Anastas Mikoyan - Politburo Member

Politburo Member

Mikoyan supported Stalin in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death in 1924; he had become a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1923. As People's Commissar for External and Internal Trade from 1926, he imported ideas from the West, such as the manufacture of canned goods. In 1935 he was elected to the Politburo, and was among one of the first Soviet leaders to pay goodwill trips to the United States in order to boost economic cooperation. Mikoyan spent three months in the United States, where he not only learned more about its food industry but also met and spoke with Henry Ford and inspected Macy's in New York. When he returned, Mikoyan introduced a number of popular American consumer products to the Soviet Union, including American hamburgers, ice cream, corn flakes, popcorn, tomato juice, grapefruit, and corn on the cob. Mikoyan initiated the production of ice-cream in the USSR and kept the quality of ice-cream under his own personal control until he was dismissed. Stalin made a joke about this, stating, "You, Anastas, care more about ice-cream, than about communism." Mikoyan also contributed to the development of meat production in the USSR. One of the Soviet sausage factories was named after Mikoyan.

In the late 1930s Stalin embarked upon the Great Purge, a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated against members of the Communist Party, the peasantry, and other unaffiliated persons. In assessing Mikoyan's role in the purges, historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore states that he "enjoyed the reputation of one of the more decent leaders: he certainly helped the victims later and worked hard to undo Stalin's rule after the Leader's death." Mikoyan, like many other Politburo members, tried to save some close-knit companions from being executed. He was not without his faults; in 1936 he enthusiastically supported the execution of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, claiming it to be a "just verdict." As with other leading officials in 1937, Mikoyan signed death-lists given to him by the NKVD. The purges were often accomplished by officials close to Stalin, giving them the assignment largely as a way to test their loyalty to the regime.

In September 1937 Stalin dispatched Mikoyan, along with Georgy Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria, with a list of 300 names to Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), to oversee the liquidation of the Communist Party of Armenia (CPA), which was largely made up of Old Bolsheviks. Mikoyan tried, but failed, to save one from being executed during his trip to Armenia. That person was arrested during one of his speeches to the CPA by Beria. Over a thousand people were arrested and seven of nine members of the Armenian Politburo were sacked from office. In several instances, he intervened on behalf of his colleagues; this leniency towards the persecuted may have been one reason why he was selected by Stalin to oversee the purges in the ASSR.