• Mariupol, Ukraine

    From David P.@21:1/5 to All on Sun Mar 20 16:11:45 2022
    From 1948 to 1989, the city was named Zhdanov, after the Soviet
    functionary Andrei Zhdanov, as part of the practice of renaming
    cities after Communist leaders.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariupol
    ------------------
    Zhdanov made a political comeback during 1946, when his main rival,
    Malenkov, temporarily lost his position as a party secretary. For
    the next two years, he was delegated by Stalin to direct the Soviet
    Union's cultural policy and to handle relations with the Eastern
    European states under or coming under communist control. He formulated
    what became known as the Zhdanov Doctrine ("The only conflict that
    is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best").
    In December 1946, he launched the attack on Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, two writers living in Zhdanov's former Leningrad fiefdom.
    He described Akhmatova, arguably then the greatest living Russian poet,
    as "half nun, half whore".

    In 1947, he organised the Cominform, which was designed to coordinate
    and control the communist parties around the world. At a famous speech
    at Szklarska Poręba in Sept 1947, Zhdanov warned his fellow communists
    that the world was now split into two hostile camps and that the
    Cominform was needed to oppose the "frank expansionist programme" of the US.

    In Jan 1948, he presided over a 3-day conference in the Kremlin, to
    which more than 70 composers, musicians and music critics, including
    Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, and Nikolai Myaskovsky were summoned to be lectured by Zhdanov on why they should
    avoid "formalism" in music. A persistent story is that Zhdanov played
    the piano during the conference to demonstrate how music should be
    written, but years later that story was furiously denied by Shostakovich,
    who attributed it to "toadies". Zhdanov's cultural policy rested on the Soviets' "critically assimilating the cultural heritage of all nations
    and all times" to "take what was most inspiring".

    In Jun 1948, Stalin sent Zhdanov to the Cominform meeting in Bucharest.
    Its purpose was to condemn Yugoslavia, but Zhdanov took a more restrained
    line than his co-delegate and rival, Georgy Malenkov. That infuriated
    Stalin, who removed Zhdanov from all his posts and replaced him with
    Malenkov. Zhdanov was soon transferred to a sanatorium.

    Zhdanov died on 31 Aug 1948 in Moscow of heart failure. It's possible
    that his death was the result of an intentional misdiagnosis. Zhdanov
    was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in one of the 12 individual
    tombs located between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Zhdanov

    =============

    "Zhdanovshchina" was the emphasis on purified communist ideology
    developed during the World War II by Andrei Zhdanov. It emerged
    from Zhdanov's debates inside the party hierarchy opposing
    Malenkov's pragmatist faction. Malenkov stressed universal values
    of science and engineering, and proposed to promote technological
    experts to the highest positions in the Soviet administrative
    elite. Zhdanov's faction said proper ideology trumped science and
    called for prioritizing political education and ideological purity.
    However the technocrats had proven amazingly successful during the
    war in terms of engineering, industrial production, and development
    of advanced munitions. Zhdanov sought to use the ideological
    purification of the party as a vehicle to restore the Kremlin's
    political control over the provinces and the technocrats. He worried
    that the provincial party bosses and the heads of the economic
    ministries had achieved too a high degree of autonomy during the
    war, when the top leadership realized the urgent need for maximum
    mobilization of human and material resources. The highest priority
    in the postwar era was physical reconstruction after the massive
    wartime destruction. The same argument that strengthened the
    technocrats continue to operate, and the united opposition of
    Malenkov, the technocrats, the provincial party bosses, and the key
    ministries doomed Zhdanov's proposals. He therefore pivoted to devote Zhdanovshchina to purification of the arts and culture.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Malenkov#Defeating_Zhdanovshchina

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