Vasil Mzhavanadze

Who was Vasil Mzhavanadze?

Vasil Pavlovich Mzhavanadze was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Georgian SSR from September 1953 to September 28, 1972 and a member of the CPSU's Politburo from June 29, 1957 to December 18, 1972. Dismissed after a corruption scandal, he was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze.

Mzhavanadze served in the Red Army as a political commissar during World War II. After the war, he became deputy commander for political affairs in the Kiev military district in the Ukrainian SSR, under the administration of Ukrainian Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Georgia was at this time ruled by supporters of Lavrentiy Beria, who had been the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party from 1931 to 1938. In July 1953, following the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the arrest of Beria, the leadership of the Georgian Communist Party was purged by Khrushchev's supporters. Mzhavanadze was promoted to lead the Party in Georgia, replacing Beria's protégé Aleksandre Mirtskhulava as First Secretary in September 1953. In an unprecedented display of military presence on the political arena, Mzhavanadze was joined in the Georgian Central Committee by the generals Alexi Inauri and Aleksei Antonov. When Khrushchev became leader of the USSR in 1957, Mzhavanadze was appointed to become a candidate member of the Soviet Politburo. He became a full member in 1966.