Marshals at Work

Ever since the battle of Narva and Pskov in 1918,* when the Bolsheviks won their first military victory, Feb. 23 has been Red Army Day in the U.S.S.R. Last week the Red army celebrated its 37th anniversary with the customary pomp but with special significance: for the first time since Narva and Pskov, its top officers hold highest political jobs.

Wherever there were Red army units (and that was almost everywhere in the U.S.S.R. and a dozen other countries) there were solemn festivals. In the huge Central Theater of the Red army in Moscow, the stage was loaded with military notables, their chesty uniforms stiffened with buckram to carry the weight of glittering decorations. Center of attention was Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, new Premier of the U.S.S.R. and longtime top military commissar. The speech of the day was made by the new Defense Minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who has a better right than Bulganin to call himself a soldier.

In the glare of klieg lights and television cameras, stocky, bull-necked Zhukov gave a rousing, atom-waving oration in stock Communist prose, threatening the world (and especially the U.S.) with the might of the Red army. Lined up with Zhukov were Marshals Alexander Vasilevsky and Vasily Sokolovsky, present army chief of staff, while Stalin's old buddy, white-whiskered Marshal Budenny, was on hand to give a cavalry dash to the gathering. Among the diamond-studded, gold-starred military uniforms, Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was a small, undistinguished figure in civilian clothes, but to remind the audience where the power lay, a huge banner had been hung across the stage: "Under the banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, under the leadership of the Communist Party--forward to the victory of Communism."

Fighting Marshal. Beneath all the bombast the marshals had a message for the Soviet people. In its most pointed form it was delivered by egg-bald Marshal Ivan Konev, a figure of growing significance in the shifting Soviet scene. Pravda last week gave special prominence to an article by him. Konev was a Bolshevik before he was a soldier, but he is a fighting marshal who has earned his decorations the hard way and has the respect of the Russian people.

In World War II Konev commanded the north flank of Zhukov's famous counterattack which thrust the Germans back from Moscow in December 1941. Assigned to the Kursk front, he commanded the Second Ukrainian Army, which breached the German defenses and liberated Belgorod and Kharkov. In 1944 he won his greatest victory at Korsun-Shevchenkovsky, where in mud and blizzard his Soviet force encircled and destroyed ten German divisions. From there he went on to force the Dnieper, the Bug and the Dniester, and after liberating North Moldavia, his troops crossed Poland and became the first Russians to reach the Elbe, where his 58th Guards Division linked up with the U.S. 69th Division. Here Konev met General Bradley, presented him with a Cossack charger (the name Konev is derived from kon, a stallion).

Like most Soviet generals, Konev won his victories at a merciless expenditure of men and by stubborn will power. At Vienna, where in 1945-46 he was chairman of the Allied Council for Austria, his obdurate tactics stung General Mark Clark into describing him as "a mental robot saying only what had been written for him, as though his tongue moved only when wound by a key in the Kremlin."

The Doctors' Plot. The key in the Kremlin unlocked a curious fact about Marshal Konev in 1953. A couple of months before the death of Stalin, nine top Soviet doctors were arrested and charged with having deliberately hastened the deaths of Politburocrats Andrei Zhdanov (died 1948) and Alexander Shcherbakov (died 1945), and having plotted the deaths of Marshals Konev, Vasilevsky and other military leaders. So immense an accusation indicated that somebody big was about to get hurt. Instead, at this crucial point, came Stalin's death. A month after his funeral, while Lavrenty Beria was still Minister of Security, the doctors were released, and the plot was declared to be a hoax. But 2 1/2 months later, Beria himself was arrested, and six months after his arrest it was Marshal Konev who headed the tribunal at Beria's trial for treason, and ordered Beria's execution by shooting.

No one has yet satisfactorily explained the "Doctors' Plot," but it still lingers over the Kremlin, and could be invoked whenever a suitable victim is found. In his article in the Red Army Day issue of Pravda, Marshal Konev, in the course of praising the Red army, named four men who had contributed most to World War II victory: Bulganin, Khrushchev, and the two principal victims of the "Doctors' Plot," Zhdanov and Shcherbakov. Konev made no mention of the part played by ex-Premier Georgy Malenkov, who, as all Russians know, was Stalin's civilian right-hand man in the war effort, as well as Zhdanov's leading rival in the old days.

As if to emphasize Malenkov's unhappy position these days, Pravda next day launched into an attack on the Ministry of Electric Power Stations now in his care, accusing its management of inefficient methods and backward ideas.

* Fought about 200 miles southwest of Leningrad by a scratch partisan army of ex-Czarist soldiers, Red Guards and workers, which stopped a German army of some 15 divisions, moving toward the Bolshevik capital in open breach of the Soviet-German armistice signed two months earlier.

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