Background
Yekaterina Alexeyevna Furtseva was born on December 7, 1910 in the town of Vyshni Volochek, Tver Oblast, Russia.
Yekaterina Alexeyevna Furtseva was born on December 7, 1910 in the town of Vyshni Volochek, Tver Oblast, Russia.
In the late 1930's she was graduated as a chemical engineer from a Moscow technical institute.
At the age of 14 she became a member of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and at 20 she wasadmitted to full membership in the Communist Party.
She performed outstanding work as a party propagandist during the next ten years and in 1949 became an assistant to Nikita S. Khrushchev, then first secretary of the party's regional central committee in Moscow.
In 1954 she succeeded to this post herself, becoming in effect head of the Communist Party in the city of Moscow. From February 1956 until November 1961 she was a member of the presidium, and thus the highest ranking woman in the Soviet Union.
She also served as a secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1956 to 1960, and as minister of culture from 1960 until her death.
She fell in love with Nikolay Firyubin, the Soviet ambassador in Yugoslavia. They were married.
