Lev Mekhlis

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Lev Mekhlis Лев Ме́хлис
Minister of State Control
In office 19 March 1946 – 27 October 1950
Premier	Joseph Stalin
Preceded by	Vasily Popov
Succeeded by	Vsevolod Merkulov
In office 6 September 1940 – 21 June 1941
Preceded by	Rosalia Zemlyachka
Succeeded by	Vasily Popov
Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
In office 6 September 1940 – 15 May 1944
Premier	Vyacheslav Molotov Joseph Stalin
Editor-in-chief of Pravda
In office 1930–1937
Preceded by	Maximilian A. Saveliev
Succeeded by	Ivan E. Nikitin
Full member of the 17th, 18th Central Committee
In office 12 October 1937 – 16 October 1952
Candidate member of the 17th Central Committee
In office 10 February 1934 – 12 October 1937
Full member of the 17th, 18th Orgburo
In office 14 January 1938 – 16 October 1952
Personal details
Born	Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis (1889-01-13)13 January 1889 Odessa, Russian Empire
Died	13 February 1953(1953-02-13) (aged 64) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Resting place	Kremlin Wall Necropolis
Citizenship	Soviet
Nationality	Ukrainian
Political party	CPSU (1918–53)
Alma mater	Institute of Red Professors
Occupation	Politician Political commissar Chief editor
Awards	Order of Lenin (4) Order of the Red Banner (2) Order of Suvorov Order of Kutuzov Order of Military Valour (grade 4)
Signature
Nickname(s)	The Shark Gloomy Demon
Military service
Allegiance	Russian Empire (1911–1917) Soviet Russia (1918–1920) Soviet Union (1941–1945)
Years of service	1911–20, 1941–45
Battles/wars	World War I Russian Civil War World War II

Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis (Template:Lang-ru; January 13, 1889 – February 13, 1953) was a Soviet politician and a prominent officer in the Red Army from 1937 to 1940. As a senior political commissar, he became one of the main Stavka representatives on the Eastern Front (1941-1945) during World War II, being involved successively with five to seven Soviet fronts. Despite his fervent political engagement and loyalty to the Communist Party, various Soviet leaders, including Joseph Stalin, criticized and reprimanded Mekhlis for incompetent military leadership during World War II.

Early Career

Mekhlis, born in Odessa, completed six classes of Jewish commercial school. He worked as a schoolteacher from 1904 to 1911. In 1907–1910 he was a member of the Zionist workers' movement Poale Zion.

In 1911 he joined the Imperial Russian Army, where he served in the second grenadier artillery brigade. In 1912 he obtained the rank of bombardier. He served in the artillery in the First World War.

In 1918, he joined the Communist Party and until 1920, he did political work in the Red Army (commissioner of brigade, then 46th division, group of forces). In 1921–1922 he managed administrative inspection in the People's Commissariat of Worker-Peasant Inspection (under People's Commissar (Narkom)), which was headed by Stalin. In 1922–1926 he served as the assistant to the secretary and the manager of the bureau of the Secretariat of the Central Committee - in effect Stalin's personal secretary.

In 1926–1930 he took courses at the Communist Academy and in the Institute of Red Professors. When Stalin ordered the forced collectivisation of Soviet farms in 1929, Mekhlis helped purge the Institute of Stalin's opponents. He was also the instigator of a letter published in Pravda on 30 May 1930, denouncing the influence of the right wing opposition in the Industrial Academy in Moscow. The resulting purge saw the future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev appointed head of the party organisation at the Academy. From 1930 he was the head of the press corps Central Committee, and in 1929, he replaced Nikolai Bukharin, who had led the opposition to collectivisation, as editor in chief of Pravda . In 1934, he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and promoted to full membership in October 1937.

Military Career

In December 1937, during the Great Purge, Mekhlis was confirmed as Head of the Political Administration of the Red Army, which had been vacant since the previous holder, Yan Gamarnik had committed suicide. Nicknamed "the Shark" and the "Gloomy Demon",, he supervised a drastic purge of the 30,000 political commissars attached to the army, during which at least 20,000 were removed. In January 1938, he was promoted to the Orgburo.

In May 1938, he travelled to Khabarovsk, with the Deputy head of the NKVD, Mikhail Frinovsky to supervise the purge of the Far Eastern Army, commanded by Vasily Blyukher, who was arrested and beaten to death. In a telegram to Stalin, Mekhlis boasted: "I dismissed all 215 political workers, most of them arrested. But the purge is not finished."

By November 1938, Mekhlis was officially listed as second in seniority in the military establishment, behind the People's Commissar Kliment Voroshilov, and ahead of the professional soldiers. In 1940–1941 People's Commissar of State Control (Goskontrolya). According to Khrushchev, Mekhlis "had a particularly strong influence over Stalin ... I had once been on very good terms with him ... But by the time he took over as chief of the Political Directorate I considered him a nitwit, and I was appalled that someone like him could enjoy Stalin's unbounded confidence.'s Mekhlis's influence did the army and the country no good."

During the war with Finland in 1939-40, Mekhlis was sent to the front to report personally Stalin on why the Red Army was being trounced by the Finns. He attributed the setbacks to treachery, and had the Soviet commander Alexei Vinogradov, his chief of staff, and the chief of the political department tried and shot in front of the troops.

In June 1941 he was newly assigned by the chief of main political administration and the deputy of the Peoples Commissar of Defense. Mekhlis was named army commissar of the 1st rank, which corresponded to the title of General of the red Army. In 1942 he was the representative of the Stavka (headquarters) of supreme commander-in-chief

In March 1942, he was sent to organise the defence of the vital Kerch peninsula at the Crimean Front, where he constantly disputed with General Dmitry Timofeyevich Kozlov. In May, the Red Army was driven out of the Crimea by a smaller German force. In his report to Stalin, Mekhlis sought to blame Kozlov, but received a scathing telegram in reply:

Crimean front, t. Mekhlis:

Your code message #254 (I) received. Your position of a detached observer who is not accountable for the events at the Crimean Front is puzzling. Your position may sound convenient, but it positively stinks. At the Crimean Front, you are not an outside observer, but the responsible representative of Stavka, who is accountable for every success and failure that takes place at the Front, and who is required to correct, right there and then, any mistake made by the commanding officers.

You, along with the commanding officers, will answer for failing to reinforce the left flank of the Front. If, as you say, "everything seemed to indicate that the opponent would begin an advance first thing in the morning", and you still hadn't done everything needed to repel their attack instead limiting your involvement merely to passive criticism, then you are squarely to blame. It seems that you still have not figured out that we sent you to the Crimean Front not as a government auditor but as a responsible representative of Stavka.

You demand that Kozlov be replaced, that even Hindenburg would be an improvement. Yet you know full well that Soviet reserves do not have anyone named Hindenburg. The situation in Crimea is not difficult to grasp, and you should be able to take care of it on your own. Had you committed your front line aviation and used it against the opponent's tanks and infantry, the opponent would not have been able to break through our defenses and their tanks would not have rolled through it. You do not need to be a 'Hindenburg' to grasp such a simple thing after two months at the Crimean Front. Stalin.

ZK VKP(6)9.V.42r>>.

The war correspondent, Konstantin Simonov, who witnessed the Kerch debacle, later wrote:

The reason for the shameful defeat is quite clear to me: the complete mistrust of the army and front commanders that emanated from Mekhlis, the stupid tyranny and wildly arbitrary ways of this military illiterate ... He forbade the digging of trenches so that the offensive spirit of the soldiers would not be undermined. He moved up heavy artillery and army staffs to the very front lines, and so on ... Incidentally, he was of irreproachable personal courage and did nothing for his own glory. He was deeply convinced that he was doing right ... (Kozlov) was afraid to pit a reasonable argument against a stupid onslaught, afraid ... of Mekhlis.

On his return to Moscow, Mekhlis was removed from the post of the deputy people's commissar of defense and the chief of the main political administration of the Red Army. Witnesses claim that when Mekhlis came to Stalin shortly after the defeat, Stalin shouted at him and slammed a door in his face. He was demoted in rank two levels down to a corps commissar.

The commander of the North-Caucasian Front, Marshal Semyon Budyonny, also could not control Mekhlis, who had no desire to be subordinated, only recognising orders which came directly from the Stavka. Mekhlis, during a stay at the post of the representative of Stavka, was occupied by the fact that he wrote sufficiently critical reports to senior officers.

After one such report Major General Tolbukhin was taken off the post of chief of staff of the front, which had carelessness in contrast the instruction of Stalin to express opinion about the need for the front considering the need for being defended. So he attempted through the Stavka to replace the front commander, Kozlov, with Konstantin Rokossovsky or Klykov. At the same time in reports to Stalin he attempted to distance himself from the failures which the Crimean Front suffered, and to lay the entire responsibility on the front commander.

In 1942–1946, he was a member of the military council of a number of armies and fronts. Mekhlis soon recovered from his demotion, as from December 6, 1942, he was a lieutenant general, and on July 29, 1944 he became a colonel general. On 23 June 1942 he was made head of the army's Main Political Directorate, in this position his influence was contained by resistance from leading military officers like Zhukov and Voroshilov however. In 1946 he was made minister of government control of the USSR, a position he held until 1950.

On October 27, 1950 he was discharged due to his health. He died in February 1953. His ashes were interred at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square.

Lev Mekhlis was awarded four Orders of Lenin, five other orders and numerous medals.

Awards

• Four Orders of Lenin
• Order of the Red Banner (twice)
• Order of Suvorov
• Order of Kutuzov
• campaign and jubilee medals

Publications

• The Red Army Today / Speeches Delivered [by K Voroshilov, L Mekhlis, S Budyonny, and G Stern] at the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU(B), March 10–21, 1939, by Kliment Voroshilov, Lev Mekhlis, Semyon Budyonny, Grigory Shtern, pub Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1939
• The U.S.S.R. and the Capitalist Countries, edited by Lev Mekhlis, Y Varga, and Vyacheslav Karpinsky, pub Moscow, 1938, reprinted University Press of the Pacific, 2005, ISBN 978-1410224194

References

• Rubtsov, Yuri (1999). Alter ego Сталина. Moscow: Zvonnitsa-MG. ISBN 978-5880930562.
• Rubtsov, Yuri (2011). Мехлис: Тень вождя [Mekhlis: Shadow Leader]. Moscow: Veche. ISBN 978-5-9533-5781-4.