Andrei Zhdanov
Shtykov was born in 1907 to a family of farmers in eastern Belarus. In 1929 he joined the Communist Party in Leningrad and became a Komsomol activist. In 1938 Shtykov became the Second Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee, where he became the protege of First Secretary Andrei Zhdanov. Zhdanov's support allowed Shtykov to rise rapidly: he even briefly held a leading role in the Great Purge that September.