Member of The Politburo
Kuusinen became an influential official in the Soviet state administration. He was a member of the Politburo, the highest state organ. Kuusinen also continued his work during the administration of Nikita Khrushchev (1953–1964). He was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1957–1964. In 1952 and again in 1957 he was also elected to the Presidium of the Central Committee.
Kuusinen was one of the editors of The Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, considered to be one of the fundamental works on dialectical materialism and Leninist communism. In Kremlin politics he was considered a liberal — and from its temporal distance his thinking pointed forward to perestroika. While editing a new party programme for "rapid agricultural, industrial, and technological development" he championed giving up the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the horror of more conservative ideologists. In this he was supported by Khrushchev.
Kuusinen was elected a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1958.
After learning that he was terminally ill, Kuusinen requested (via the Helsinki Embassy of the Soviet Union) permission to visit Laukaa and Jyväskylä as a private person. The government of Finland denied this request.
Kuusinen died in Moscow on May 17, 1964. His ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Otto Wille Kuusinen was survived by his daughter Hertta Kuusinen, a leading communist politician in Finland during the Cold War.
Read more about this topic: Otto Wille Kuusinen
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