Lev Mekhlis

Soviet politician

Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis (Лев Заха́рович Ме́хлис; 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.

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, 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 1930, he succeeded Nikolai Bukharin, who had led the opposition to collectivisation, as editor in chief of Pravda. He was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1934, and promoted to full membership in October 1937.