Yekaterina Furtseva

Yekaterina Alexeyevna Furtseva (; 7 December 1910 – 24 October 1974) was a Soviet politician and member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). She was the second woman to be elected member of the CPSU Presidium (20th term) and the fourth woman elected to the CPSU Secretariat (20th term). The first female Politburo and Secretariat member was Yelena Stasova.

Biography Furtseva was born in Vyshny Volochyok. Until the 1940s, she worked as an ordinary weaver at one of Moscow's textile factories. She had been a minor party worker in Kursk and the Crimea, and was called to Moscow and sent to the Institute of Chemical Technology from where she graduated in 1941 as a chemical engineer. Furtseva's party career started under Joseph Stalin. Gradually, she became active in Komsomol affairs and rose to the position of Secretary of the Moscow City Council in 1950. She gave a speech at the 19th Congress of the CPSU in 1952,

In 1956 she was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee and was elected a candidate member of Presidium of the Central Committee (aka the Politburo). She became the first woman to join the Politburo the next year. In this capacity, she sided with Khrushchev in de-Stalinization during the Khrushchev's Thaw, and secured the downfall of Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, and Lazar Kaganovich when they conspired to depose her patron.

During that time she fell in love with Nikolay Firyubin, the Soviet ambassador in Yugoslavia. Furtseva scandalized the Soviet elite by her weekend trips abroad in order to meet her lover. However, she retained her post as Minister for Culture for 14 years. She died in Moscow a few months later, officially of heart failure. Yet there were rumors that she was implicated in illegal commercial dealings and, wishing to preclude the impending scandal and disgrace, committed suicide. Furtseva is buried at the Novodevichye Cemetery.