The Leningrad Affair and the Mingrelian Affair

The Leningrad Affair
Leningrad and its Communist Party came out of the war with a good deal of prestige, having been tried and proved by testing the siege

• Several leading communists had their power base in the city, foremost among them Zhdanov, who was the local Party leader
• When Zhdanov died in 1948, Stalin acted to remove  what he saw as a rival focus of power, wishing to prevent another Kirov emerging from the city
• The two men in Stalin's sights were Nikolai Vozesensky and Alexander Kuznetsov: Voznesensky had been responsible for planning the Soviet economy and Kuznetsov had…