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
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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
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"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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