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In this edition of the program we are remembering the woman who
served as Soviet culture minister for nearly 14 years.
Right after Stalin’s death in 1953 Yekaterina Furtseva was put at the head of the Moscow Party Committee becoming the virtual boss of the city of several million people. It was then that she first met Nikita Khrushchev prompting rumors of a love affair between the two. Well, Furtseva was a woman in the full meaning of the word, but a woman who played the man’s games sharing her male colleagues’ penchant for swearwords, booze and long hours relaxing at the table and all other things men like doing... Khrushchev’s rule was a happy time for Yekaterina Furtseva. It was during that time that she met Nikolai Firyubin, a career diplomat, a slim brunette of a medium height with an expressive face. Men did not like him because of his high and lofty ways and their friends wondered how such different people could possibly stay together. Their secret meetings spawned a wealth of hearsay and, as if adding fuel to all that rumor, Furtseva never missed a chance to fly to meet her loved one in Prague and then to Belgrade where Firyubin was appointed to serve as Soviet ambassador. When five years later, Nikolai Firyubin returned to Moscow and was promoted to deputy foreign minister, the two finally tied the knot. The family bliss proved pretty short lived though and, disappointed again, Furtseva realized it was already too late to change anything… In 1960, grateful as she was for Nikita Khrushchev’s favors, Furtseva sided with his Politburo pals who were getting increasingly restive about the First Secretary’s ill-advised reforms. Learning about Furtseva’s betrayal, Khrushchev relieved her of all of her Party posts. Coming home that same day Yekaterina Furtseva filled the tub with hot water and slashed her veins... She would have bled white had it not been for the timely intervention of an old friend. The woman called the ambulance, the medics saved the life of the city’s disgraced party leader and a month later Furtseva was appointed Minister of Culture of the USSR. It was then that people started calling her Catherine the Great. As if to underscore the analogy with the 18th century Empress, Furtseva had the portrait of the British Queen Elizabeth II with a laconic inscription “To Catherine from Elizabeth” hanging in her office. Legend had it that after spending a half hour with Furtseva Queen Elizabeth said: “Catherine, do not call me Your Majesty, just say Comrade Elizabeth…” Queen Margrete of Denmark once said she wished she could do for her country just as much as Furtseva did for hers… The rises and falls of an unordinary person like Furtseva were certainly taking their toll on her life. She took to the bottle, but in a way that no one could see it. Getting drunk she would complain about life and curse the men who had once abandoned her. Her work had turned into a string of triumphs and flops. She and Firyubin were now separated. She did not divorce him but she no longer loved him either. She kind of retracted into her own shell only livening up during noisy booze parties which were now happening more and more often… She spent the last two years of her life all alone. People stopped coming
to see her, Firyubin was having an affair on the side and she knew it.
One night, it was October 25, 1974, a tearful deputy foreign minister Nikolai
Firyubin telephoned Furtseva’s daughter, Svetlana, and choking on his words,
said that Yekaterina was dead. Furtseva was only 63…
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made
in the decades following the end of the Second World War. As a 15-year-old
girl she started working at a textile factory where her mother then worked.
It looked like her future life was now sealed – after 30 years spent amid
the deafening roar of the weaving machines she would spend her old years
half deaf and subsisting on a meager pension. Life proved all these
projections wrong though… Joining the Communist party as a 20-year-old
woman, Yekaterina embarked on what later proved an absolutely fantastic
career! Shortly afterwards she was sent to continue her education in Leningrad,
now St. Petersburg. New to the big city, Yekaterina met a dashing
young pilot and soon after they got married. Their daughter was born in
May 1942, in the years of the Second World War. Four months after the birth
of their daughter Yekaterina’s husband came from the front to visit his
family and said he had met another love. Brokenhearted, Yekaterina graduated
from the institute only to realize she had completely lost her direction
in life… She wanted to try her hand in science but the Communist party
functionaries suggested that she embark on a public career instead.
By 1949 Furtseva was introduced to Josef Stalin. Stalin liked her and that
meeting sealed her future career.
