Lev Mekhlis - Biography

Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis (January 13, 1889, Odessa – February 13, 1953, Moscow) was a Jewish-Soviet statesman and party figure.

Career

He however served incompetently as a party commissar at the front during World War II, among his mistakes being failures, in conjunction with General Dmitri Kozlov, which meant the Crimean Front was defeated and had to be evacuated under fire in May 1942. Mekhlis was demoted to corps commissar. (John Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 2003 edition, p. 348-9)

Lev Mekhlis was awarded four Orders of Lenin, five other orders and numerous medals. He was interred at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on the Red Square. When he run the Pravda, he almost had a nervous break-down at the beginning of the Terror; note his letter addressed to Stalin (pg. 274). He turned the disastrous Finnish war around, where he was considered suicidal reckless, partly because as a Jew, he wanted to be "purer than crystal" (pg. 329). He was one of the most bloodthirsty commissars of Stalin. On the front, he condemned Generals and soldiers to death and had them executed immediately. “Lev Mekhlis,” notes Louis Rapoport, “would become Stalin’s secretary and one of the most despised men in Soviet history ...

All of the following is a machine translation of the content of the Russian Wikipedia site. Some of it is not very clear but it provides a lot more detail than the above.

He finished six classes of Jewish commercial school. In 1904-1911 he worked as a clerk and he was a domestic teacher. In 1907-1910 he was a a member of the working Zionist party “Of the Poaley of Zion”.

From 1911 he was in the Russian army. He served in the second grenadier artillery brigade. In 1912 he obtained the rank of bombardier (in 1914-1917 he served in the artillery).

In 1918 he joined the Communist Party and until 1920 he did political work in the Red Army (commissioner of brigade, then 46th division, group of forces). In 1921-1922 – he was the manager of administrative inspection in the People's commissariat of worker-peasant inspection (Peoples Commissar (Narkom) I. V. Stalin). In 1922-1926 – he was the assistant to the secretary and the manager of the bureau of the secretariat of the Central Committee, in effect the personal secretary I. V. Stalin.

In 1926-1930 he learned in courses at the Communist academy and in the institute of red professorate. From 1930 he was the head of the press corps Central Committee, and simultaneously a member of the editorial board, and then the editor in chief of the newspaper “Pravda”.

In 1937-1940 – he was the deputy of the Peoples Commissar of Defense and the chief of the main political administration of the Red Army. From 1939 he was the member of Central Committee the CPSU (he had been a candidate since 1934), in 1938-1952 – he was a member of the Orgburo of the Central Committee, in 1940-1941 - Peoples Commissar of State Control (Goskontrolya).

In June 1941 he was newly assigned by the chief of main political administration and the deputy of the Peoples Commissar of Defense. Mekhlis was named the army commissioner of the 1st rank, which corresponded to the title of General of the Army. In 1942 he was the representative of the Stavka (headquarters) of supreme commander-in-chief at the Crimean Front, where constantly he disputed with General D. T. Kozlov. The leaders of the staff of front did not know whose orders to carry out – the commander’s or Mekhlis’s.

The commander of the North-Caucasian front marshal Budyonniy also could not control Mekhlis, who had no desire to be subordinated, only recognising orders which came directly from the Stavka. Mekhlis during a stay at the post of the representative of Stavka was occupied by the fact that it wrote sufficiently critical reports to the senior officers.

After one of such report from the post of the chief of staff of front was taken the Major General Tolbukhin, which had carelessness in contrast the instruction of Stalin to express opinion about the need for the front considering the need for being defended. So it attempted through the Stavka to replace the front commander, Kozlov, with Rokossovskiy or Klykov. At the same time in reports to Stalin he attempted to be distance himself from the failures, which the Crimean Front suffered, and to lay entire responsibility on the front commander.

In regard to this, Stalin sent a telegram to Mekhlis, in which he subjected to his rigid criticism for similar behavior: You are held the strange position of outside observer, who does not correspond for the matters of the Crimean Front. This position is very convenient, but it is rotten right through. At the Crimean Front you are not an outside observer, but the responsible representative of Stavka, who is responsible for all successes and failures on the front and who is obligated to correct errors of command on the spot. You, together with the commander, answer for the fact that the left flank of the front proved to be weak there from the hands. If “the entire situation showed that from the morning the enemy will begin,” and you did not take every measure to repulse it, after limiting to passive criticism, then those worse for you. It means, you yet did not understand that you were sent to the Crimean Front, not as the state control, but as the responsible representative of Stavka. You require that we would replace Kozlov whom- or like Hindenburg. But you cannot but know that we do not have any in Hindenburgs's reserve. The matters in your Crimea are simple, and you could manage them yourselves. If you used attack aviation not on side-line matters, but against the tanks and the live enemy target, the enemy would not break through the front and the tanks would not get through. It is not necessary to be by Hindenburg in order to understand this simple thing, sitting two months on the Crimean Front. I.Stalin

After the crushing defeat in May 1942 on the Crimean Front (of 250,000 soldiers and officerers on the Crimean Front in 12 days of fighting 162,282 people - 65% were lost forever) he was taken from the post of the deputy peoples commissar of defense and the chief of the main political administration of the Red Army, he was reduced in rank by two levels - to the corps commissioner.

In 1942-1946 – he was a member of the military council of a number of armies and fronts, from December 6, 1942 – he was a lieutenant general, from July 29, 1944 he was a colonel general. In 1946-1950 – he was the minister of government control of the USSR.

On October 27, 1950 he is discharged due to his health. After his death, he was cremated in February 1953, and the urn placed in the Kremlin wall over Red Square in Moscow.