Dmitri Trofimovich Shepilov (, Dmitrij Trofimovič Šepilov; – 18 August 1995) was a Soviet economist, lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs. He joined the abortive plot to oust Nikita Khrushchev from power in 1957, and was denounced and removed from power. Rehabilitated after Khrushchev's downfall, he lived a largely obscure retirement.
Early career Dmitri Shepilov was born in Askhabad (current capital of Turkmenistan) in the Transcaspian Oblast of the Russian Empire in a working-class family of Russian ethnicity. He graduated from the Law Faculty of the Moscow State University in 1926 and was sent to work in Yakutsk, where he worked as a deputy prosecutor and acting prosecutor for Yakutia. In 1928–1929 Shepilov worked as an assistant regional prosecutor in Smolensk. In 1931–1933 Shepilov studied at the Institute of Red ProfessorsWilliam Taubman. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, New York, W. W. Norton and Co., 2003, p.314. in Moscow while simultaneously working as the "responsible secretary" of the magazine On the Agrarian Front. After graduating in 1933, Shepilov was made head of the political department of a sovkhoz. In 1935 he was made Deputy Chief of the Sector of Agricultural Science of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In 1937 Shepilov became a Doctor of Science and was made the Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He also taught economics in Moscow's colleges between 1937 and 1941.
Shortly after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Shepilov joined the Soviet People's Militia (Narodnoe Opolcheniye) in July 1941 and was a Political commissar of its Moscow component during the Battle of Moscow in 1941–1942. In 1942–1943 he was the political commissar of the 23rd Guards Army and in 1944–1946 of the 4th Guards Army, ending the war with the rank of Major General. Between May 1945 and February 1946, Shepilov was one of the top Soviet officials in Vienna during the early stages of the Soviet occupation of eastern parts of Austria.
Post-war In February 1946, Shepilov was appointed deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Soviet Army's Main Political Directorate. On 2 August 1946 he became the head of the propaganda department of the main Communist Party daily Pravda.
In mid-1947, the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Communist Party Central Committee Georgy Aleksandrov and his deputies were subject to public criticism for being insufficiently vigilant and removed from their positions. Shepilov was appointed deputy chief of the Department on 18 September 1947. Since the new department head, Mikhail Suslov, had other responsibilities, Shepilov had almost complete control of the Department's day-to-day operations.
While in Moscow, Shepilov—famous for his near-eidetic memory, erudition and polished manners (reputedly, he could sing the whole of Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades from memory)—became an expert on Communist ideology and a protégé of Joseph Stalin's chief of Communist ideology Andrei Zhdanov.Transcripts of frank conversations between Zhdanov and Shepilov in Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov. Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953, Harper Collins Publishers, 2003, p.79. One of his first tasks was to assist Zhdanov in disciplining the Soviet Union's two greatest living composers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. He selected Shostakovich's Eighth and Ninth Symphonies and Prokofiev's opera War and Peace as the worst examples of what was wrong with Soviet music.
The appointment of Yuri Zhdanov, Andrei Zhdanov's son, to lead the Propaganda Department's Science Sector on 1 December 1947 put Shepilov in the delicate position of supervising his patron's son. The situation was made even more delicate by the fact that Yuri Zhdanov had just married Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana and the fact that Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's closest advisor at the time, had many enemies in the Soviet leadership. When in April 1948 Shepilov approved Yuri Zhdanov's speech critical of Soviet biologist and Stalin favorite Trofim Lysenko, it started an intense political battle between Andrei Zhdanov on the one hand and his rivals who were using the episode to discredit Zhdanov.See Alexei Kojevnikov. "Games of Stalinist Democracy: ideological discussions in the Soviet sciences 1947–1952" in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, London, Routledge, p.158-159
On 1 July 1948, Zhdanov's main rival, Georgy Malenkov, took over at the Communist Party Secretariat while Zhdanov was sent on a two-month vacation, where he died. Shepilov, however, not only survived this change at the top, but even improved his position and was appointed as the next head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department on 10 July 1948. He also survived the next round of the intra-Party struggle associated with the removal and later execution of the Politburo member Nikolai Voznesensky. However, on 14 July 1949, he was censured by the Central Committee for allowing the Party's main theoretical magazine Bolshevik to publish Voznesensky's book on economics back when Voznesensky was still in power.Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Volume 4, No. 50, 24 January 1953, p. 15.
In 1952 Stalin put Shepilov in charge of writing a new Soviet economics textbook based on Stalin's recently published treatise Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.I primknuvshii k nim Shepilov: pravda o cheloveke uchyonom, voine, politike, eds. Tamara Tochanova and Mikhail Lozhnikov, Moscow, 1998, pp. 127–28, 180–82, 281–82 On 18 November 1952, after the 19th Communist Party Congress, Shepilov was appointed editor-in-chief of Pravda.See Yoram Gorlizki, Oleg V Khlevniuk. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.215
Khrushchev's theoretician After Stalin's death in March 1953, Shepilov became an ally and protégé of the new Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev,Taubman, op. cit., p.313. providing ideological support in the latter's struggle with the Soviet prime minister Georgy Malenkov. He was made a Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences the same year. While Malenkov argued in favor of producing more consumer goods, Shepilov emphasized the role of heavy and defense industries and characterized Malenkov's position as follows:
In February 1955 Malenkov was ousted as prime minister while Shepilov was elected one of the Secretaries of the Central Committee on 12 July 1955. He retained his Pravda post and became a senior Communist theoretician, contributing to Khrushchev's famous "secret speech" denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956.Roger D. Markwick. Rewriting History in Soviet Russia, New York, Palgrave, 2001, p.262, note 146
Minister of Foreign Affairs Even though his field was Marxist-Leninist theory, Shepilov soon began to branch out into foreign policy. In September 1954, he accompanied Khrushchev on a visit to China. In late May 1955 he accompanied Khrushchev and the new Soviet prime minister Nikolai Bulganin to Yugoslavia to end the confrontation between the two countries which had begun in 1947–1948. According to Veljko Mićunović, then a member of the Yugoslav leadership:
At a lunch with Tito in 1955, Khrushchev several times asked Shepilov to confirm an incident he had just described. "Shepilov would remove the table napkin," Micunovic recalled, "stand up from the table, and as though he were reporting officially, would reply: 'Just so, Nikita Sergeyevich!' and sit down again. I found such behavior on Shepilov's part most unusual, as I did Khrushchev's in tolerating it".Quoted in Taubman, op. cit., p. 312
In July 1955 Shepilov traveled to Egypt for talks with the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and secured an arms deal, which meant de facto Soviet recognition of Egypt's military regime and paved the way for subsequent Soviet-Egyptian alliance.Rami Ginat. The Soviet Union and Egypt, 1945–1955, London, Frank Cass and Company Ltd., 1993, pp. 213–214. It also signaled the Soviet Union's new found flexibility in dealing with non-Communist Third World countries in marked contrast to the intransigence of Stalin's years. On 27 February 1956, after the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress, Shepilov was made a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee's Presidium (the Politburo's name in 1952–1966).USSR: Communist Party: Presidium at www.archontology.org
On 1 June 1956, Shepilov replaced Vyacheslav Molotov as the Soviet foreign minister. He gave up his Pravda post, but remained a Secretary of the Central Committee until 24 December.Since Central Committee Secretaries were only appointed and dismissed by infrequent Central Committee plenary meetings, Shepilov formally retained the post until the next meeting In early June 1956 Shepilov went back to Egypt and offered Soviet assistance in building the Aswan Dam, which was eventually accepted after a competing American-World Bank offer was withdrawn in July 1956 in the context of general deterioration of Western-Egyptian relations.
On 27 July 1956, one day after Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, Shepilov met the Egyptian ambassador to the Soviet Union and offered general support for Egypt's position, which Khrushchev made official in his 31 July speech. Although the Soviet Union, as a signatory to the Constantinople Convention of 1888, was invited to the international conference on the Suez issue to be held in London in mid-August, Shepilov at first hesitated to accept the offer. However, once the decision to go was made, he led the Soviet delegation at the conference. Although the conference adopted the American resolution on the internationalization of the Suez Canal 18 votes against 4, Shepilov succeeded in striking an alliance with India, Indonesia and the Dominion of Ceylon as directed by the Soviet leadership.
Shepilov represented the Soviet Union at the UN Security Council during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis in October–November 1956, although all important political decisions were made by Khrushchev and other top Soviet leaders.Laurent Rucker. "The Soviet Union and the Suez Crisis", in The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East, ed. David Tal, London, Frank Cass Publishers, 2001, pp.67–82.
Post-ministership and resignation On 14 February 1957 Shepilov was once again made Secretary of the Central CommitteeUSSR: Communist Party: Secretariat at www.archontology.org responsible for Communist ideology and the next day, Andrei Gromyko replaced him as the Soviet foreign minister.