Dmitri Shepilov

Dmitri Trofimovich Shepilov (Дми́трий Трофи́мович Шепи́лов, Dmitrij Trofimovič Šepilov; 5 November 1905 – 18 August 1995) was a Soviet economist, lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

He graduated from the Law School of the Moscow State University in 1926 and was sent to work in Yakutsk, where he worked as a deputy prosecutor and acting prosecutor for Yakutia.

In 1928–1929 Shepilov worked as an assistant regional prosecutor in Smolensk.

In 1931–1933 Shepilov studied at the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow while simultaneously working as the "responsible secretary" of the magazine On the Agrarian Front.

After graduating in 1933, Shepilov was made head of the political department of a sovkhoz.

In 1935 he was made Deputy Chief of the Sector of Agricultural Science of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In 1937 Shepilov became a Doctor of Science and was made the Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

He also taught economics in Moscow's colleges between 1937 and 1941.

Shortly after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Shepilov joined the Soviet People's Militia (Narodnoe Opolcheniye) in July 1941 and was a Political commissar of its Moscow component during the Battle of Moscow in 1941–1942.

In 1942–1943 he was the political commissar of the 23rd Guards Army and in 1944–1946 of the 4th Guards Army, ending the war with the rank of Major General.

Between May 1945 and February 1946, Shepilov was one of the top Soviet officials in Vienna during the early stages of the Soviet occupation of eastern parts of Austria.

In February 1946, Shepilov was appointed deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Soviet Army's Main Political Directorate.

On 2 August 1946 he became the head of the propaganda department of the main Communist Party daily Pravda.

In mid-1947, the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Communist Party Central Committee Georgy Aleksandrov and his deputies were subject to public criticism for being insufficiently vigilant and removed from their positions.

Shepilov was appointed deputy chief of the Department on 18 September 1947.

Since the new department head, Mikhail Suslov, had other responsibilities, Shepilov had almost complete control of the Department's day-to-day operations.

While in Moscow, Shepilov—famous for his near-eidetic memory, erudition and polished manners (reputedly, he could sing the whole of Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades from memory) —became an expert on Communist ideology and a protégé of Joseph Stalin's chief of Communist ideology Andrei Zhdanov.

One of his first tasks was to assist Zhdanov in disciplining the Soviet Union's two greatest living composers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev.

He selected Shostakovich's Eighth and Ninth Symphonies and Prokofiev's opera War and Peace as the worst examples of what was wrong with Soviet music.

The appointment of Yuri Zhdanov, Andrei Zhdanov's son, to lead the Propaganda Department's Science Sector on 1 December 1947 put Shepilov in the delicate position of supervising his patron's son.

The situation was made even more delicate by the fact that Yuri Zhdanov had just married Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana and the fact that Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's closest advisor at the time, had many enemies in the Soviet leadership.

When in April 1948 Shepilov approved Yuri Zhdanov's speech critical of Soviet biologist and Stalin favorite Trofim Lysenko, it started an intense political battle between Andrei Zhdanov on the one hand and his rivals who were using the episode to discredit Zhdanov.

On 1 July 1948, Zhdanov's main rival, Georgy Malenkov, took over at the Communist Party Secretariat while Zhdanov was sent on a two-month vacation, where he died.

Shepilov, however, not only survived this change at the top, but even improved his position and was appointed as the next head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department on 10 July 1948.

He also survived the next round of the intra-Party struggle associated with the removal and later execution of the Politburo member Nikolai Voznesensky.

However, on 14 July 1949, he was censured by the Central Committee for allowing the Party's main theoretical magazine Bolshevik to publish Voznesensky's book on economics back when Voznesensky was still in power.

In 1952 Stalin put Shepilov in charge of writing a new Soviet economics textbook based on Stalin's recently published treatise Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.

On 18 November 1952, after the 19th Communist Party Congress, Shepilov was appointed editor-in-chief of Pravda.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, Shepilov became an ally and protégé of the new Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev, providing ideological support in the latter's struggle with the Soviet prime minister Georgy Malenkov.

He was made a Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences the same year.

While Malenkov argued in favor of producing more consumer goods, Shepilov emphasized the role of heavy and defense industries and characterized Malenkov's position as follows:

In generally understandable language this means: we surrender the advantage of forcing forward the development of heavy industry, machine construction, energy, chemical industry, electronics, jet technology, guidance systems, and so forth, to the imperialist world... It is hard to imagine a more anti-scientific, rotten theory, which could disarm our people more.

In September 1954, he accompanied Khrushchev on a visit to China.

In February 1955 Malenkov was ousted as prime minister while Shepilov was elected one of the Secretaries of the Central Committee on 12 July 1955.

In late May 1955 he accompanied Khrushchev and the new Soviet prime minister Nikolai Bulganin to Yugoslavia to end the confrontation between the two countries which had begun in 1947–1948.

He retained his Pravda post and became a senior Communist theoretician, contributing to Khrushchev's famous "secret speech" denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956.

Even though his field was Marxist-Leninist theory, Shepilov soon began to branch out into foreign policy.

He joined the abortive plot to oust Nikita Khrushchev from power in 1957, and was denounced and removed from power.

Rehabilitated after Khrushchev's downfall, he lived a largely obscure retirement.

Dmitri Shepilov was born in Askhabad in (current capital of Turkmenistan) the Transcaspian Oblast of the Russian Empire in a working-class family of Russian ethnicity.