Background
Suslov was born in Shakhovskoye, a rural locality in Pavlovsky District, Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russian Empire on 21 November 1902.
Suslov was born in Shakhovskoye, a rural locality in Pavlovsky District, Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russian Empire on 21 November 1902.
He went on to study economics at the Institute of Red Professors and the Plekhanov Economics Institute before entering the party-state apparatus in 1931.
From the mid-1960's on he ranked second in importance only to Leonid Brezhnev. Suslov was born on Nov. 21, 1902, into a poor peasant family in Shakhovskoe, in the middle Volga Valley.
In the early 1930's he helped to supervise Stalin's purges of the party in the Urals and the Ukraine.
During World War II Suslov ruled the unoccupied section of the northern Caucasus and guided the guerrilla resistance to the Germans in the occupied section.
Toward the end of the war he supervised the integration of Lithuania into the Soviet Union.
Suslov was named to the party's national secretariat in 1947 and to its politburo as well in 1952; he was dropped from the politburo briefly after Stalin's death in 1953 but renamed to it in 1955.
In 1957 Suslov supported Nikita Khrushchev against an attempt led by Vyacheslav M. Molotov to oust him, and in 1964 Suslov played a leading role in Khrushchev's removal.
In 1921 he joined the Communist Party and enrolled in a school for workers in Moscow.
In 1949, at a Cominform meeting in Budapest, he denounced the Yugoslav Communist Party for its independent stance and in 1956 went to Hungary with Anastas Mikoyan and Marshal Grigory Zhukov to supervise the suppression of the Hungarian uprising.
A hardline supporter of communism, he disliked the company of Westerners.
