Thin Man Out

Rare in Soviet Russia is a living ex-chief of the political police. Last week Russia had one--tough, professorial Marshal Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, 46. He stepped out as head of the N.K.V.D,, but was apparently still in Stalin's high command.

To succeed Beria, Stalin chose Colonel General Sergei Nikolaevich Kruglev, a baby-faced leviathan (6 ft. 2 in., 245 Ib ) who looks like a cop and is one. Kruglev bossed the police detail that guarded Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam, chaperoned Molotov to San Francisco and London. At Potsdam he chain-smoked, enthusiastically bummed chewing gum from every Yank he met, consumed vast quantities of food and vodka, kept his belly shaking with laughter between mouthfuls. President Truman liked Kruglev well enough to give him an autographed picture, a Legion of Merit.

Nobody (except Stalin) could say just what Beria's replacement meant, UNO delegates saw a connection with Vice Commissar Vishinsky's unexplained absence from London. Was the Red Army about to blow its top? President Mikhail Kalinin had publicly admitted it would be tough to keep returning soldiers down on the farm (TIME, Nov. 19). Some observers guessed that Trouble Shooter Beria had been given the job of holding down discontent.

Moscow merely said that Beria had left the N.K.V.D. because he was too busy with "other central work."

It was unlikely that his predecessors' fate was closing in on Beria.* The thin man with the bourgeois pince-nez was still alternate on the all-powerful Politburo, a vice chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, a marshal of the Soviet Union. Last fortnight he was nominated for re-election to the Supreme Soviet on a special list of handicappers' choices which also includes Candidates Stalin and Molotov. A native of Georgia like his boss, whom he once lionized in an apple-polishing history, Beria joined the C.H.E.K.A. in 1921.

In 1938 Stalin summoned him to Moscow with orders to curb the zeal of the N.K.V.D., which was making the state more enemies than it was catching. Beria promptly purged the purgers, began what for Russia was a comparatively kid-gloved regime. Was it time again for the iron fist?

* Beria's four predecessors in the C.H.E.K.A., Ogpit, N.K.V.D.: Felix Dzerzhinsky (1917-26), relieved and died of heart attack 1926; Viacheslav Menshinsky (1926-34), died in office 1934! Genrikh Yagoda (1934-36), relieved in 1936, shot for treason 1938; Nikolai Yezhov (1936-38), relieved in 1938, disappeared from public view in 1939, believed dead or insane.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.