In 1938, at the height of the Great Purge, the 30 year old Aleksandrov was made deputy head of the Publishing Department of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.
[4] In 1946, Aleksandrov played a leading part in the campaign to humiliate and intimidate Anna Akhmatova, who is now recognised as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
In August 1947, Zhdanov led the first public attack on the book, and Aleksandrov lost his Propaganda and Agitation Department position to Mikhail Suslov and his supporters were purged.
[1] After Malenkov lost his position in a power struggle with the Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in February 1955, Aleksandrov was fired on 10 March 1955.
[8] Aleksandrov, whom the Montenegrin communist Milovan Djilas described as "a short, pudgy, bald man whose pallor and corpulence proclaimed that he never set foot outside his office"[9] was once again demoted for being involved in a sexual scandal.
After his dismissal, the Soviet press reported on his immorality, though the historian Robert Conquest reckoned: "It seems hard to imagine that such conduct could have gone unnoticed for years, and suddenly come to the horrified attention of the authorities just at the moment when the sinner's faction suffers political defeat.
"[10] Aleksandrov was sent to Minsk where he was put in charge of the section of dialectical and historical materialism of the Institute of Philosophy and Law at Belarus Academy of Sciences.