, 22, he fired at Brezhnev’s motorcade as it was driving into the Kremlins gate. He succeeded in killing one of the chauffeurs and wounding a cyclist, but Brezhnev escaped.
In 1970, Suslov made a speech declaring "the general crisis of capitalism" favoured a rapid increase in industrial strikes. He argued that, in 1965, a total of 26 million people went on strike in Western nations, but by 1969 the figure had grown to more than 60 million. And in the ten months up prior to his speech, the total had passed the 63 million mark. He warned the non-Communist nations were doomed to defeat against the increasing impact of subversion and revolution.
Around that time, Mikhail Gorbachev came to the attention of two top Politburo members - Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov. They took him under their collective wing and got him elected to the Central Committee in 1971. They also arranged foreign trips for their rising star – a rare privilege in the USSR. Gorbachev was appointed a party secretary of agriculture in 1978. He became a candidate member of the Politburo in 1979 and a full member in 1980. Suslov became Gorbachev’s political mentor.
In 1975, Brezhnev suffered a stroke that incapacitated him for a while. Suslov and Andrey Kirilenko assumed some of his functions until he recovered.
Suslov’s last known major political gambit came in 1979 when he prepared a plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II, the Polish Pope elected in 1978. KGB files from the former Communist Czech secret service revealed the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow became greatly alarmed at John Paul II’s election. Because party chief Leonid Brezhnev was terminally ill at that time, Suslov prepared the plan himself. He was evidently deeply concerned that John Paul II could establish close relations with the Russian Orthodox church in the Soviet Union and undermine the regime.
Also in 1979, Suslov encouraged invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow former poster-boy for Communism, Hafizullah Amin, whose bent for modernization was upsetting the conservative religious community in Afghanistan, and replace him with Babrak Karmal - someone Suslov saw as more compliant towards Soviet goals and less likely to cause trouble. But the Afghanis wanted no part of a Soviet puppet regime and war broke out.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, Suslov fought to curb any attempt at moderation by the Polish Communist Party to find a political compromise to social conflict with the Solidarity movement. In 1980, Suslov visited Poland to give a stern warning to the Polish party, and when he returned to Moscow, published a statement in TASS on the danger in the Polish Communist Party of revisionists who sought to "paralyze" the party's role as "the leading force in society." That was followed by a letter from the Central Committee to the Polish Communist Party deploring how the Polish Communist Party leadership had surrendered "one position after another to the counter revolution." In 1981, following a recommendation by a Politburo commission chaired by Suslov, martial law was declared in Poland to suppress the Solidarity movement.
According to Andrei Gromyko, in 1980, Suslov was adamant the USSR had to respond to the please for help from the Soviet’s puppet government in Afghanistan, and act in accordance with the Soviet-Afghan treaty to save the government from being overthrown. He convinced Brezhnev troops were required, and Brezhnev convinced the rest of the Politburo. In June, 1980, the Assembly of the Central Committee unanimously approved the decision of the Politburo.
Two days before he died, Suslov maneuvered to protect his boss, Brezhnev, from a political scandal that involved his aging party-girl daughter, Galina Churbanova, and her flamboyant consort, Boris Buryatia (Galina’s high-flying antics while she was married to the Deputy Minister of the Interior were a constant source of embarrassment for Brezhnev). The KGB had traced a theft of diamonds to Boris, who was running a successful diamond-smuggling operation with Galina.
When KGB Gen. Semyon Tsvigun - the number-two man at the KGB, and Brezhnev's brother-in-law – tried to arrest Boris, Suslov intervened. He confronted Tsvigun and advised him to commit suicide rather than embarrass the Leader. The general shot himself on Jan. 19. Two days later, Suslov suffered a heart attack and died on Jan. 25. One day later, during Suslov's state funeral, the KGB arrested Boris.
Suslov's death was followed by a bitter internecine battle among the aging leaders (the 'gerontocracy') who remained. Yuri Andropov, KGB head, secured Suslov's role as head of Soviet ideology (quickly bumping Konstantin Chernenko from the spot) , using his power to sideline his opponents Kirilenko and Chernenko. Chernenko took over as General Secretary in 1984, when Andropov died, to be succeeded by Gorbachev, in 1985. And shortly after that, the USSR fell apart and Communism ceased to be a major political or economic power anywhere (even in China, where it has been gradually replaced by a market economy since 1975).
Suslov was perhaps the most powerful man in the USSR and held his power for longer than most of its leaders. He survived - and prospered - in the most competitive, voracious political enviroment of our time. He played kingmaker, he ruled the administration, he set policy and procedure. Yet despite four decades climbing the Party's hierarchy few of us in the west even recognize his name.
Who was this man? He was hardly ever seen by western eyes, just a tall, gaunt figure lurking in the background at Party events, seldom photographed (in a cult where having one’s beaming face photographed for the media at every possible occasion was almost obligatory). He was unknown for his writing outside the USSR (many Soviet leaders had prodigious bodies of works under their names, albeit often the product of state ghost writers). His narrow chest wasn’t bedecked with racks of medals and ribbons.
Yet Suslov survived four decades at the top of Soviet politics, one of the most ruthless venues for power, and prospered there. And, depending on your source, he may have been the power behind the throne for much of that period, the kingmaker who made – and unmade – some if the top Communist leaders.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Suslov was born on November 21, 1902, in Shakhovskoye, a village in Russia west of the Volga, not far from Lenin’s own birthplace. He died of a stroke (or heart attack?) on January 25, 1982, in Moscow.
Suslov joined the Communist Party in 1921 and over the next two decades, rose in the ranks until he was made a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In 1921, Suslov was sent to Moscow for his education. For a short while, he was a teacher of economics, but his real career lay in the Party ranks. He was chosen to supervise Stalin’s purges in the Urals and Ukraine in the 1930s. He was so successful in following Stalin’s wishes, he was then sent to the Caucasus where he quickly rose to become a ruling member of the local Party apparatus. When World War II broke out, Suslov was picked to supervise the deportation of ethnic minorities to Siberia.
In 1941, he was named to the party's central committee. He rose rapidly in the political hothouse. He took over the role of the Party’s leading theoretician, and was known for his strident condemnation of any deviations from Soviet policy by Party members both domestically and internationally. He was particularly vocal in his anti-Yugoslav/anti-Tito propaganda in 1948. In the post-war years, he was appointed head of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee.
In late 1944, the All-Union Communist Party denounced Lithuanian Communists for their apparent lack of zeal in implementing the land reform and "insufficient determination in uncovering Lithuanian-German bourgeois nationalists." A bureau for Lithuanian affairs was organized, with Mikhail Suslov as its chairman. Suslov’s talent for hard-line repression made him the obvious choice to re-impose Soviet rule. He proved merciless in his repression of all attempts at resistance. He sent entire villages to prison camps in Siberia.
In 1946, Suslov condemned the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), established by the Soviets in 1942 to mobilize international Jewish support for the Soviet war effort. The JAC’s leadership included the USSR’s top 25 writers, artists, doctors, scientists and government officials. After the war ended, responsibility for the JAC was transferred to Suslov. In November 1946, he made a secret report to the Politburo, warning the JAC was becoming increasingly nationalistic and Zionist in its support for ‘the reactionary idea of a single Jewish nation’. Suslov recommended the JAC should be ‘liquidated’, but Stalin was not ready to act. Events in the Middle East suggested that the Soviet regime could extend its influence, and this was not the time to alienate international Jewish
opinion.
His next step up the ladder came in 1952 when he was appointed as a secretary to the Politburo. Stalin, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Brezhnev were among his peers. His first act was to remove P.N. Fedoseev as editor of The Communist, the principal theoretical organ of the Russian CP. Suslov criticized Fedoseev for propagating the economic theories of N. Voznosensky, former head of Gosplan, but later persona non-grata in Soviet ideology and removed from his post in 1949 because Stalin had disagreed with his liberal approach to market economy.
Although his protector, Stalin, died in 1953, Suslov managed to hold onto his seat in the struggle that followed. In their book, The Unknown Stalin, Roy and Zhores Medvedev put forward the theory Suslov was Stalin’s “secret heir,” and this was exposed by Khrushchev in his “secret speech” of 1956.
In 1955, Suslov was elected a full member of the Central Committee – the Presidium. He was re-elected to the Central Committee in 1956, when Khrushchev was appointed First Secretary. He stayed in it until his death, 26 years later.
Suslov had assumed a pivotal position in the ruling clique as the party’s ruling theoretician. Suslov maneuvered behind the scenes – possibly having a lead, but hidden, hand in the coup that replaced Beria with Nikita Khrushchev in 1953. Although he was one of Stalin’s handpicked henchmen, Suslov managed deftly to survive the de-Stalinization campaign of 1956-1962 by throwing his support behind Khrushchev.
During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Suslov supervised Yuri Andropov, then the Soviet ambassador to Hungary, on how to repress the Hungarian freedom movement. After Andropov returned to Moscow, in 1957, Suslov recommended him for the job of Head of Central Committee Department for Relations with Communist and Workers Parties in Socialist Nations. Later, Suslov would pull some strings to get Andropov appointed head of the KGB.
When Khrushchev faced a conspiracy in the Politburo in 1957, Suslov helped quell the opposition. In propping up Khrushchev, the conservative Suslov further cemented his position as defender of the status quo. But he later turned on the increasingly eccentric and voluble Khrushchev, and helped organize the coup that installed Leonid Brezhnev at the top of the Politburo, in 1964.
The break between Suslov and Khrushchev likely began with Khrushchev's public declaration that the USSR had achieved socialism, in 1961, combined with Khrushchev's mishandling of the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises. As ideologue, Suslov - and many other Politburo members - did not want to announce socialism as a Soviet achievement, because it simply had not been reached. It was seen as an important stage along the journey to Communism. Worse for the nation, the growing conflict with the West was causing significant stress on the economy.
Khrushchev wanted a PR coup to boost his flagging popularity, so he overrode his party's objections and declared it. Suslov, the party’s top watchdog over ideological matters for much of his time in the Secretariat, was not impressed with Khrushchev's incursion into his realm. Khrushchev evidently thought the quiet Suslov would follow his lead, but he was wrong. Shortly after, Khrushchev was ousted and Brezhnev inserted as leader.
Officially, however, it was Khrushchev’s failed policy over the belligerent Chinese Communists that brought him down. Suslov, of course, had been the author of the policy Khrushchev had flouted (Suslov and Andrei Gromyko were the only Soviet officials who took part in all of Khrushchev’s talks with Mao Tse Tung and Zhou Enlai) . He allied with Shelepin, Brezhnev and Malinkovsky to bring him down, making a secret speech of his own in which he criticized Khrushchev’s one-man rule. Many of Khrushchev’s policies and appointments were reversed after he was ousted.
Tall, lanky and looking intellectual behind thick-framed glasses, Suslov gathered his resources quietly, didn’t make waves, and quietly put built himself a power base that lasted until his death in 1982. According to some analysts, Suslov essentially ran the Party between 1952 and 1982, although he never assumed a public face in that role. One note of interest: in the invective-dense conversations of Politburo members, Suslov was one of only three members who never cursed (Andropov and Gromyko being the other two).
As the Party ideologue, Suslov had control over much of the Party’s information flow and output, but also over the output from the intelligentsia. Writer Vasiliy Grossman submitted his novel about Stalingrad and Stalinism, Life and Fate, for publication in 1960. However, despite promises of publication, in February 1961, the KGB seized the manuscript, and confiscated all known copies from Grossman's flat. Suslov told Grossman that his novel was “more hostile to the ideals of the Russian Revolution than was Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.” He declared that Life and Fate could not be published for at least 250 years (it was published in the West in the 1980s).
After Khrushchev’s fall from power, Suslov hitched his wagon to Brezhnev’s rising star and Suslov's position as the chief ideologue was fixed in the Soviet firmament. He concentrated his attention on relations between the Soviet Communist Party and other communist parties around the world.
After Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, Suslov was able to gain almost total domination over Agitprop, tightly controlling the Party’s direction through its release of information both internally and externally. Prior to 23rd Party Congress, a power struggle broke out between Suslov and Shelepin as to which of the two might be elected as First Secretary, replacing Khrushchev. This allowed Leonid Brezhnev to move in and consolidate power, taking the position for himself.
Suslov suffered a political setback that in other Politburo men might have proved fatal when he attempted to rehabilitate Stalin in the late 1960s. Although party chief Leonid Brezhnev was generally too self-indulgent and lazy to make a serious effort to curb his other Politburo members, Suslov’s efforts upset the Central Committee elite. They, along with foremost members of the Soviet intelligentsia launched a protest that forced Brezhnev to step in and stop Suslov’s project.
Despite this setback, Suslov, an unapologetic Stalinist, retained his Politburo seat and regained his influence. He was the State’s ultra-orthodox advocate for ideological purity, increasingly rigid in his stance. Brezhnev, who disliked anything intellectual, recognized he was no innovator in Marxist-Leninist theory, and increasingly relied on Suslov’s analyses of theoretical issues. Suslov’s dogmatism and caution suited Brezhnev, although Suslov’s unyielding view often exacerbated the Soviet Union’s relations with reform-minded communist parties, such as the Yugoslav and Italian parties. Brezhnev turned to Suslov to advise him on China policy as soon as Khrushchev had been removed.
Brezhnev basically turned over the responsibility of administering the party and state apparat to Suslov, including the Department for Liaison with Socialist Countries. Suslov also managed the personnel policy, using his power to position his own people preferably ideological hardliners like himself- in key roles, and to remove those who (like Alexander Yakolev, later a Gorbachev supporters) opposed him.
Suslov spent much of the 1960s supporting, funding and encouraging Communist parties around the world, particularly those in capitalist nations looking to foment an uprising. That included supplying and arming Communist, but nationalist, German rebels in the former Saarland, in 1965. He was supportive of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, but did not get along well with Che Guevara.
In 1967, Suslov, declared that Communism had grown faster than any other ideology in history, faster than the great religions of the world had spread. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he argued, Communism had spread from Russia to the “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe and to China. By Suslov’s count, seven million Communist militants were active in 27 developed capitalist countries and in 47 national liberation movements. He predicted the excesses of capitalism would continue to push the historical dialectic in the direction of Communism, as Karl Marx had foretold.
However, Suslov is also mentioned as one of the four Politburo members (out of 11) who opposed the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
An odd occurrence happened in January, 1969. Twenty-two-year-old Viktor Ilyin apparently decided to kill Brezhnev to let Suslov take his place. On January, 22, he fired at Brezhnev’s motorcade as it was driving into the Kremlins gate. He succeeded in killing one of the chauffeurs and wounding a cyclist, but Brezhnev escaped.
In 1970, Suslov made a speech declaring "the general crisis of capitalism" favoured a rapid increase in industrial strikes. He argued that, in 1965, a total of 26 million people went on strike in Western nations, but by 1969 the figure had grown to more than 60 million. And in the ten months up prior to his speech, the total had passed the 63 million mark. He warned the non-Communist nations were doomed to defeat against the increasing impact of subversion and revolution.
Around that time, Mikhail Gorbachev came to the attention of two top Politburo members - Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov. They took him under their collective wing and got him elected to the Central Committee in 1971. They also arranged foreign trips for their rising star – a rare privilege in the USSR. Gorbachev was appointed a party secretary of agriculture in 1978. He became a candidate member of the Politburo in 1979 and a full member in 1980. Suslov became Gorbachev’s political mentor.
In 1975, Brezhnev suffered a stroke that incapacitated him for a while. Suslov and Andrey Kirilenko assumed some of his functions until he recovered.
Suslov’s last known major political gambit came in 1979 when he prepared a plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II, the Polish Pope elected in 1978. KGB files from the former Communist Czech secret service revealed the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow became greatly alarmed at John Paul II’s election. Because party chief Leonid Brezhnev was terminally ill at that time, Suslov prepared the plan himself. He was evidently deeply concerned that John Paul II could establish close relations with the Russian Orthodox church in the Soviet Union and undermine the regime.
Also in 1979, Suslov encouraged invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow former poster-boy for Communism, Hafizullah Amin, whose bent for modernization was upsetting the conservative religious community in Afghanistan, and replace him with Babrak Karmal - someone Suslov saw as more compliant towards Soviet goals and less likely to cause trouble. But the Afghanis wanted no part of a Soviet puppet regime and war broke out.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, Suslov fought to curb any attempt at moderation by the Polish Communist Party to find a political compromise to social conflict with the Solidarity movement. In 1980, Suslov visited Poland to give a stern warning to the Polish party, and when he returned to Moscow, published a statement in TASS on the danger in the Polish Communist Party of revisionists who sought to "paralyze" the party's role as "the leading force in society." That was followed by a letter from the Central Committee to the Polish Communist Party deploring how the Polish Communist Party leadership had surrendered "one position after another to the counter revolution." In 1981, following a recommendation by a Politburo commission chaired by Suslov, martial law was declared in Poland to suppress the Solidarity movement.
According to Andrei Gromyko, in 1980, Suslov was adamant the USSR had to respond to the please for help from the Soviet’s puppet government in Afghanistan, and act in accordance with the Soviet-Afghan treaty to save the government from being overthrown. He convinced Brezhnev troops were required, and Brezhnev convinced the rest of the Politburo. In June, 1980, the Assembly of the Central Committee unanimously approved the decision of the Politburo.
Two days before he died, Suslov maneuvered to protect his boss, Brezhnev, from a political scandal that involved his aging party-girl daughter, Galina Churbanova, and her flamboyant consort, Boris Buryatia (Galina’s high-flying antics while she was married to the Deputy Minister of the Interior were a constant source of embarrassment for Brezhnev). The KGB had traced a theft of diamonds to Boris, who was running a successful diamond-smuggling operation with Galina.
When KGB Gen. Semyon Tsvigun - the number-two man at the KGB, and Brezhnev's brother-in-law – tried to arrest Boris, Suslov intervened. He confronted Tsvigun and advised him to commit suicide rather than embarrass the Leader. The general shot himself on Jan. 19. Two days later, Suslov suffered a heart attack and died on Jan. 25. One day later, during Suslov's state funeral, the KGB arrested Boris.
Suslov's death was followed by a bitter internecine battle among the aging leaders (the 'gerontocracy') who remained. Yuri Andropov, KGB head, secured Suslov's role as head of Soviet ideology (quickly bumping Konstantin Chernenko from the spot) , using his power to sideline his opponents Kirilenko and Chernenko. Chernenko took over as General Secretary in 1984, when Andropov died, to be succeeded by Gorbachev, in 1985. And shortly after that, the USSR fell apart and Communism ceased to be a major political or economic power anywhere (even in China, where it has been gradually replaced by a market economy since 1975).
Suslov was perhaps the most powerful man in the USSR and held his power for longer than most of its leaders. He survived - and prospered - in the most competitive, voracious political enviroment of our time. He played kingmaker, he ruled the administration, he set policy and procedure. Yet despite four decades climbing the Party's hierarchy few of us in the west even recognize his name.
