Lev Mekhlis

Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis (Template:Lang-ru; January 13, 1889, Odessa – February 13, 1953, Moscow) was a Soviet statesman and party figure.

He however served incompetently as a party commissar at the front during World War II, among his mistakes being failures, in conjunction with General Dmitri Kozlov, which meant the Crimean Front was defeated and had to be evacuated under fire in May 1942. Mekhlis was demoted to corps commissar. (John Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 2003 edition, p. 348-9)

Lev Mekhlis was awarded four Orders of Lenin, five other orders and numerous medals. He was interred at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on the Red Square. When he run the Pravda, he almost had a nervous break-down at the beginning of the Terror; note his letter addressed to Stalin (pg. 274). He turned the disastrous Finnish war around, where he was considered suicidal reckless, partly because as a Jew, he wanted to be "purer than crystal" (pg. 329). He was one of the most bloodthirsty commissars of Stalin. On the front, he condemned Generals and soldiers to death and had them executed immediately. ("Stalin - The Court of the Red Zar", by Simon Sebag Montefiore). publishe in 2003 by Alfred A. Knopf.

“Lev Mekhlis,” notes Louis Rapoport, “would become Stalin’s secretary and one of the most despised men in Soviet history ... [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 30]