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Concept
Alexander Shelepin
Summary
Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin (Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Шеле́пин; 18 August 1918 – 24 October 1994) was a Soviet politician and intelligence officer. A long-time member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he served as First Deputy Prime Minister, as a full member of the Politburo and as the chairman of the KGB from December 1958 to November 1961. He continued to maintain decisive influence in the KGB until 1967; his successor as chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, was his client and protégé.
Intelligent, ambitious, and well-educated, Shelepin was the leader of a hard-line faction within the Communist Party that played a decisive role in overthrowing Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Opposed to the policy of détente, he was eventually outmaneuvered by Leonid Brezhnev and gradually stripped of his power, thus failing in his ambition to lead the Soviet Union.
Alexander Shelepin was born in Voronezh on 18 August 1918 to a middle-class family, the son of Nikolai Shelepin, a railway official. A talented student, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy and then obtained a master's degree from the Moscow Institute of History. He started his political career in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) while still a student, and already in his teens he had expressed his desire to become a party leader.
Shelepin briefly served in the Red Army in 1940, during the last stages of the Winter War against Finland, and after the Nazi invasion in 1941, he helped organize the guerrilla partisan movement in the Moscow region; after the notorious execution by the Nazis of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (whom Shelepin had personally selected), he caught the eye of Joseph Stalin himself, and his political fortune was made. He became a senior official of the Komsomol, working in the All-Union Secretariat in Moscow, and was then named General Secretary of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, an international youth organization recognized by the United Nations and granted general consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
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