The Leningrad Affair, 1949-1952—The Beginning of the End
Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on January 30, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a Russian history workshop (kruzhok) with David Brandenberger.
The Leningrad Affair, one of the last and least-well understood of Stalin’s political purges, had a transformative effect on the postwar history of the USSR. Not only did it claim the lives of two leaders who Joseph Stalin had tapped to succeed him (Aleksei Kuznetsov and Nikolai Voznesenskii), but it compromised other prominent members of the party elite (Viacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoian and Aleksei Kosygin). It gutted the country’s third largest party organization, stymied discussions of reform and exacerbated the country’s hyper-centralization. Ultimately, the purge left Georgii Malenkov, Lavrentii Beriia and Nikita Khrushchev to assume power after Stalin’s death in 1953—a motley group of party bosses whose inconsistent leadership rocked Soviet society, confused its communist allies and roiled its Cold War rivals into the mid-1960s.
Such fallout has long justified a thorough investigation of this purge. That said, despite the importance of the Leningrad Affair to understanding the dynamics of postwar Soviet politics, remarkably little is known about the purge itself. This is largely due to the inaccessibility of key archival documents—circumstances that have hamstrung all attempts to thoroughly investigate the origins of the Leningrad Affair as well as its destructive course and impact. This book combines recently declassified material with accessible but overlooked archival files in order to tell a vivid story of vicious party infighting, bloody political violence and personal tragedy within the communist elite during the last years of Stalin’s life.
