born Feb. 26, 1896, Mariupol, Ukraine, Russian Empire
died Aug. 31, 1948, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.
Soviet politician.
He joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and became a leading member of the Politburo (1939) and Communist Party secretary in Leningrad. A close associate of Joseph Stalin , he formulated the extreme anti-Western cultural policy known as "Zhdanovism" (1946), which imposed strict government control on art and literature and soon affected all intellectual activity in the Soviet Union. In 1947 he founded the propaganda bureau Cominform .