Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan (; , ; ; – 21 October 1978) was a Soviet statesman, diplomat, and Bolshevik revolutionary. An ethnic Armenian, he served as the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the head of state of the Soviet Union. As a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee from 1923 to 1976, Mikoyan was the only Soviet politician who remained in power from Lenin, through the eras of Stalin and Khrushchev, to his retirement under Brezhnev. His longevity inspired the popular Russian saying "from Ilyich [Lenin] to Ilyich [Brezhnev] without heart attack and paralysis".
A native of Armenia's northern Lori region, Mikoyan joined the Bolsheviks in 1915, and following the October Revolution of 1917 participated in the Baku Commune. In the 1920s, he was the party's boss in the North Caucasus. Mikoyan was elected to the Politburo in 1935, served as foreign trade minister from 1926 to 1930 and again from 1938, and during World War II became a member of the State Defense Committee. After the war, Mikoyan began to lose favour, losing his position as minister in 1949 and being criticized by Stalin at the 19th Party Congress in 1952. Following Stalin's death in 1953, Mikoyan sided with Khrushchev, supported him against a failed coup in 1957, and played a leading role in crafting his de-Stalinization policy.
Under Khrushchev, Mikoyan played an important role in Soviet foreign policy, making several key trips to the United States and communist Cuba. He acquired an important stature on the international diplomatic scene, especially with his skill in exercising soft power to further Soviet interests. In 1964, Khrushchev was forced to step down in a coup that brought Brezhnev to power. Mikoyan briefly served as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the official head of state, from 1964 until his resignation in 1965.
Early life and career
Mikoyan was born to Armenian parents in 1895 in the village of Sanahin, then part of the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire (today part of Alaverdi in Armenia's Lori Province). His father, Hovhannes, was a carpenter and his mother, a rug weaver. He had one younger brother, Artem Mikoyan, who would be the co-founder of the MiG aviation design bureau, which became one of the primary design bureaus of fast jets in Soviet military aviation.
Mikoyan learned to read and write from a monk at the Sanahin Monastery. He received his formal education at the Nersisian School in Tiflis and the Gevorgian Seminary in Vagharshapat (Echmiadzin), both affiliated with the Armenian Apostolic Church. Religion, however, played an increasingly insignificant role in his life. He would later remark that his continued studies in theology drew him closer to atheism: "I had a very clear feeling that I didn't believe in God and that I had in fact received a certificate in materialist uncertainty; the more I studied religious subjects, the less I believed in God." Before becoming active in politics, Mikoyan had already dabbled in the study of liberalism and socialism.
Mikoyan soon became a convinced Marxist and, by the age of twenty, had formed a workers' soviet in Echmiadzin. In 1915, he formally joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (later known as the Bolshevik Party) and became a leader of the revolutionary movement in the Caucasus. Mikoyan's revolutionary activities led him to Baku, where he became the co-editor for the Armenian-language newspaper Sotsyal-Demokrat and later for the Russian-language paper Izvestia Bakinskogo Soveta.
Baku Commune
After the February 1917 revolution that toppled the Tsarist government, Mikoyan and other Bolsheviks fought against anti-Bolshevik elements in the Caucasus. Mikoyan became a commissar in the newly formed Red Army. He was wounded in the fighting and was noted for saving the life of fellow Party member, Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Mikoyan continued his Party work during the Russian Civil War, becoming one of the co-founders of the Baku Commune under the leadership of Stepan Shaumian. In Baku, he worked as the editor of the commune's official Armenian newspaper Teghekatu, and as the political commissar supervising its armed Armenian militia. He directed the seizure of the banks in April 1918, and the defence of Baku against the advancing Turkish army in July 1918.Mikoyan's activities in Baku are treated in passim in .
After the fall of Baku, Shaumian and other Bolshevik leaders were arrested by the Centrocaspian Dictatorship. A commando unit, led by Mikoyan, organized their escape from prison, and they fled across the Caspian Sea to Krasnovodsk (today Türkmenbaşy in present-day Turkmenistan). However, at Krasnovodsk they were arrested by the Transcaspian Government, which was controlled by the British-allied Socialist Revolutionaries. The SR authorities executed the 26 Baku commissars, including Shaumian, on 20 September 1918 in the Turkmen desert. It was only by accident that Mikoyan avoided their fate. As American journalist Harrison Salisbury wrote:
After his release in February 1919, Mikoyan returned to Baku and resumed his activities there. These included helping establish the Baku Bureau of the Caucasus Regional Committee (kraikom).
Politburo member
At the suggestion of Lenin, the Central Committee assigned Mikoyan to the party organization in Nizhny Novgorod in September 1920. From 1922 to 1926, during the era of the New Economic Policy, he served as the Secretary of the South East Bureau of the Communist Party and its successor, the North Caucasus kraikom. It was in that position that Mikoyan advocated granting autonomous status to Chechnya.
Mikoyan was elected to the Central Committee in 1923 and remained a member of that body for more than 50 years. In the power struggle that followed Lenin's death in 1924, Mikoyan supported Stalin, whom he had first met in 1919. During the 11th Congress of the CPSU, in 1922, before the power struggle between Stalin and Leon Trotsky had broken out into the open, Mikoyan characterised Trotsky as "a man of the state but not of the party". According to Trotsky's biographer, Isaac Deutscher, by saying that, "he summed up what many members of the Old Guard thought but did not yet utter in public."
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 one of the first Soviet leaders to pay goodwill trips to the United States in order to boost economic cooperation. In the summer of 1936, Mikoyan spent two months in the U.S., where he not only learned more about its food industry but also met and spoke with Henry Ford and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull. 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 spearheaded a project to produce a home cookbook, which would encourage a return to the domestic kitchen. The result, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, was published in 1939. Later, during the Khrushchev era, Mikoyan encouraged Aram Piruzyan, the head of Soviet Armenia's food industry, to develop a similar book on Armenian cuisine, entitled Armenian Cooking, which became a hit with Soviet readers. Mikoyan also helped initiate 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 once joked about this, stating, "You, Anastas, care more about ice cream, than about communism." Mikoyan likewise contributed to the development of Soviet meat production (particularly, the so-called Mikoyan cutlet), and a Soviet-era sausage factory in Moscow (notable for producing the mildly spiced, low-fat "doctor's sausage") was named after him.
The Great Purge
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, as well as the peasantry and unaffiliated persons. In assessing Mikoyan's role in the purges, historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore stated 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 tried to save some close-knit companions from being executed. However, 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 Georgy Malenkov and Mikhail Litvin of the NKVD to Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, in response to the death of Sahak Ter-Gabrielyan. Their mission was to oversee the purge of the Armenian Communist Party and its leaders First Secretary Amatuni Amatuni and NKVD chief Khachik Mughdusi , both loyalists of Lavrentii Beria. Stalin later dispatched Mikoyan too, in order to test his loyalty and send a signal to Soviet Armenian leaders. Stalin did not trust Mikoyan due to his leniency towards the persecuted. In several instances, Mikoyan had intervened to save friends and colleagues, including Ivan Bagramyan, Avetik Isahakyan, and Yervand Kochar. During his trip to Armenia, he tried, but failed, to save one individual (Danush Shahverdyan) from the repressions. However, "on the instructions of Great Stalin", he led the attack during a stormy session of the Armenian Central Committee plenum, during which Amatuni angrily called him a "liar". More than a thousand people were arrested and seven of nine members of the Armenian Politburo were sacked from office.
World War II In September 1939, under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union each carved out their own spheres of influence in Poland and Eastern Europe. The Soviets arrested 26,000 Polish officers in the eastern portion of Poland and in March 1940, after some deliberation, Stalin and five other members of the Politburo, Mikoyan included, signed an order for their execution as "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries".
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Mikoyan was placed in charge of organizing the transportation of food and supplies. His son , a pilot in the Red Air Force, died in combat when his plane was shot down over Stalingrad. Mikoyan's main assignment throughout the war was supplying the Red Army with materiel, food and other necessities. He is also credited for his significant role in the 1941 relocation of Soviet industry from the threatened western cities, such as Moscow and Leningrad, eastward to the Urals, Western Siberia, the Volga region, and other safer zones. During the war, Mikoyan alone dissented on Stalin and Beria's deportations of nationalities, especially the Chechens and the Ingush, officially out of "concern regarding the possible international repercussions" for the USSR.
In February 1942, by order of Stalin, Mikoyan became a Special Representative of the State Defense Committee. He had not been a member until that point because Beria believed he would be of more use in government administration. Mikoyan was decorated with a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1943 for his efforts. In 1946, he became the Vice-Premier of the Council of Ministers. As Minister of Foreign Trade, he was responsible for the dismantlement of industry and infrastructure in Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany for collection as reparations.
Thaw and de-Stalinization