Kuzmin, Alexander Trifonovich

Alexander Trifonovich Kuzmin was born in 1918 in the village of Dobrotino, Kirov District, Mogilev Region , BSSR ^[1] .

During the years of World War II he was a navigator, commander of a link of a bomber aviation regiment on the South and Transcaucasian fronts .

After the war, he worked in the party organs of the republic: the Soviet district committee, the Minsk city committee, the regional party committee, and later on, the head of the propaganda and agitation department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. In February 1971, he was elected secretary of the Central Committee of the CPB on ideology. In this position, Alexander Kuzmin stayed for 15 years. In 1986, but after arbitrarily, without waiting for an answer, “Moscow” gave the command to announce a disaster and evacuate Pripyat, and subsequent principal clashes with the republican party leadership of the highest rank, namely, 1 secretary of the Central Committee Slyunkov, who tried in every possible way to hide the real scale of the Chernobyl tragedy Kuzmin resigned (after which, in July 1986, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus relieved Kuzmin of his duties as secretary, but he continued to be a member of the Supreme Council of the USSR).

He was awarded eight orders ^[2] .

Alexander Kuzmin died of cancer on May 1, 2003, at the age of 85. He was buried in Minsk at the Eastern cemetery.

Peter Masherov himself considered the opinion of Kuzmin ^[3] .

Alexander Kuzmin was known as a liberal during his career (the correspondent of Narodnaya Volya Valery Anishchuk even called him “The support of the liberals in the leadership of the republic”). He supported and in every way possible helped such writers as Vasil Bykov , Andrei Makayonok , Ales Adamovich , Svetlana Aleksievich ^{[3] [4] [5]} .

In 1980, when the Belarusian architect Valmen Nikolaevich Aladov was removed from the post of director of the design institute, Alexander Kuzmin helped him get a job as a teacher at the Polytechnic Institute (now BNTU ) ^[6] .

The critic and literary critic Lazar Lvovich Lazarev in his article “About Vasil Bykov” wrote about Alexander Kuzmin ^[5] :

I once saw him, he received us Muscovites invited to the Belarusian writers' congress, talked with us for a long time and impressed me not as a party bourbon, but as a normal sane person.

- “The Banner” 2003, No. 12

Professor V. A. Bobkov in his book “The Revival of the Spirit of Leninism” negatively commented on the activities of Kuzmin in the last years of his tenure as secretary of ideology ^[7] :

“Maybe in the early years in this position he pulled a cart, but already in the early 1980s, not only the close, but also the prying eyes could see the inability of this leader. His time was long gone, he was hopelessly behind. But he persistently dressed up in old armor ...

- "The Revival of the Spirit of Leninism", 1989

Alexander Kuzmin gave his last interview in 2001 to Soviet Belarus . Correspondent of the newspaper Valentina Zhdanovich then wrote about him ^[8] :

We sat in his spacious office, where piles of newspapers, magazines, and books on the desktop testified that in his very respectable years he had a lively, not soothing, and far from senile mind. Kuzmin spoke vigorously, energetically, defiantly upholding the right of the communist ideology to exist, comparing it with the Christian one, spurred on by our questions.

- “Soviet Belarus”, September 13, 2003