Proof of Weakness

In Communism's 37 years in power in Russia, leaders have fallen from power in dramatically diverse ways. Some cringingly confessed to being jackals, venal hirelings in the pay of the capitalist enemy. Some went silently to the cellar. Some, like Molotov in his days as Premier, stepped uncomplainingly aside and lived on, even rising to high power again. Some, like the devoted Communists in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, confessed to others' errors as their last proof of loyalty to the system, and hoped that after their deaths Communist history would thank them for their sacrifice to the cause. But nobody before had ever fallen as Georgy Malenkov, once the presumed heir to Stalin's dictatorship, fell last week.

He sat before the Supreme Soviet while his startling admission of incompetency was read out: "I ... request to be relieved." There was a reason for Malenkov's whimper: the regime could not afford a bang. To have trumpeted out a brazen declaration of his disloyalty to the creed at this moment might have jarred things too much; but to have left without admitting some error--even if only inefficiency--would have left Georgy Malenkov unreprimanded, in too strong a position. So came his odd confession and the clumsy charade that followed: 1,300 hands raised unquestioningly to accept their premier's resignation.

The momentousness of the news could be judged by the headlines it displaced. Until the bulletin from Moscow, the big news everywhere was of the U.S. Seventh Fleet steaming to within gun range of Communist China to evacuate, come war or high water, Chiang's Nationalists from the Tachen Islands. The British Commonwealth prime ministers assembled in London could talk of nothing else; Britain's Laborites cried that it surely meant war and demanded that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden beg Premier Chou En-lai for peace. That kind of fear of imminent war in the Formosa Strait (an impression that the Chinese Communists wished to spread) quickly faded with the Moscow announcements, and the evacuation went off without anyone's being hurt.

For above all, Moscow's confession of failure, admission of serious shortcomings, and blustered warnings were proof of the essential myth of the Red monolith. A going concern does not shake up its management at the very top. After 37 terrible years of trying, the Soviet Communist system had still not found ways to feed and clothe its people, satisfy its national needs and provide a stable succession of governments--the Kremlin leaders openly confessed so.

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