Pavel Yudin

He joined the Russian Communist Party (b) in 1918, served in the Red Army 1919–21, and graduated from the Zinoviev University (later renamed the Stalin University) in Leningrad in 1924, after which he began a post graduate course at the Institute of Red Professors, where he was one of the minority of students who supported Joseph Stalin against the Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed the forced collectivisation of agriculture.

Yudin was one of three signatories of an article, published in Pravda on 7 June 1930, denouncing Abram Deborin, who was the leading soviet communist philosopher of the 1920s.

Yudin and his co-signatories - who included his long time colleague M. B. Mitin - upheld Vladimir Lenin as the greater philosopher.

Unable to dislodge Deborin from his commanding position in the Institute of Red Professors, or his control over the scientific magazine Под Знаменем Марксисма (Pod Znamenem Marxisma - Under the Banner of Marxism, they made a direct appeal to Stalin in December 1930 to intervene.

I'm offended by his peasant cunning, his lack of principle, his duplicity, and the cowardice of someone who, while aware of his own personal impotence, attempts to surround himself with people even more insignificant and to hide among them.

Those four were all executed, but the historian Isaak Mints survived despite being denounced by Yudin, in the same letter as "a two-faced Janus, the toady of Yagoda and Kryuchkov.

But in May 1944, the third volume was attacked in an editorial in the magazine Bolshevik for allegedly failing to recognise that the philosopher Georg Hegel was a German nationalist and racist.

[5] These setback in Yudin's were obviously connected to the rise of Andrei Zhdanov, who emerged around 1946 as the Soviet Communist Party's chief ideologist and Stalin's successor-in-waiting.

While we were discussing the matter, the telephone rang and Zhdanov told me that Yudin was coming with an issue of the Cominform journal, published in Belgrade.

There he played a major role in the split between the USSR and Yugoslavia, which culminated in the Yugoslav communist party's expulsion from Cominform, and a failed attempt by Moscow to destroy the Tito regime.

In March 1948, Yudin suppressed an article written for the journal by the Yugoslav communists Vladimir Dedijer and Radovan Zogović, which had expressed solidarity with liberation movements in Asia.

Having delivered a speech to the Central Committee plenum afterwards, Yudin reputedly exclaimed, purely out of habit "Long live Comrade Stalin!"