Anastas Mikoyan

Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan ( Russian Анастас Иванович Микоян ; Armenian Անաստաս Հովհաննեսի Միկոյան / Anastas Mikoyan Howhannessi ; born November 13, ^jul. / 25. November  1895 ^greg. In Sanahin , Russian Empire (now Armenia ); †  21st October 1978 in Moscow ) was a Soviet politician of Armenian descent.

Life

Mikojan together with Wilhelm Pieck at the IVth Party Congress of the SED (1954)

Mikoyan held various ministerial posts under Stalin and Khrushchev and was also head of state of the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era from 1964 to 1965 as chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet . His brother was the aircraft designer Artyom Mikoyan .

Mikoyan with Stalin and Grigory Ordzhonikidze

The North Caucasian city ​​of Mikoyan-Shachar bore his name until 1944 .

Anastas Mikojan was born to the carpenter Owanes Nersesowitsch Mikojan and his wife Talida Otarovna. He attended a seminary for education, in which he was also the first tests, but he returned the seminar the back, came in 1915 in the RSDLP and joined the Bolsheviks on. After the February Revolution of 1917 , he held the function of organizer of the Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies in Etchmiadzin in order to subsequently set up party cells in Baku and Tbilisi . In October 1917 he took part in the First Congress of Bolshevik Organizations in the Caucasus . Since then he has been a member of the presidium of the Baku Committee of the Bolsheviks and edited the Bolshevik newspaper Social Democrat in Armenian, later the Izvestia of the Baku Soviet. In March 1918 he was a political officer in the suppression of the uprising of the bourgeois Mousavatists and was wounded in the process. Mikoyan was one of the party cadres who pushed through the nationalization of the oil industry and banks in Baku.

In mid-1918, during the struggle against German and Turkish intervention troops and the Mousavatists, he was political commissar of a Red Army brigade . In August 1918, when British troops occupied parts of Baku, a group of Bolsheviks under his leadership stayed behind to do illegal work. On September 15, 1918, when the city was conquered by Turkish troops, Mikoyan managed to liberate 26 Baku commissioners and set course for Astrakhan on the Turkmen steamer . But the steamer drove to the British-occupied Krasnovodsk and the 26 commissioners were shot. Mikoyan narrowly escaped being shot. He was sent to the Krasnovodsk prison, then to the Kyzyl-Arwat and Ashkhabad prisons , where he remained until February 1919.

In February 1920 Mikoyan was a member of the leadership of the CP of Azerbaijan . According to his own statements, Mikoyan is said to have campaigned for Azerbaijan’s independence in 1919. This attitude, in turn, is said to have brought him into conflict with Armenian communists in Baku, whom Mikoyan subsequently referred to as “Muslim communists”. When Mikoyan was secretary of the Baku party committee, however, Nəriman Nərimanov , the council chairman of the People's Commissars of the Azerbaijani SSR , accused him of discriminating against and systematically suppressing the Muslim part of the working class.

From 1926 to 1946, Mikoyan was successively appointed People's Commissar for Internal and Foreign Trade, Supply, Food Industry and Foreign Trade of the USSR. He adopted Western ideas such as the production of canned food and introduced, among other things, the Plombir ice cream . From 1937 to 1946 he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars.

In 1923 Mikoyan became a member of the Central Committee (ZK) of the KPR (B) . From 1935 to 1966 he was a member of the Politburo of the CPSU . In the post-war period he was deputy head of government in 1946 and 1953, and first deputy prime minister from 1955 to 1964.

Mikoyan supported Stalin in the power struggle after Lenin's death. He actively participated in the repression of the Great Terror from 1936 to 1938. He put his name on the death lists of the NKVD . Together with Georgi Malenkov , he carried out purges in the Soviet Republic of Armenia , his homeland, in which thousands of his compatriots were killed and tens of thousands were deported.

He was responsible for supplies during the Second World War . In 1942 he became a member of the Defense Commission. On March 5, 1940, he agreed to the shooting of 14,700 Polish prisoners of war and 11,000 Polish prisoners in the Katyn massacre .

After Stalin's death, Mikoyan remained a member of the government under Malenkov as Minister of Commerce. He supported Khrushchev in the power struggle for Stalin's succession and became deputy prime minister. But he lost this post because Khrushchev accused him of not having reacted properly to the crisis of the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

At the 20th party congress in 1956, it was Mikoyan who gave the first public speech against Stalin and named his crimes. The following, more detailed secret speech on the personality cult and its consequences , which may have been prepared by Mikoyan's colleagues, was then read out by Nikita Khrushchev.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis , Mikoyan negotiated with Castro about 100 warheads stationed in Cuba, the existence of which was successfully kept secret from America.

Mikoyan was a key player in the overthrow of Khrushchev and was in the Brezhnev era from 1964 to 1965 Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and thus head of state of the Soviet Union.

Mikoyan was the friend of the army commander I rank Jeronimas Uborevičius , who fell victim to the Great Terror, and supported his daughter Vladimira Ieronimovna Uborevich .

His final resting place is in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery .

Honors

In Germany, a memorial plaque on the enclosure of Wackerbarth Castle commemorates the meeting of the Soviet military (Anastas I. Mikojan and Iwan S. Konew ) with German politicians ( Hermann Matern , Kurt Fischer and Rudolf Friedrichs ) on May 8, 1945. In the Antarctic are the Skaly Anastasa Mikojana named after him.

literature

• Donald Rayfield: Stalin and his executioners , Blessing, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-89667-181-2 .
• William Taubman: Khrushchev. The Man and His Era , London 2005, ISBN 0-393-05144-7 .

Movies

• Settlement with Stalin 1956 - departure in the east

Web links

Commons : Anastas Mikoyan  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Anastas Mikojan in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Anastas Mikojan in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ An Asian in Bonn , Der Spiegel 17/1958, p. 23
2. ↑ Jörg Baberowski: The enemy is everywhere. Stalinism in the Caucasus . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-421-05622-6 , pp. 286, 291 .
3. ↑ The history of the ice «Plombir»
4. ↑ Aleksandr Jakowlews archive , Document No. 4 of December 22, 1988.
5. ↑ Gerd Kaiser: Katyn. The state crime - the state secret. Berlin 2002, p. 395.
6. ↑ ANASTAS MIKOJAN † , Der Spiegel , edition 44/1978
7. ^ Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret one , BBC News , Magazine October 13, 2012

predecessor	Office	successor
Leonid Brezhnev	Head of State of the Soviet Union 1964–1965	Nikolai Podgorny