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Alexander Nikolaevich Shelepin

Alexander Nikolayevich ("Iron Shurik", with a hint of "iron Felix") Shelepin (August 18, 1918 - October 24, 1994) was a party leader and statesman, member of the Central Committee and Politburo of the CPSU, head of the KGB from December 25, 1958 to November 13, 1961. Shelepin returned the cult of Dzerzhinsky, a Chekist idealist, who reliably defends the Soviet man. Shelepin went down in history as the man who organized the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev.

Alexander Shelepin was born in August 1918. He grew up in Voronezh in the family of a railwayman. The qualities of the leader awoke in him early. He became secretary of the Komsomol committee, and graduated with honors from the school, having received a pocket watch from Pavel Bure. Having graduated with honors from high school, he studied at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (MIFLI).

During the Great Patriotic War he was engaged in the recruitment of youth into partisans. He himself, by the way, did not fight in that dashing time. He spent several months in the Finnish war - deputy political instructor, commissar of the squadron, but he did not take part in the Great Patriotic War, for which then someone would reproach him: he sent others to battle, and sat himself in Moscow. It was he who attracted Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya to partisan activities. Zoe's fate was tragic. She did not actually have time to do anything - the Germans immediately caught her and as an incendiary in the first days of December 1941 were executed.

Zoya's outrageous execution by the Germans attracted Stalin's attention to Shelepin - which predetermined his fast career. In the Young Communist League, many made a career, writing denunciations to their superiors, knowing that this is the best way to advance. In 1943 Shelepin became one of the secretaries of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, from 1952 to 1958 he headed the Komsomol. He accompanied Khrushchev on his trip to China (1954), and in 1957 supervised the preparation and holding in Moscow of the VI World Festival of Youth and Students.

On December 25, 1958 Shelepin became the head of the KGB. Khrushchev appointed him to this post. Khrushchev explained that working in the KGB is the same party and political work, but with specificity. The KGB needs a fresh man who is intolerant of any abuses by the Chekists. In conclusion, AN Shelepin recalled, Nikita Sergeyevich suddenly said: "I have another request for you: do everything so that I will not be overheard".

Shelepin placed an emphasis on electronic intelligence and the work of decipherers who read foreign coded messages. With him in 1959 appeared the service "D", which later became the service "A" - "active measures", that is, disinformation. Its main target was West Germany, which was accused of neo-Nazism and revanchism.

In February 1960, Shelepin issued an order stating: "There has been no endeavor to provide Cheka's surveillance to many objects where, in fact, there are no serious interests from the point of view of ensuring state security." In other words, the chekists simply did not have enough work. They invented it. There are not many spies, there are a lot of Chekists.

Khrushchev proposed with the task set to restructure the work of the Committee in accordance with the decisions of the Twentieth Party Congress : accelerate de-Stalinization and eradicate violations of socialist legality. Conducted a large-scale reorganization of the Committee with a reduction of the working apparatus by several thousand people, while actively attracting Komsomol workers to work; thoroughly restructured the structure of the Committee, instead of the task forces, forming a single centralized management body.

Khrushchev set before Shelepin the task of restoring the work of the KGB in the spirit of the decisions of the Twentieth Party Congress : to accelerate de-Stalinization and eradicate "violations of socialist legality." Shelepin demoted or dismissed several thousand KGB officers, replacing them with people from communist organizations, especially from the Komsomol. But at the same time, he tried to return the state security agencies the importance they had in the Stalin era. Shelepin attempted to release from the prison the prominent assistants of Beria, N.Eitingon and P.Sudoplatov. Together with Prosecutor General R. Rudenko, he arranged for the early release of Stalin's son, Vasily.

It was under Shelepin that the KGB saboteur Bogdan Stashinsky killed Stepan Bandera in Munich (October 15, 1959. In the 1950s, Shelepin destroyed many documents related to the Katyn massacre, so that the truth about it was not disclosed. However, his report of March 3, 1959 to Khrushchev on the execution of 21,857 Poles and the proposal to liquidate their personal affairs remained in the archives and later were made public.

In February 1960 Shelepin abolished the 4th Department of the KGB, which was engaged in surveillancefor the intelligentsia, and its' chief - Lieutenant-General Pitovranov - was sent to Beijing as a representative to the Chinese intelligence service. But soon the situation is changing. Khrushchev had decided that his fear after the Hungarian and Polish events was excessive and the measures taken then were too harsh, but he decides to soften punitive measures and even cancellation of some sentences already passed. But Shelepin not only did not support this slightly more liberal course, but tried to hinder him to the best of his ability. During Shelepin's tenure (in the summer of 1961), Khrushchev and the Central Committee instructed the KGB to support "anti-colonialist" movements in Central America and in African countries. The policy of military support for the "national liberation movement" was actively supported by Cuba, the role played by Che Guevara and Algerian Ben Bella.

In 1961, at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, the chairman of the KGB, Shelepin made a sharp anti-Stalinist speech, spoke of repression, and called figures. He declared: "The state security bodies have been reorganized, significantly reduced, freed from their uncharacteristic functions, cleared of careerist elements ... The state security bodies were no longer afraid of what the enemies of Beria and his henchmen tried to do in the recent past, but the truly popular political bodies of our party in in the direct sense of the word ... Now the Chekists can look with a clear conscience into the eyes of the party, into the eyes of the Soviet people."

At the first plenum after the congress, October 31, 1961, Shelepin was elected secretary of the Central Committee. This was the beginning of a fast-moving party career. In the KGB, he worked for less than three years. Two weeks after he left the post of chairman of the KGB, his friend and comrade Vladimir Efimovich Semichastny, who had previously been the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, was appointed to the vacated seat.

As secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Shelepin is believed to have continued to control the KGB, which was directly led by his protege, Vladimir Semichastny. In June 1962 Shelepin traveled to the place of unrest in Novocherkassk (together with A. Kirilenko) and made decisions about reprisals against "troublemakers".

On November 23, 1962 Shelepin was appointed deputy prime minister (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR) and - the same day - Chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control under the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers (just formed as a result of the merger of the State Control Commission of the Council of Ministers and the Party Control Committee of the Central Committee ). It was a very powerful elevation. The plenum of the Central Committee, at the suggestion of Khrushchev, decided to form a Committee for Party and State Control. This organ was created with enormous, almost unlimited powers, which was given the right to control the party organs, the government, the Armed Forces, and even the KGB. The structure of the committee was duplicated by both the government and the Central Committee apparatus. The Committee received the right to investigate, impose penalties on the guilty parties and refer cases to the prosecutor's office and the court.

It is said that the first two deputy prime ministers Kosygin and Mikoyan tried to prevent this, realizing that the creation of a new committee significantly weakens the power of the Council of Ministers. Chairman of the committee Khrushchev appointed Shelepin. And at the same time he made him deputy head of government: "He will have to deal with ministers, with state agencies and he needs to have the necessary powers." Such a set of posts made Shelepin one of the most influential people in the country. Historians even conclude that the real power in the country was gradually shifting from Khrushchev to Shelepin.

Shelepin was the main organizer of the conspiracy against Khrushchev in October 1964, providing the conspirators with the support of the KGB. In August 1964, at a meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, where it was about Khrushchev's resignation, Shelepin, and even with the main speech, had no right to speak - he was the secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, but was not a member of the Presidium. Nevertheless, it was he who presided over the presidium meeting.

When Khrushchev was overthrown, many expected that Shelepin would become the head of the party and state. "Iron Shurik" had an unusually influential position, heading a powerful conservative faction within the CPSU and having two high positions: one under the Council of Ministers (deputy head), and the second in the party leadership (secretary of the Central Committee). Shelepin supported the remnants of the Stalinists in power, who believed that the meaning of the overthrow of Khrushchev consisted in returning to the methods of Stalin. Shelepin opposed the relaxation of tension with the West and advocated an internal policy aimed at "strengthening discipline" and supporting purely Russian interests within the USSR.

But with the support of his "Komsomol friends" he achieved only the appointment of himself in November 1964 as a member of the Politburo. Other Soviet leaders carefully watched Shelepin, restraining his ambitions. Could Alexander Shelepin become the first person in the country after all? His weak point was the lack of practical experience. From the Komsomol he immediately went to the KGB, and then to the Central Committee. He never led a region, he did not deal with issues of the national economy.

Shelepin represented a young, educated part of the apparatus, which came to public office after the war. She proceeded from the fact that the economy needs to be updated, in reforms and, above all, in technical modernization. She wanted economic reforms with a rigid ideological line. This is about the way that China chose under Deng Xiaoping. Young party leaders supported Kosygin and Shelepin. If Shelepin headed the country, the country would go, relatively speaking, along the Chinese way. The "Komsomol conspiracy" was preparing to push Brezhnev out of power, but in December 1965 Shelepin was stripped by his colleagues by the post of deputy head of government and chairman of the party-state control committee. Shelepin was demoted in July 1967 to the insignificant post of head of the AUCCTU (All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions). Shelepin, as a man of great energy, began to visit factories and communicate with workers. He put forward a program of social support for the working class, started construction of sanatoriums for workers. His popularity grew His supporters continued to be removed from important bureaucratic positions. During a visit to the UK with a trade union delegation in 1975 Shelepin was met there by demonstrations of protest. In Moscow, this scandal was used to remove him from the Politburo (April 1975) and to dismiss his as head of the Council of Trade Unions (May 1975). In 1975-1984 Shelepin worked as deputy chairman of the USSR State Committee for Vocational Education, then retired.

Shelepin's pension was small, it was hard to live. Ten years later he died.