The Voice of Inexperience

(See Cover]

The chimes of the Spassky clock have just struck the noon hour over Moscow. Some 1,300 members of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics are on their way to the Kremlin, walking down the Mokhovaya or the Volkhonka through the snow, or arriving by taxi. At the Borovitsky Gate, while fur-capped guards inspect their passes, they queue up--solid-looking citizens in fur hats and fur-collared overcoats, some in the uniforms of high-ranking army and navy officers, others in the picturesque costumes of their distant countries. Most of them display medals awarded for services to party, state and industry, for all are Communists.

Passing through the guard lines, they make their way to their desks in the Great Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace, a lofty room with canary-colored draperies hanging over tall windows in the south wall. In a gallery behind and above the Deputies, a few selected visitors, including foreign newsmen, are taking their places, while in a series of semicircular boxes on the north wall sit the foreign diplomats. At the far end of the hall, on a raised platform, is a set of pewlike enclosures. Men and women are also taking their places in these pews: they are the functionaries of the Supreme Soviet, its Presidium, ministers and secretaries.

At 1 o'clock the room is suddenly quiet. A group of short, chunky men file into a rear pew: the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the all-high bosses of Communism, has arrived. There is a short, brief explosion of applause, which ends exactly on the instant, for this is the best drilled and most obedient body of public executives in the world--yet one not entirely incapable of shock.

"My Guilt." So last week began the second meeting of this session of the Supreme Soviet. The budget had been received and debated; custom called for a report on foreign affairs, made at the last session by Premier Georgy Malenkov. Instead, putty-nosed Alexander Volkov, Chairman of the Council of the Union, stepped forward to the rostrum. He had, he said, a communication from Comrade Malenkov. Volkov began reading from a paper in hand:

"I ask [he said on behalf of Malenkov] to bring to the notice of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. my request to be relieved from the post of chairman of the Council of Ministers . . ."

There was a muffled gasp, an audible murmur from the well-drilled Deputies. Eyes were focused on the dark-browed, porcine face of the Premier of the Soviet Union, sitting in the middle of the party pew.

"My request is due to practical considerations on the necessity of strengthening the leadership of the Council of Ministers and the need to have at the post . . . another comrade with greater experience in state work. I clearly see that the carrying out of the complicated and responsible duties of Chairman of the Council of Ministers is being negatively affected by my insufficient experience in local work, and the fact that I did not have occasion, in a ministry or some economic organ, to effect direct guidance of individual branches of the national economy . . ."

Calm, impassive, cold-eyed, his heavy arms folded, Malenkov looked straight ahead. This was the man who for 25 years had been Stalin's chief administrative assistant and one of the three or four directors of the Soviet effort in World War II.

"I can see particularly clearly [Volkov went on] my guilt and responsibility for the unsatisfactory state of affairs which has arisen in agriculture, because for several years past I have been entrusted with the duty of controlling and guiding the work of central agricultural organs and the work of local party and administrative organizations in the sphere of agriculture . . ."

Eyes shifted to balding, jug-eared Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the party and high panjandrum of Soviet agriculture, whose report of a week previous had revealed the disastrous state of that industry.

"It is to be expected that various bourgeois, hysterical, ranting viragoes will busy themselves with slanderous inventions in connection with my present statement and the fact itself of my release from the post of Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers, but we, the Communists and the Soviet people, will ignore this lying and slander . . ."

A few more phrases and Malenkov's ignominious abdication speech was ended. Volkov stepped back and Alexander Puzanov, premier of the Russian Republic, moved that Malenkov's resignation be accepted. Every right hand in the audience went up automatically, nor did anyone bother to glance backward to see if there was a sneaking abstainer.

The meeting adjourned. It had lasted seven minutes.

The Mess in the Kremlin. Immediately, there was a buzz of conversation in the hall. Foreign newsmen leaped out of their seats and headed for the Central Telegraph office in Gorky Street, where they broke the news to the world. The predictable had happened: the struggle for power among the Soviet Communist leaders, forecast in hundreds of recent headlines (TIME, Feb. 7), had broken out. Once again the mess in the Kremlin was being laundered in full sight of the world.

Around 4 o'clock that afternoon, the Supreme Soviet Deputies trailed back to the Great Hall. This time, stubby Nikita Khrushchev stepped to the rostrum, his bald head gleaming.

"Comrade Deputies, on instructions from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Elders, I submit the proposal to appoint as Chairman of the Council of Ministers . . . Comrade Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin. We all know Nikolai Alexandrovich ..."

Khrushchev stepped back. The parliament that never says Nyet obediently raised an assenting arm. Immediately afterward, Molotov went into his belligerent, bragging foreign-policy speech (see below).

Next morning the Deputies met again to "debate" the foreign-policy issue. This time it was the turn of the new Premier, portly Marshal Bulganin, 59, to take the rostrum. His marshal's shoulder boards flopping, his white goatee bobbing as he spoke (the morning newspapers had retouched his hair and beard black), he nominated as Defense Minister to succeed him Marshal Georgy Zhukov, three times Hero of the Soviet Union, defender of Moscow, conqueror of Berlin.

As if by an afterthought, Bulganin announced that ex-Premier Georgy Malenkov had been made Minister of Electric Power Stations, and would continue to be a Deputy Premier.

Again the Great Hall was deathly silent. Who among the bureaucrats and functionaries in that room did not remember that Trotsky, deposed by Stalin, had been contemptuously given the Electric Power Stations job?

The Headless Dictatorship. This sudden and cataclysmic shifting of power at the top came as a shock to the audience. Nothing in the previous day's debate had prepared them for the abrupt announcements. Even the high-ranking generals among the Deputies had been surprised. It had all happened behind closed doors, within that narrow circle of men who, each fearful for his own life, had tried to create a headless dictatorship with checks and balances, and had failed. In the party Presidium pew Malenkov was hamming a little, pretending to talk to the men around him. But no one in that audience was deceived. They knew now how serious it was for Malenkov. At the other end of the bench the parched, crushed-satin face of Molotov was turned away, and Marshal Bulganin fussed with papers like an old white parrot. Khrushchev alone among them seemed willing to exchange a word with the ex-Premier.

The First Secretary of the Communist Party is a garrulous man. In relaxed moments at embassy parties, Khrushchev-likes to buttonhole diplomats, talk to them endlessly in badly phrased, ungrammatical Russian. Only a few days before, he had joked and winked with foreign newsmen about the idea of capitalists and Communists sitting around a table talking together, and as he assured visiting Publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr.* that there was no possibility of a rift between himself and Malenkov, his blue eyes were as candid as a baby's.

When Khrushchev smiles, the light flashes on two gold bicuspids. He is short (5 ft. 3 in.), like all of Stalin's men, but bulky, and he has a blunt, peasant face. Among Russians he has a crude way of addressing all those below him in rank with the unceremonious and familiar "thou." Said a Russian who knew him during his days in the Moscow Soviet: "He exudes self-confidence and aplomb. He knows very well how to annoy people with explanations of their party tasks." Was he talking with Malenkov now about his failed party tasks? Was he using the familiar "thou"?

Test of Strength. First Secretary Khrushchev could afford to joke to Malenkov if he had a mind to. He had chosen to make his battle for power public for more than a year now. Openly he had criticized the government ministries under Malenkov's control for inefficiency, for lagging production, etc. Pointedly he had demanded an increasingly harder Stalin line, as opposed to the soft line Malenkov had identified himself with.

While diplomats and pundits the world over weighed these matters with care trying to measure the change from "coexistence" to hardness, from consumer to heavy industry, as if Malenkov and Khrushchev were members of a democratic cabinet politely begging to differ with each other, the fact was that in the final testing of strengths neither man cared basically about ideological matters. Proof of this lay in the resignation announcement. In losing the struggle for power, Malenkov even had to take the rap for errors in agriculture made by Khrushchev.

Two years ago, when Stalin died, the world expected a dramatic breakdown in Soviet politics, then settled back to see what would be done under a proclaimed collective leadership. Who is the No. 1 man? they asked. For the first fortnight they thought that it was Malenkov: he appeared confidently installed as head of the committee. But 16 days after Dictator Stalin's death, there was a significant change: Khrushchev supplanted Malenkov as First Secretary of the party, key position in the Communist setup, a job held by Stalin to the end of his life. Who was Nikita Khrushchev that he could grab so much power?

Little was known about him except that he was the son of a miner in the Kursk region, joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served as a soldier in the civil war. As a party worker in the '30s. he caught the attention of Politburocrat Lazar Kaganovich (now First Deputy Premier and apparently No. 8 or 9 in the hierarchy), who brought him to Moscow. After the vast 1937-38 purge had carried off hundreds of thousands of his comrades, Khrushchev was sent into the Ukraine to help build up the demoralized party organization. He became a Ukrainian expert.

His blunt, rough manners, garrulity and good humor won him attention, but he fired thousands of party secretaries and workers, cracked down ruthlessly on resisting collective farmers. He had an easy audacity about him. During World War II, Stalin gave him the rank of lieutenant general, and he went to work with General (now Marshal) Konev on the Ukrainian front. Professional Soldier Konev masterminded the military strategy; Nikita Khrushchev took care of the politics.

Politics meant provoking German atrocities in order to disillusion the captive Ukrainian people with their German liberators and. as the Red army went forward, catching up with and liquidating Ukrainian nationalists and non-Soviet partisans. He came out of the war wearing the mark of that stony brutality which characterizes all the men who were around Stalin.

He was sent back to the rich, restless Ukraine to organize the reconstruction of that war-swept land, and to put the collective-farm organization in order. Out of that grew his characteristically audacious agrogorod plan, a scheme by which scores of small farm and village communities could be amalgamated into large agricultural towns and thus more easily supervised by the police. In effect, farm workers, like factory workers, would become a city proletariat, radiating out to tractor stations each day and returning to the towns each night. When the peasant rebelled in the only way he could, by working inefficiently. Khrushchev cracked down. Stalin rewarded him by putting him on the Presidium of the party and in 1952 making him one of the eight secretaries of the reformed party secretariat.

The Big Leap. How did Khrushchev jump so smartly from under secretary to First Secretary of the party, at Malenkov's expense? Outside the Kremlin, no one knows. In the months after Stalin's death, it was to the interest of all the jostling little cluster of Soviet leaders to show that there was none of what Malenkov called "panic and disarray." Some executions were inevitable. But significantly, they were all among the secret police: first Lavrenty Beria, Minister for the Interior, pulled down from his high place and shot; then Mikhail Ryumin, Deputy Minister of State Security. Last Christmas Eve it was Viktor Abakumov, former Minister of State Security, and three of his aides. All were identified with the "Beria plot" and the equally mysterious and never explained "doctors' plot" against the army (Vasilevsky, Shtemenko, Konev). Even the now deposed Malenkov can be described as a former police official, for as clerk of the 2,500,000 dossiers, he was actually Stalin's finger man in the great GPU purges.

Everyone in the regime's top leadership well knew that who controlled the policy controlled their necks. It was necessary to their common survival to disperse the State Security apparatus, and to make common cause against anyone out front, i.e., Malenkov, to keep him from getting this last key symbol of power. In April 1954, after Beria's downfall, the Security Services were detached from the Ministry of the Interior and placed under a Committee for State Security. Committee Chairman Ivan Alexandrovich

Serov did not belong either to the presidium of party or government. An old GPU agent, whose most notable exploits were liquidating the Baltic and Chechen peoples during World War II, Serov is a tall, cadaverous man who walks unevenly. The Germans knew him as "the one with the limp." They made his acquaintance in the Ukraine, where he is said to have worked with Khrushchev.

Tirelessly, Khrushchev labored to place his own men in key positions in the provincial and city organizations of the party. Then, in a succession of major policy speeches, he took the fight into the open (TIME, Sept. 28, 1953 et seq.). A series of near national calamities gave him the chance to pin Malenkov with a fine set of charges, and his success in reorganizing the party gave him the power to make them stick. That was the big thing.

The New Life. Malenkov had stepped into the premiership bellowing the slogan, "A new life for all." There were to be more and better houses, amnesty for political prisoners, an abundance of consumer goods, honest art and, above all, peace. It was an obvious tactic: after a generation of Stalinist austerity and terror, the leader who could deliver these things might consolidate himself with the masses. As a matter of fact, everyone climbed on the "new life" bandwagon, including Khrushchev himself.

But a year later, Khrushchev, as party chief, with the power in his control, was able to show that the "new life" was a flop. In a series of speeches he showed that: 1) housing had not materialized; 2) the consumer-goods program had failed; 3) there was a nationwide food shortage. There were some other failures he did not have to point up: the first suggestion of relaxed control had been followed by the East German riots and by a ten-day strike of slave laborers in the Vorkuta prison camps. Attempts at "honest art," e.g., Novelist Ehrenburg's The Thaw, merely confused Soviet writers accustomed to writing propaganda, including Ehrenburg himself, and honesty in art was incomprehensible to painters of the approved anecdote.

A bad season in the Ukraine had ruined the harvest, and vast quantities of grain had rotted on the railroad sidings; in the Volga region, dry winds cut crops. It did not matter to Khrushchev that these failures were aggravated by his own plan to switch wheat production to Siberia, and that the harvest in the Ukraine had been delayed (and a fourth of it lost) because he had ordered much of the machinery for its collection removed to Siberia. All he wanted was something to pin on Malenkov, head of the negligent government ministries.

It did not matter to Khrushchev (or any other Soviet leader) that the condition he had revealed was in fact the sharpest proof that the Soviet system of state socialism, with its hierarchy of officials and police, is unworkable, both in industry and agriculture. The idea of the "new life" had sprung from Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., published just before the old dictator's death, in which the idea of satisfying consumer demand on the basis of "primacy in the production of means of production" could be found in a fog of ideological jargon. Khrushchev made a savage comment about "ill-starred theoreticians" in his last speech on the subject, but it was Malenkov he was aiming at, not Stalin.

The Blaze. The gathering of all this ideological tinder had been made plain to all the world for weeks, but who would start the blaze, and when, and who would be burned, was something no man outside the Kremlin could foresee.

Possibly the final testing of strength came too quickly, and at an awkward moment for the regime, so that it was necessary to make the clash seem merely a modest confession of Malenkov's domestic inadequacy. The one new complicating factor that had intruded on the Central Committee's locked-door meetings just before the Supreme Soviet session was foreign policy. The "peaceful coexistence" line had won important people outside the Soviet Union, but was not achieving its basic purpose of defeating German rearmament. In Asia, Chou En-lai's unyielding stand on Formosa had raised the awkward question of whether the Russians were prepared to support him if he got into war with the U.S. The two men who emerged most triumphantly from last week's shake-up--Khrushchev and Bulganin--were the men who journeyed to Peking together last fall and promised "to support the Chinese people in their determination to liberate their suffering brothers from the oppression of the Chiang Kai-shek brigands on Taiwan [Formosa]." But if their victory over Malenkov was won on that issue, it was victory at a cost: the cost of exposing to the world the basic weakness of Moscow. The leadership was in disarray, and the new coalition that emerged was only a new balancing of strength in a struggle that is not yet fought out.

In the new coalition, Khrushchev the adventuresome was the big figure of the day. Malenkov, having confessed his errors, had possibly for a time saved his neck. Other realignments showed caution.

Durable Molotov, who had made the proper noises about coexistence without sounding personally convinced, was still the big voice on foreign affairs (in the jostle for power, he had no cause to love Malenkov: in 1940 Malenkov's charges of nepotism in certain commissariats had cost Madame Molotov her job as boss of the fish industry and put Molotov on a spot). The army marshals got a big play in the propaganda, which would comfort those Russians who might take Molotov's thunderings about capitalist encirclement seriously, for the marshals, though party men. also have a loyalty to the army.

Shortly after the announcement of Malenkov's demotion, the Supreme Soviet approved a decree elevating Liquidator Serov, the man with the limp, to ministerial rank. The decree said its aim was to "strengthen the links" between the committee in Moscow and the security committees (recently reorganized by Serov) in the 16 Soviet republics. Apparently the time has not yet come for seizure of absolute power. Any direct attempt to take the mantle of Stalin might well lead to Khrushchev's own suppression.

After 37 years of power, the Communist Party had not yet solved the problem of how to run an economy, only how to sit on one. The party was exposed as a power group which cannot resolve its leadership. Committee or collective leadership fails because the strongest member of the group moves towards absolute power. In the face of its economic and organizational failure, the party had returned to the only business in which its members excel: conspiracy, intrigue and terror.

There have been some who have thought that Communism might possibly work, but only at very great cost. The power struggle in the Kremlin revealed that it still does not work, even at great cost.

*For other findings on Hearst's assignment to Moscow, see PRESS.

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