What Caused the Fall of Nikolai A. Voznesenskii? The Gosplan Affair, the Leningrad Affair and Political Infighting in Stalin's Inner Circle, 1949–1950

DOI

10.1017/slr.2023.99

Abstract

The 1949–1952 Gosplan Affair is rarely mentioned in the literature on late Stalinism, insofar as this purge of Politburo member Nikolai A. Voznesenskii and his clients at the USSR Council of Ministers Economic Planning Committee (Gosplan) is usually conflated with the coterminous Leningrad Affair. According to most scholars, Voznesenskii played a role in Andrei A. Zhdanov's Leningrad patron-client network, which was purged after the death of its leader in 1948 on Stalin's orders. This article revisits the Gosplan Affair and the campaign against Voznesenskii on the basis of an array of newly declassified archival sources. It demonstrates much of Voznesenskii's spectacular fall to have been separate and distinct from the Leningrad Affair, and to have stemmed from rivalries within Stalin's inner circle rather than at the general secretary's behest. It also provides an unprecedentedly close perspective on postwar political infighting in the party leadership at the end of Stalin's reign and the beginning of the Cold War.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-3-2023

Publisher Statement

Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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