
How a former orphan became the USSR Minister of Culture

“I have lived a difficult life. My father is a Putilov factory worker, I spent many years in orphanages and everything I got in life was given to me by the Komsomol and the Party,” Aleksandrov wrote in a repentant letter to Nikita Khrushchev, when he was found guilty of… a sex scandal.
From orphanage to professorship
Little is known about the childhood of the future minister: He was born in 1908, presumably in St. Petersburg. His parents died and, in the early 1920s, he found himself on the street and ended up in an orphanage in the provincial city of Tambov. As a teenager, he attended a Bolshevik Party school, then joined its youth organization (the Komsomol) and, at the age of 20, became a member of the Communist Party. Only such a path could ensure social and career growth in Soviet times.

Aleksandrov graduated from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History and stayed on to work there. At the age of 31, the former homeless child defended his PhD on Aristotle and became a professor.
In parallel, the young philosopher was also building a Party career: He was appointed deputy head and then head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Party. He also took the post of director of the Higher Party Courses, which trained personnel for Soviet bureaucracy.
Aleksandrov also wrote scholarly philosophical works on Marxism-Leninism and one of the first biographies of Stalin.
Ups & downs
The outbreak of World War II saw Aleksandrov in the status of being responsible for all Soviet propaganda. He actively wrote articles and actually helped form the style of Soviet newspapers and magazines of the 1940s. He is even credited with the authorship of many postal stamps.
For example, he justified why it was not just a war with Germany, but a great patriotic war: “The Soviet people are waging a great patriotic war against Hitler's Germany, which treacherously attacked our homeland.”

“Soldiers and commanders of the Red Army are heroically fighting on the fronts of the patriotic war. By dedicated labor, the entire Soviet people are helping the Red Army to defeat the enemy,” Aleksandrov wrote for ‘Pravda’ newspaper and these thoughts were echoed by other correspondents.
In addition, he abundantly quoted and praised Stalin and, later, received the ‘Stalin Prize’ for his work during World War II.
In 1946, he was given the title of academician, although he had no serious scientific works. However, a year later, Stalin suddenly trashed his new book ‘History of Western European Philosophy’. Officially, the book did not meet the requirements of the Bolshevik textbook on philosophy, applied the wrong methodology of analysis and the author dared to call Marx a Western philosopher.

Fellow scholars were surprised at this turn. “Truly, he could have been guilty of anything but bourgeois objectivism, liberalism and forgetting the principle of partisanship,” historian Gennady Batygin wrote.
The “propagandist” was suspended from Party work, but was still given the post of director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

His new rise began after Stalin's death: In 1954, Khrushchev appointed him Minister of Culture of the USSR. But, the philosopher held the high post for only a year.
Plagiarism, frivolous behavior & an unpleasant personality
Contemporaries spoke unflatteringly of the minister. Famous ballerina Maya Plisetskaya mentioned that he was “an unsightly and dim little man, literally a puss in boots”.
Writer Kornei Chukovsky left abundant negative memories of Aleksandrov. In his diary, he made notes that the minister was always drunk and behaved frivolously. “He is talentless, ignorant, boorish, vulgar and petty. You only had to look at him for five minutes to see that this is a careerist official who has nothing to do with culture. And he is being made Minister of Culture!” Chukovsky wrote in the diary, after finding out about this appointment.

Plagiarism and intimidation were also recalled. Taking advantage of his official position, Aleksandrov called young scientists, telling them that they were in danger and state security agencies were interested in them. And the only salvation is to urgently write a certain book. A terrified scientist would write a manuscript and give it to Aleksandrov, who would then easily publish it under his own name.
A notorious sex scandal
Aleksandrov's career was, however, ruined because of a sex scandal. It turned out that he and several other ministers and academicians had organized and were running… a brothel! They supplied young actresses and ballerinas for high-level guests and used the “services” of the establishment themselves.

The girls were simply afraid to refuse the wooing of such high ranking men. The case was discovered by accident, as a mother of one of the girls wrote to Nikita Khrushchev himself.
Aleksandrov was removed from the post of minister and “exiled” to the Minsk Academy of Sciences, where he worked until his death.
Read more details about the ‘gladiator case’ (and why it’s called this way) here.