Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev was born in the Sychyovsky Uyezd of the Smolensk Governorate of the Russian Empire to a peasant family.

Andreyev spent the early part of the Russian civil war as a trade union and Communist Party organiser in the Urals, where he oversaw the nationalisation of the factories, and for ensuring that the new Soviet republic was supplied with metal and food.

A fellow delegate, the French communist Alfred Rosmer, remembered him as "a friendly and modest companion, who didn't mind us joking about his name".

[7] From January 1928 to December 1930, Andreyev was based in Rostov in south Russia, as First Secretary of the North Caucasus territory party committee.

At the outset, he seemed hesitant about forcing the pace: as late as October 1929, he forecast that it would be impossible to complete the changeover to collective agriculture before the end of the First five-year plan in 1933.

[10] By February, 80 per cent of the rural population of the North Caucasus had been herded onto collective farms, but the result was armed rebellion by thousands of peasants, which was put down by the Red Army, and which forced a partial retreat by the authorities.

[13] Between June and September 1937, he travelled to Voronezh, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Kursk, Saratov, Kuybyshev, Tashkent, Stalinabad, Rostov and Krasnodar.

[14] In Saratov, where he arrived on 20 July, his main target was the local head of the NKVD Yakov Agranov, who was arrested and shot, along with the second secretary of the regional communist party and others.

[17] When Andreyev arrived in Tashkent, in September 1937, the founder of the Uzbek communist party, Faizullah Khojaev, and seven others were denounced as enemies of the people.

[19] In March 1938, an official of the USSR Writers' Union approached Andreyev about finding work for the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was in Moscow, but unemployed.

[21] In November 1938, Andreyev supervised the changes at the headquarters of the NKVD, in which Lavrentiy Beria was confirmed as its new head in place of Nikolai Yezhov,[22] who was arrested and shot.

Also in November, he chaired a session of the Central Committee of Komsomol, the communist youth league, at which most of its leaders were sacked, and later arrested and shot.

[23] In 1939, Andreyev resumed his former position as Chairman of the Central Commission, combining that with his continued role as party secretary and Politburo member.

[24] Despite this array of titles, there were signs that he was being supplanted within Stalin's inner circle by Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Voznesensky and other rising stars.

During the war, he was not included in the emergency State Defense Committee (GOKO), or involved front line duties, but was given responsibility for transport and food supplies, as deputy chairman of the transport sub-committee of GOKO, as USSR People's Commissar for Agriculture, 1943–46, and as chairman of the Kolkhoz (collective farms) Central Council from December 1943 to February 1950.

Although still nominally a member of the Politburo, he was in reality excluded from the party leadership in what Khrushchev later described, somewhat hypocritically, as one of Stalin's "most unbridled acts of willfulness".

[27] According to Sergo Mikoyan, son of Andreyev's contemporary and colleague, Anastas Mikoyan, around 1950 Andreyev asked Stalin for permission to retire from office, because he had become nearly totally deaf, as even hearing aids hardly helped him - making him the only high-ranking communist in Stalin's time to leave office alive, without being arrested.

[28] It was not unknown for Politburo members to continue in high offices while their wives were in the gulag: the same happened to Vyacheslav Molotov, Mikhail Kalinin and Otto Kuusinen, among others.

After Stalin's death, he was briefly brought back as Chairman of the Central Commission, in 1954–56, and was made a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet,[24] a largely ceremonial position.

However, after he died, on 5 December 1971, despite his historical importance and decades of tenure in the top ranks of Soviet government officials, Andreyev's funeral was not attended by either Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the CPSU, or Alexei Kosygin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers.