Childhood and education Aleksandrov was born in 1908 who, as a Secretary of the Central Committee, retained overall supervision over Communist propaganda in the USSR. In 1941 Aleksandrov was also made a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee and, on 19 March 1946, a member of its
Orgburo. In 1946 he was also elected a member of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Persecution of Anna Akhmatova In 1946, Aleksandrov played a leading part in the campaign to humiliate and intimidate
Anna Akhmatova, who is now recognised as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. In 1940, when on a rare occasion a book of her poems was prepared for publication, Aleksandrov received an angry instruction from Zhdanov to suppress it. In August 1946, a minor agitprop official complained to Aleksandrov about Akhmatova's poetry. Aleksandrov used it to prepare a memo for Zhdanov, for which he or one of his staff dug up a quote from a critical essay written in 1926, which Zhdanov borrowed to denounce Akhmatova as "half nun, half whore", before having her expelled from the Writers' Union, later in August 1946, thus cutting off her source of income. The satirist
Mikhail Zoshchenko was denounced and expelled from the Writers' Union at the same time as Akhmatova. In a memo to Zhdanov just before his expulsion, Aleksandrov complained that "in Zoshchenko's depiction, Soviet people are very primitive and limited. The author makes our people look dumb." He also had a minor role in preparing the attack that Zhdanov later launched against the Soviet Union's leading composers. Shortly before he was dismissed form his post in 1947, he compiled a long report complaining about an opera by the minor composer,
Vano Muradeli. His report was overlooked until Stalin watched the opera, and walked out in a fury. This was the start of a campaign which widened to an onslaught against the Soviet Union's greatest living composers, including
Shostakovich and
Prokofiev.
1947 demotion Through most of his career, Aleksandrov was associated with
Georgy Malenkov, who was one of
Joseph Stalin's closest advisors. The historian Werner Hahn believed that he was 'a key member of the Zhdanov group' in 1946–47, 'but later switched sides and became a Malenkov protege.' His apparent change of allegiance may have been connected to the reception given to Aleksandrov's textbook
History of Western European Philosophy (1945), which Stalin privately denounced early in 1947 for overvaluing
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's contributions and underestimating the contributions made by Russian philosophers. In August 1947, Zhdanov led the first public attack on the book, and Aleksandrov lost his Propaganda and Agitation Department position to
Mikhail Suslov and his supporters were purged. Nonetheless, Aleksandrov retained his Orgburo post and was made Director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy. He remained there even after Zhdanov's demotion and subsequent death in 1948 and Malenkov's return to power.
After Stalin When
Georgy Malenkov became the next Soviet Premier after Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, he made Aleksandrov his
minister of culture on 9 March 1954. Aleksandrov, whom the Montenegrin communist
Milovan Djilas described as "a short, pudgy, bald man whose pallor and corpulence proclaimed that he never set foot outside his office" was once again demoted for being involved in a sexual scandal. After his dismissal, the Soviet press reported on his immorality, though the historian
Robert Conquest reckoned: "It seems hard to imagine that such conduct could have gone unnoticed for years, and suddenly come to the horrified attention of the authorities just at the moment when the sinner's faction suffers political defeat." Aleksandrov was sent to
Minsk where he was put in charge of the section of
dialectical and
historical materialism of the Institute of Philosophy and Law at
Belarus Academy of Sciences. He spent the rest of his life working on
sociology and its history. He died in Moscow in 1961 at age 53. ==References==