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When diplomats in Moscow opened their invitations to the annual anniversary celebration of the Soviet Army & Navy last week, they read: "Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky, Chief of Staff, and his wife invite . . ." It was the first outsiders knew that there had been a major change in the Soviet high command.

Sokolovsky, 55, one of Russia's ablest soldiers, one of the captors of Berlin in World War II and organizer of the anti-Western Berlin blockade, had displaced General Sergei M. Shtemenko. As usual, the Kremlin gave no explanation, left Westerners to wonder what had happened to ex-Chief of Staff Shtemenko. Only last month he was in the news: he was one of the five high Soviet military figures said by the Kremlin to have been saved from slow murder in the Kremlin "doctors' plot."

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