Anastas Mikoyan - Death, Personality, and Legacy

Death, Personality, and Legacy

As with Khrushchev and other companions, Mikoyan in his last days wrote frank but selective memoirs from his political career during Stalin's rule. Mikoyan died on 21 October 1978, at the age of 82, from natural causes and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. He received six commendations of the Order of Lenin.

Mikoyan, in a description by Simon Sebag-Montefiore, was "slim, circumspect, wily and industrious". He has been described as an intelligent man, understanding English, having learned German on his own by translating the German version of Karl Marx's Das Kapital to Russian. Unlike many others, Mikoyan was not afraid to come into a heated argument with Stalin. "One was never bored with Mikoyan", Artyom Sergeev notes, while Khrushchev called him a true cavalier. However, Khrushchev warned of trusting "that shrewd fox from the east." In a close conversation with Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin referred to Mikoyan as a "duckling in politics"; he noted, however, that if Mikoyan ever took a serious shot he would improve. Mikoyan had so many children, five boys and the two sons of the late Bolshevik leader Stepan Shahumyan, that he and his wife faced economic problems. His wife Ashkhen would borrow money from Politburo wives who had fewer children. If Mikoyan had discovered this he would, according to his children, have become furious.

Mikoyan was defiantly proud of his Armenian identity, pointing out: "I am not a Russian. Stalin is not a Russian." He and Stalin were said to share a toast: "To hell with all these Russians!"

Dubbed the Vicar of Bray of politics and known as the "Survivor" during his time, Mikoyan was one of the few Old Bolsheviks who was spared from Stalin's purges and was able to retire comfortably from political life. This was highlighted in a number of popular sayings in Russian, including "From Illich to Illich ...without accident or stroke!"(Ot Il'ica do Il'ica bez infarkta i paralicha). One veteran Soviet official described his political career in the following manner: "The rascal was able to walk through Red Square on a rainy day without an umbrella without getting wet. He could dodge the raindrops."