Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov is rightfully the most mysterious political figure of the Stalin era. Since 1948, not a single full-fledged study of his biography has appeared in Russian. Born into a family of Orthodox theologians, he became a leading ideologist of Stalinism. During industrialization, the Gorky Automobile Plant and the first heavy tanks were built. In 1941, he created the Leningrad People's Militia and the Ice Road of Life, but some still consider him to be the culprit of the horrors of the blockade. He publicly criticized Akhmatova, Zoshchenko, Truman and Tito. He taught socialist realism to writers, philosophy philosophers and music composers. He was friends with Stalin and was at enmity with Malenkov and Beria. The circumstances of his death still raise questions among historians. Members of the Stalinist Politburo considered him “soft-bodied,” but even now he remains a frightening bogeyman for part of the Russian intelligentsia and all nationalists in the Baltic states and Finland. “Zhdanovism” was exposed by Western Sovietologists during the Cold War, by Gorbachev during the years of perestroika, and it is still being exposed in liberal journalism. So who is A. A. Zhdanov? For the first time in modern Russia, this book, based on a mass of archival documents, attempts to comprehensively tell about this complex personality.