I don't really know what to think of him. Letting aside the cultural crackdown which seems incredibly overblown he seems to have equal numbers of successes and based moments to failures.

I think most notable was his original idea of appointing experts to high posts - at that moment in history most likely a mistake, especially with all the Lenin's writing about them being used as arguments against. Then again maybe not that much since a lot of time passed and it might be safer... especially safer than Khrushchev. Also, China right now does exactly this with a great successes, as long as the proven comrades are there too - we can say that Zhdanov was a man who went far ahead of his time :D

Zhdanovshchina, especially the point that socialism and capitalism formed two blocks that are in the ideological war with eachother and therefore socialism must not ignore the culture war, is so absolutely obvious, even from back then, that why it wasn't on all the time? Even more, later the socialist block allowed the western soft power in and it was one of main factors in the fall.