The Quick & the Dead

(See Cover)

Stalin spoke of the continuity of Soviet policy. If anything were to happen to him, there would be good men ready to step into his shoes.

--Winston Churchill in Triumph and Tragedy

Georgy Malenkov was the man Stalin chose six months before his death in 1953 to step into his bloodied jack boots. But last week pudgy Georgy Malenkov. like hundreds of thousands of Communists before him, was on his way to banishment in Asia's outer reaches. Kicked out of the Soviet Communist Party Presidium and Central Committee, demoted from the Ministry of Electric Power Stations, he had been put on a job as a Dynamo-Dan at a hydroelectric project at Ust Kameno-gorsk in the remote Altai Mountains near the Mongolian border--1,800 crow-flight miles from Moscow. The area is part of the Karaganda administration of Gulag, the vast slave-labor system that Malenkov helped found. In Ust Kamenogorsk, Malenkov will be constantly watched. If his exile follows the pattern of previous top-party banishments (Trotsky was banished to the same province), he will be amply supplied with creature comforts and vodka, but there will be no escape. Nor would there be any real contact with people, because the risk of close association with him would be too great.

Malenkov's banishment, announced last week in foreign broadcasts by Radio Moscow, was intended as proof of the Soviet Union's new ''lose-and-live" policy. Demoted with Malenkov for their "anti-party"' activity ( TIME. July 15). two more of Stalin's "good men." Yyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. were also said to be slated for minor, unspecified jobs in the government apparatus. But there was a curious dichotomy about the lose-and-live policy: the avidly curious Russian public had been told nothing about these shifts, instead was being treated to a stepped-up hate-and-horror campaign. All . over the Soviet Union, haranguing poli-truks were laying the basis for what could be a monster show trial of Malenkov on the charge of having organized a mysterious, little known (outside the Communist Party) 1949 conspiracy called "the Leningrad Case" (see box).

The Black Sheep. Whether the Soviet Union can be anything but a monolithic state in which all opponents must, of necessity and for public instruction, be physically annihilated sooner or later depends at present on a rotund, cup-nosed, mica-eyed man who was bustling and belly-laughing his way through Czechoslovakia last week. Xikita Khrushchev, the muzhik with the mostest. was acting like a champion who has dusted off the challenger. Overflowing with friendship and good humor, he bussed pale, frigid Czech Communist Leader Antonin Novotny on both cheeks and rode through Prague, which was tapestried with flags and banners and huge portraits of himself, on the jump seat of the reception automobile waving a panama hat.

Everywhere he went he made speeches (scores--seven one day) that were fluent, effulgent, flabbergasting. Said he of the Malenkov opposition: "As they say among the people, a scabby sheep appeared among a good flock. They were thinking of seizing the key positions and of turning the current their own way. But you know, Comrades, how it ended. As one, we took them by their tails and threw them out." Murmured Premier Nikolai Bulganin, whose new, lesser role in association with Khrushchev was underlined by a new low in obsequiousness: "It is necessary to emphasize in particular that the First Secretary, Comrade Khrushchev, deserves great praise for unmasking and defeating the anti-party group."

For a man who had presumably just exposed and defeated a powerful conspiracy to grab power, Khrushchev had left Moscow rather quickly. The world was asked to believe that this was proof of how well Khrushchev had everything under control. But Stalin, a greater autocrat, never left home when a conspiracy needed routing out. The inference was that, though Khrushchev is No. 1, "others" were powerful enough to do the dirty work, and did not have to clear everything with Khrushchev. As Khrushchev strode confidently through Communist Czechoslovakia, he was followed by tanned, blond, smiling State Security Boss Ivan Serov, watchdog of the Communist state and liquidator of millions. Many of Nikita's more reckless, vodka-primed speeches to the Czechs were drastically edited by other hands before being passed out to the press: Did Stalin let someone else, without his say-so, edit his remarks? The easy confidence of the happy tourists reflected their satisfaction at the turn of events, but it also raised a question: Had the Malenkov affair been, as Communist sources were anxious to make out, a personal power struggle on the lines of a Maffia feud or a Chicago gang fight? Or was it, remembering the breadth and depth of the Soviet state, and the irreducible fanaticism of the Communist ideology, a power adjustment of pro-founder significance?

Destroying the Party. In the past three years Stalin's successors have released, for their own purposes, a flood of new material about the nature of the Stalinist regime. From this material, a completely new interpretation of the development of the Soviet Union has been reached by Western scholars and "Sovietologists." It is now known that between 1934 and 1939 Stalin attempted to destroy the authority and power of the Soviet Communist Party by liquidating thousands of its leaders and tens of thousands of its minor functionaries. For 13 years there was no full meeting of the Central Committee and, according to Khrushchev himself, Politburo meetings were a sham. In its last years, the Stalin regime was a pure autocracy. Stalin ruled through a personal secretariat controlled by a "special sector" whose head was Malenkov. The famous names that ranked beside Stalin's in the Politburo and in the government ministries were those of privileged shop-window dummies and personal toadies whom Stalin switched around at will, and sometimes caused to disappear.

The chief administrator of Stalin's domestic and foreign policies was the NKVD,* a huge secret bureaucracy with absolute powers which grew out of Lenin's Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The Cheka was a picked group of Bolshevik revolutionaries whose duty, during the 1918-1920 Civil War, was to instill Marxism in soldiers, workers and peasants and to liquidate anti-Bolshevik activity. Stalin made the NKVD the "inner temple" of Communism, and its dedicated, anonymous thousands of operators not only controlled the police, espionage, security and surveillance agencies, but by dominating innumerable inspection, control, auditing and credentials committees and commissions, reached down into every corner of Soviet life; their chauffeurs abroad gave orders to ambassadors. In the shape of Gulag (literally, State Administration of Camps), the NKVD was the undisguised administrator of vast areas of the Soviet hinterland.

Stalin's autocracy, according to Khrushchev, was responsible for Soviet army reversals in the first six months of World War II, a debacle which cost four or five million Russian lives and lost most of European Russia to the Nazis. By the time the Russians, by a superhuman effort, had reversed the balance, the whole country was literally sick of autocracy. There were murmurs of dissent, attempts to guide Stalin along other paths. But the mysterious demise of a number of high Politburo-crats halted any defiance from on high. The result was, says Robert C. Tucker, who spent 5 1/2years in the U.S. embassy in Moscow as an attache, an "inward migration'' of the Russian people. Boredom, cynicism, and mediocrity--what the NKVD called "formalism"--characterized almost all cultural and political life.

Stalin's autocracy was incapable of dealing with the vastly enlarged empire gained in World War II. The aging dictator ruthlessly suppressed nationalist tendencies in Poland, launched a bitter hate campaign against the recalcitrant Tito, and in the Soviet Union refused his war weary people any of the easing of their misery that they had hoped peace would bring. Toward the end of his days, Stalin may have begun to see the essential weakness of his personal autocracy; in 1952 he called, for the first time since 1939, a congress of the party, reconvened the Central Committee and set up a 36-man Party Presidium (a new name for the Politburo) in which his favorite, Malenkov, had a prominent place. Was this a dying dictator's effort to reconstitute a party whose power he had all but destroyed? Or was it, as Khrushchev said, his way of seeking "younger" men who would do nothing "but extol him?"

The evidence of the past four years is that the Soviet inner power struggle, of which the Malenkov banishment is only one chapter, began at this point. It is not only a fight between known men, but a struggle among powerful institutions--the party as a political organization, the party in the NKVD, the party in the Soviet Army--and involved in this struggle are others, as well as the faces the world knows, with degrees of power the world can only guess at. They want no new autocracy, but the inevitable impulse, Soviet Communism being what it is, has been one head, one brain, that will bring all factions together in a semblance of monolithic unity.

The Timashuk Woman. Counting against all the old Politburocrats and Kremlin toadies was the party's and people's hatred of Stalin. All were guilty by association, and by the innumerable crimes they had committed at the dictator's direction, but Malenkov was closer to Stalin than any of the others. As Stalin lay ill, a letter reached him from a woman doctor called Timashuk, warning him of improper treatments being used by his doctors. The "sickly suspicious" Stalin ordered the top specialists of the Kremlin dispensary arrested, called in Security Boss Semyon D. Ignatiev* and told him:

"If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head." The doctors were arrested and charged with having murdered Politburocrats Zhdanov and Shcherbakov and having attempted to poison some top Red marshals.

Khrushchev, telling of the episode in his famed secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, said that the woman Timashuk was a professional provocateur ("an unofficial collaborator with the organs of state security") and that an unnamed "someone" had put her up to the job. Khrushchev left the identity of the "someone" open.

Was it Malenkov? The question hung in the air above the Congress meeting. In the same speech, Khrushchev revealed that one of Stalin's last acts was an effort to liquidate almost the whole Presidium. The inference Khrushchev may have wanted drawn from these facts is that "someone" was exploiting the dying Stalin's well-known psychosis to get all his rivals for leadership liquidated.

Though an able administrator and an adroit politician. Georgy Malenkov was probably too ruthless an intriguer for the big institutions (NKVD, the army, etc.) to entrust their future to. Though he lasted 23 months as Premier of the Soviet Union. Malenkov lasted only 16 days as First Secretary of the party, the crucial job Stalin willed him. Next in line after Malenkov in the hierarchy was Beria (who was quickly liquidated, a sop to popular anti-Stalin feeling, as much as for the crimes he had committed). Then came Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan.

Some distance down the line, for he had ascended to the Politburo at the top of the hierarchy a dozen years after the oldest hands, was Nikita Khrushchev. It is unlikely that Khrushchev had a personal apparatus powerful enough to catapult him into the general secretaryship of the party a fortnight after Stalin's death. The great institutions behind the struggle obviously settled for the ebullient little man from the village of Kalinovka in the region of Kursk because, at that step of the leadership crisis, Khrushchev had the advantage of a fairly new face, and being a man without ideological subtlety, he would have to yield to advice given by the great institutions: the army, the NKVD, the reconstituted party.

Dancing the Gopak. Khrushchev is of peasant stock, forthright and outgoing, but at the same time full of wile and guile. Before the revolution he was remembered in his village as an accomplished performer on the Ukrainian flute, the town's best dancer of the gopak (hearing of this, Stalin once ordered him to dance the gopak; he did), and a prodigious drinker of yorsh (a potent mass boilermaker made of six pints of beer to iV pints of vodka). Born in a reed-and-mud hut, the son of a miner, he had taught himself to read, worked as a pipe fitter. In bell-bottomed pants and a grey wool cap, Sunday costume of the Donets worker of his day, he was often seen around the taverns, downing yorsh and saying: "Beer's all right for the Germans, but vodka's the stuff for Russians."

He joined the Red army and fought in the Ukraine during the 1918-20 Civil War. He caught the eye of Party Worker Kaganovich, and his career began, first as a minor party secretary at Stalino, then in Kiev. When Kaganovich was assigned to supervise the building of the Moscow subway, he brought in the untutored young tough from the Donets to watchdog the workers. Khrushchev got into the Moscow city party organization in 1931, and when Stalin started liquidating the party leaders Khrushchev quickly put himself on the road to power with a whole string of speeches condemning the fingered Communists as a ''pack of murderers and scoundrels" (1936), "a warning to all who think of raising a hand against our Stalin" (1937)> "a victorious crushing of these Fascist enemies" (1939).

Kaganovich introduced his protege to the top Kremlin big shots, and Khrushchev, who had wit and a fund of droll peasant sayings, and could laugh with his hands on his hips at the boss's mordant quips, was soon a regular visitor at the dacha Stalin kept for his fun-loving consort Roza Kaganovich, Lazar's sister. Khrushchev was a good deal more useful to Stalin than many of his Kremlin dummies. Twice Stalin sent him into the Ukraine to deal with troublesome peasants and bourgeois nationalists. Nikita, dressed in a Ukrainian shirt and cloth cap, deported scores of thousands of peasants to Siberia, dismissed hundreds of Ukrainian party members. It was while on one of these assignments that he struck up an acquaintanceship with Colonel Ivan Serov, NKVD expert in genocide.

Khrushchev's Stalinist guilt was as great as that of any other Politburocrat, if not greater, but in the eyes of the Moscow party hierarchy this did not matter so much because his victims had not been members of their families, but peasants and Ukrainians. Besides, he had a quality that could be put to great use at this moment. During World War II a Communist journalist, who had seen him scrambling over Kiev's rubble-filled Kreshchatik Street ahead of his entourage of generals and party officials, talking fast with his hands to everybody he met, put the quality in a few words: "He was the first Soviet leader I had ever seen walking among the people. It was obvious that they liked him."

The Politician. In the two years after his appointment to the party secretaryship, Khrushchev went walking and talking among the Russian people. He bustled into collective farms, backed housing developments, condemned bureaucrats, fathered radical schemes to develop the "virgin lands" of Siberia, proposed growing U.S. corn, raising pigs, promised consumer goods without backing away from the committed heavy-industry program. Behaving like a democratic politician endowed with superabundant energy, tenacity, shrewdness and folksy wisdom, he won friends and began to make the Russians feel that indeed a new age had arrived. The buildup gave him a new standing. But among the people there was still a great suspicion of the old Stalinist gang.

Toward the end of 1955, the party, feeling its new authority and power as a political organization, was in a mood to take an apparently decisive step away from Stalinist autocracy and all it stood for. There were deep rumblings of anti-Stalinism in the newspapers. In February 1956, Khrushchev got up at the end of the 20th Party Congress and made his now famous, secret three-hour speech denouncing Stalin and all his works.

Read in retrospect the speech is a chilling indictment, not only of the dead Stalin as it was then seen, but of his living associates (with the exception of Mikoyan, who is portrayed in a favorable light). Malenkov's maneuverings to obtain permanent succession by liquidation are exposed in a language any party member can understand. It is broadly hinted that it was Malenkov, head of the "special sector," who guided the hand of the Arch-terrorist Yezhov during the 1937-38 purges. Adds Khrushchev: "Mass repressions grew tremendously from the end of 1936 after a telegram from Stalin [ordering that Yezhov get a free hand to step up the liquidations] was sent to Kaganovich and Molotov." The meaning is clear: Kaganovich and Molotov bear a special responsibility for the holocaust of 1936-38.

The Gang-Up. For any Communist leader who heard or read this speech, it was only a matter of time before Malenkov, Kaganovich and Molotov went the way of Beria. It is not surprising that the three men about to be jettisoned, different in all respects, should form some kind of alliance for their own protection. Murmurs of protest were heard from Molotov in Pravda, and Malenkov began maneuvering among his followers in the technocracy. Their big break was the revolt in Poland, followed by the Hungarian Revolution, both of which made Khrushchev look bad.

In these events there was room for genuine ideological difference. Was not the process of destalinization, crudely set off by Khrushchev, proceeding too quickly? Had not Khrushchev's rough peasant hand, thrust into the delicate balance between independent Yugoslavia and the dependent satellites, been a contributing factor in the revolt? Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich got their chance to rally allies in an attack on Khrushchev at the December plenum of the Central Committee and thus delay their own fate. The ostensible issue in the plenum was a party plan, pushed by Khrushchev, for decentralizing Soviet industry (a plan which decreases the power of the Moscow ministries and gives more power to the regional party bosses). Malenkov's technocrats, their jobs in jeopardy, came to his side, and Khrushchev was forced to modify his plan.

But Khrushchev also had allies. Zhukov and Serov, at the army and police level, Mikoyan and Suslov, at the political level, ruthlessly crushed the Hungarian outbreak. At a February plenum of the Central Committee, Khrushchev was able to make a full comeback with his industrial plan. The fate of Malenkov & Co., if it had ever been in doubt, now seemed certain. But there was still one desperate play to make.

Early in June it was decided that Khrushchev should attend the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Leningrad. Immediately, Molotov began maneuvering. According to one version, he invited Zhukov to his dacha, appealed to him for army support at an extraordinary Presidium meeting, citing the danger to the whole defense setup if Khrushchev's reckless policies prevailed. (Zhukov instead privately tipped off Khrushchev that a plot was brewing.) Then Malenkov, Molotov or Kaganovich (one or all three) demanded a meeting of the Presidium. Khrushchev is said to have agreed, but when the Presidium met on June 17 or 19, three full members were absent. The opposition challenged Khrushchev's right to preside, and on a vote he was denied the chair. It was taken by Bulganin. Then the opposition launched an attack on Khrushchev's policies, charging him with Trotskyist and rightist peasant deviations. Translated out of Communist jargon, this meant that Khrushchev's foreign policy was too adventuresome, and his opportunistic farm policy would breed a new crop of rich kulaks.* Some Communist sources say that Khrushchev was at one point voted out of his party secretaryship by a combination of Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Bulganin and Voroshilov. Other sources say that he stalled any formal vote and insisted that he could legally be removed only by the full 130-odd-man Central Committee. In the Central Committee, Zhukov showed that he was backing Khrushchev, and everyone else took cover; the opposition was crushed by a unanimous vote.

The various unofficial accounts of this meeting heard round the world last week are all from Communist sources. They may be generally correct, but they have one ulterior purpose: to convince the non-Communist world, inside and outside Russia, that a genuine democratic committee fight can be staged in destalinized Moscow and put to a vote. Undoubtedly there was a .heated Presidium meeting, followed by a meeting of the Central Committee, which lasted far beyond normal duration. The men soon to be fingered as the organizers of the Leningrad Case (see box)--a charge which, according to all Soviet precedent, would cost them their lives--undoubtedly put up a vigorous fight: Molotov, attacking Khrushchev's inept foreign policy; Malenkov, agilely trying to save his skin; and the sour-voiced Kaganovich, full of murderous hate for the man who had once been his protege. But they lost because the mass of the party was against them and had ordained that they should be formally shorn of their great offices and privileges. In its final stage the meeting was probably less of a democratic gathering than a ghastly charade, designed to provide Khrushchev with his "scabby sheep" thesis (i.e., a cleansing of the party) and to speed the old Stalin associates to exile, if not to death. The stage arrangements, the cues picked up by party workers all over the country, seem too patly rehearsed to have been the outcome of a chance, snap meeting.

Family Man. Cried Khrushchev in Czechoslovakia last week: "What will the policy be like? This is a stupid question. What will happen? Everybody knows what will happen. We will do the same, but with more emphasis." The emphasis where peace was concerned: "Trust in God, but look out for yourselves. When you walk among dogs, don't forget to carry a stick. After all, this is what a hound has teeth for, to bite when he feels like it." On the subject of controlling the people: "The party leadership must not be divorced from the ranks of the party and must not become divorced from the masses. If there is a divorce there will be no comrades. Hungary serves a vivid lesson. As a result of disintegration and divorce a handful of Hungarian counterrevolutionaries, with help from abroad, were able to stage a blood bath in Budapest, when a mere sneeze from the party members should have been enough to blow them away."

These were homely analogies, a tough line folksily delivered, to conform with the current theme of benevolence. Folksiness is Khrushchev's style. Back in Moscow there is a Khrushchev family: dumpy, grey Mrs. Khrushchev, almost never seen at public functions, who once wistfully complained to a U.S. diplomat's wife that she did not go to the theater "as much as she would like to." The Khrushchevs have a downtown apartment in Moscow, a house in Lenin Hills of the boxy type favored by Nikita, nicknamed a Khrushchobka by builders, a dacha in the Crimea. In Moscow also are his son and two daughters, Nadia and Rada (of whom he once jokingly said, "They keep me from paying taxes"): one daughter married to roly-poly Alexei Adzhubei, editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, organ of the young Communists; the other talked about all over Moscow for having stolen the handsome boy friend of a famous actress. There is also the legend of a hero son killed at Stalingrad.

Tito Smells Bad. But there is another side to Khrushchev's benevolence and melting concern for peace and prosperity. Tossing away a party-prepared oration at a workers meeting in Czechoslovakia last week, Khrushchev gave vent to some tough talk about Tito. "Now certain clever boys begin criticizing us. They say you have done this badly and that stupidly. Listen, dears, where were you when we started the Revolution?" Nikita made clear that he was talking of Tito by telling Yugoslav journalists present not to put down what he had to say, that he would soon tell Tito to his face. "The front of the revolutionary working class must be broadened, and Yugoslavia must not be excluded from this front. But, let us not discuss who is cleverer and who is more stupid, to put it plainly. We won't criticize you, but if you criticize us, Comrades, we know how to pay back. Now in this fight which broke out on the Hungarian question, what did we get? We got absolute unity and the rallying of the Communist ranks of the world. Yugoslavia remained isolated, and who spoke in its favor? Dulles, Eisenhower, Guy Mollet and so forth and so forth. What a group! Socialism that gets help from Dulles smells bad."

Next day there was a shocked silence in Belgrade. This was Khrushchev the dictator talking, sure now of his ascendancy, contemptuous of all but his. own, threatening to crush anything in his way. When the time came to change the theme of benevolence, an exile in Ust Kamenogorsk could expect no mercy.

The West watched the new Khrushchev with mixed feelings. There was a widely shared belief that any trouble in the Communist Party was good for the world. But was this trouble or a strengthening of the party? If Khrushchev's bull voice had been muted before, it would soon be in full throat, making his demands known around the world. A top-level U.S. expert says: "Khrushchev has won, but the results will be catastrophic for him. He is now almost alone. Mikoyan will always leap to the winning side, and cannot be depended upon. The only first-rate man left on Khrushchev's side is Zhukov." Many felt that there was an advantage in the fact that Khrushchev was no ideologist, no man of theory, but a pragmatist, and that his pragmatism would lead him into blunders, or against his will into making more concessions than would a more doctrinaire man. But a U.S. intelligence evaluator had another view: "He has demonstrated time and again that he is a gambler, ready to go for broke. Such a man at the head of a great atomic power is always to be reckoned with soberly."

The great party institutions in Moscow were stuck with their new leader; so was the world.

* Later recreated as a ministry, the MVD, though the old name stuck. * Security Boss Ignatiev, who may know a great deal about Stalin's death two months later, is still alive, a full member of the Central Committee and the only living ex-NKVD boss. * Khrushchev's answer, delivered last week in Czechoslovakia: "On a hungry stomach, Marxist-Leninism may be very difficult to un derstand. It is not wrong to throw in a piece of bacon and a piece of butter in the course of improving the theory of Marx."

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