Everything about Nikolai Bulganin totally explained
Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin (
Nikolaj Aleksandrovič Bulganin; –
February 24 1975) was a prominent
Soviet politician, who served as Minister of Defense (1953-55) and Prime Minister (1955-58).
Bulganin was born in
Nizhny Novgorod, the son of an office worker. He joined the
Bolshevik Party in
1917, and in
1918 he was recruited into the
Cheka, the Bolshevik regime's political police, where he served until
1922. After the
Russian Civil War he became an industrial manager, working in the electricity administration until
1927, and as director of the
Moscow electricity supply in
1927-
31. From
1931 to
1937 he was chairman of the executive committee of the Moscow City Soviet.
In
1934 the Communist Party's XVII Party Congress elected Bulganin a candidate member of the
Central Committee. A loyal Stalinist, he was promoted rapidly as other leaders fell victim to
Joseph Stalin's
Great Purge of
1937-
38. In July
1937 he was appointed Prime Minister of the
Russian Republic (RSFSR). He became a full member of the Central Committee later that year, and in September
1938 he became Deputy Prime Minister of the
Soviet Union, and also head of the
State Bank of the USSR.
During
World War II Bulganin played a leading role in the government, and also in the
Red Army, although he was never a front-line commander. He was given the rank of
Colonel-General and was a member of the
State Committee of Defense. In
1944 he was appointed Deputy Commissar for Defense, under Stalin, and served as Stalin's principal agent in the High Command of the
Red Army. In
1946 he became Minister for the Armed Forces and was promoted to the rank of
Marshal of the Soviet Union. He also became a candidate member of the
Politburo of the Communist Party. He was again Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, under Stalin, from
1947 to
1950. In
1948 he became a full member of the Politburo.
After Stalin
After Stalin's death in March
1953, Bulganin moved into the first rank of the Soviet leadership, being appointed to the key post of Defense Minister. He was an ally of
Nikita Khrushchev during his power struggle with
Georgy Malenkov, and in February
1955 he succeeded Malenkov as
Premier of the Soviet Union. He was generally seen as a supporter of Khrushchev's programme of reform and
destalinization. He and Khrushchev travelled together to
India,
Yugoslavia and
Britain, where they were known in the press as "the B and K show."
By
1957, however, Bulganin had come to share the doubts held about Khrushchev's liberal policies by the conservative group (the so-called "
Anti-Party Group") led by
Vyacheslav Molotov. In June, when the conservatives tried to remove Khrushchev from power at a meeting of the Politburo, Bulganin vacillated between the two camps. When the conservatives were defeated and removed from power, Bulganin survived for a while, but in March
1958, at a session of the
Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev forced his resignation. He was appointed chairman of the Soviet
State Bank, a job he'd held two decades before, but in September Bulganin was removed from the Central Committee and deprived of the title of Marshal. He was dispatched to
Stavropol as chairman of
Regional Economic Council, a token position, and in February
1960 he was retired on a pension.
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