Yekaterina Alexeyevna Furtseva was a Soviet politician and the second woman to be admitted as secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
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, the last party congress of the Stalin era, where she was also elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Under Nikita Khrushchev, who sympathized with her, Furtseva was the first secretary of Moscow Committee of the CPSU from 1954 to 1957, a job Khrushchev himself occupied in 1930s.
In 1952, Furtseva attacked the leading filmstar, Boris Babochkin, who was famous since starring as Vasily Chapayev.