HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 384

of the Union of Zemstva, became the vehicle for
civic participation in assisting the war effort,
under the able leadership of Prince Georgii LVOV .
The February Revolution of 1917 opened up
greater possibilities for action for the zemstva, but
this was short-lived, as the Bolshevik govern-
ment abolished them by 1918.

Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich
(1896-1948)
Soviet official
One of STALIN 's chief lieutenants, Zhdanov
enjoyed a prominence that rests mainly on his
role in the post-World War II early period as cul-
tural commissar promoting a campaign to
cleanse Soviet culture from “alien,” Western
influences. Zhdanov first came into prominence
as Sergei Kirov's successor as first secretary of
the Leningrad party apparatus, after the latter's
assassination in December 1934. He played a
central role in conducting the Great Purge of the
1930s in Leningrad and became a full member
of the Communist Party's Politburo in 1939.
Zhdanov participated in the defense of Lenin-
grad against the German invaders during World
War II, setting up with Kliment Voroshilov,
Commissar of war until 1940 and a member of
the top-level State Defense Committee, a Mili-
tary Soviet for the Defense of Leningrad without
consulting Stalin. When it became clear they
had failed, they were dismissed but both, espe-
cially Zhdanov, managed to bounce back into
the dictator's good graces. By 1946, he had
replaced MALENKOV as Stalin's right-hand man.
For the next two years, as party Central Com-
mittee secretary for ideological affairs, Zhdanov
conducted with zeal and ruthlessness the xeno-
phobic campaign against Western influences in
Russian culture and science, a campaign known
as the Zhdanovshchina (the time of Zhdanov). It
began with his attack on the satirist Mikhail
ZOSHCHENKO and the poet Anna AKHMATOVA ,
which led to their expulsion from the Union of
Soviet Writers, and spread to prominent figures
in philosophy, theater, film, music, and science.

Andrei Zhdanov (Library of Congress)

Zhdanov died in 1948 of heart failure, but his
anticosmopolitan campaign continued until
Stalin's death in 1953, by which time it had
acquired explicit anti-Semitic overtones. In
1949-50, Malenkov and BERIA took advantage of
his death to purge the party of Zhdanov's pro-
tégés in an incident known as the LENINGRAD
AFFAIR . Zhdanov's unexpected death was also
used as a pretext to initiate charges, subse-
quently dropped, against a group of Jewish doc-
tors in the DOCTOR ' S PLOT of 1953.

Zhenotdel
The acronym for the Women's Section (Depart-
ment) of the Central Committee Secretariat,
Zhenotdel was the agency within the Soviet