The Kremlin Plays Ministerial Leapfrog
VISHNIAK, MARK
The Kremlin Plays Ministerial Leapfrog By Mark Vishniak Important changes have taken place on the Soviet Olympus in recent weeks. Several Communist leaders have moved up; several others have been...
...Lenin preached and demonstrated turning foreign wars into civil wars...
...In 1945, he received the rank of lieutenant general in the MVD and was continuously connected with the MVD and MGB until Stalin's death...
...There were four First Deputy Premiers named after Stalin's death —Vyacheslav Molotov, Lavrenti Beria, Nikolai Bulganin and Lazar Kaganovich...
...The other view maintains that the rise of Bulganin and Khrushchev heralds, in the words of one commentator, "extremely threatening events...
...This juxtaposition does not seem convincing to me...
...All the better if this goal is achieved by infiltration and civil war...
...These were recently attacked in Pravda by F. F. Konstantinov, a reliable Communist party spokesman...
...Those who were defeated have been described as advocates of "peaceful coexistence" with the free world and as advocating a "sharp rise" in consumer goods...
...Khrushchev and Bulganin were left...
...Furthermore, in the coal industry, Minister A. S. Zasyadko was fired and replaced by his deputy, A. N. Zademidko...
...In this sense, Khrushchev, like Malenkov or any other student of Lenin, carries with him the threat of war...
...Director of the Magnitogorsk Combine from 1933 to 1937, he was a real potentate, the owner of a three-story stucco home with fourteen rooms, his own deer park, and so on...
...These three "younger men" are Russian patriots, "in contrast" to Old Bolshevik Molotov, who is more interested in world revolution...
...If so, the main count may be his warnings against atomic war...
...Every Communist government can be described that way...
...One motive for the shuffling of ministers may have been to elevate many of them over the deposed Malenkov...
...But, on the other hand, he was never stigmatized like Kozlov, who for a long time has been a favorite target of Khrushchev's attacks...
...And how does one square the idea that "the danger of war has lessened" with aggressive declarations by Molotov, Bulganin and Zhukov...
...If Bulganin and Khrushchev do not mean war, they mean a trend toward war...
...Attempts have been made to interpret the February events as a clash between two groups which ended with the victory of the Khrushchev-Bulganin-Molotov faction, decisively supported by President Voroshilov and Kaganovich, over the Malenkov-Mikoyan-Saburov-Pervukhin group...
...Two contrasting views have been offered...
...And Malenkov differed from Molotov only in tone...
...It should be noted that several of those who moved forward were advanced over the heads of their immediate superiors...
...Molotov has convinced them that "all roads lead to Communism...
...Khrushchev, Molotov and Bulganin have all spoken at length of "coexistence...
...Will Georgi Malenkov be purged...
...The number of regular Deputy Premiers has also been doubled recently: The four original deputies were Malen-kov, Vyacheslav A. Malyshev, Alexei N. Kosygin and Ivan F. Tevosyan...
...Malenkov never denied the significance of heavy industry, nor did Khrushchev ever deny the necessity of an "abundance of popular goods and agricultural produce," as he proclaimed it in September 1953...
...What about the 74-year-old bon vivant, Voroshilov...
...In socio-political terms, this is explained as the victory of the Party and military-political elements over the "economic managers" or "captains of industry...
...his eleven-year Premiership (1930-1941) had evidently been enough for him, and the events of the last two years could hardly have made him want the post again...
...But Molotov remains at the helm of Soviet foreign policy under Khrushchev as he was under Malenkov...
...When the majority of his comrades in the Presidium of the Central Committee opposed Malenkov, the choice fell on Bulganin for lack of an alternative...
...Does the Soviet ministerial leapfrog mean the imminent fall of the Communist dictatorship...
...The London Economist has wisely observed that, when Bulganin was appointed, "Malenkov's mourners" began to create a myth about Malenkov as "the great 'conciliator,'" as a sort of symbol of "a new age of concord...
...Soviet censors then passed a cable by Associated Press reporter Richard Kasischke, which said that this "raised a question of whether Malenkov eventually could be charged with aiding and abetting the cause of imperialist atomic warmongers with his statement that world civilization could be ruined by another war...
...In the years immediately preceding the fall of Tsar-ism, ministers were often fired and replaced by less qualified men...
...But the ministerial leapfrog seems to involve much more serious matters...
...This view seems unreal as well...
...Of all these new figures, the most colorful and ominous is probably the new First Deputy Premier, Zavenyagin...
...This experienced Chekist-engineer now occupies the same position of Deputy Premier as Malenkov, Stalin's former comrade-in-arms and successor as Premier...
...it has long been a commonplace of Soviet political education that Bolshevism is civil war...
...The air is filled with signs that a storm is brewing...
...Who else could be chosen...
...His opinions had differed from Khrushchev's since 1951, and he had been publicly reprimanded on several occasions...
...PURGE FOR MALENKOV...
...To explain the change in Premiers as the formation of a "bloc" between the "Party men" (Khrushchev) and part of the Army (Bulganin) in order to struggle with the "economic managers" (Malenkov) seems to me to be applying a priori notions to inscrutable facts...
...Thus, Khrunichev was promoted over the head of Minister of Aviation Industry P. V. Dementyev, whose deputy he had been...
...What is said now about Bulganin's government could be said about Malenkov's government...
...Like fish, political regimes begin to rot and reek at the head...
...The same may be said of the disagreements in foreign policy...
...several others have been cut down...
...See my article, "Khrushchev vs...
...Such shuffling and reshuffling, of course, always indicate the instability of a regime and are definite signs of decay...
...The appointment as Bulganin's First Deputies of the "Malenkovites" Mikoyan, Saburov and Pervukhin showed how insecure the winning group felt...
...Through much of the war, he had control over the GULAG—the forced-labor camps in the Far East...
...In fact, Malenkov was described in just this way when he came to power...
...In the last case, it is hard to say whether Benediktov moved up or down...
...in China, Korea and Vietnam, they turned civil wars into foreign wars...
...Lobanov was promoted over the heads of both his recent bosses, Ivan A. Benediktov and Alexei I. Kozlov...
...Malenkov," NL, April 12, 1954...
...There is nothing to indicate that the Army, or even part of it, actively helped decide on the change of leadership, although after the reshuffle occurred the new leaders did appoint the popular Marshal Zhukov as Minister of Defense...
...Kaganovich...
...A recent article in the Washington Star declared that the rise of Khrushchev, Bulganin and Zhukov "has lessened the danger of war," because these men "appear to be more interested in the welfare of the Soviet state as a national entity than in the furtherance of the world revolution...
...None was suitable, for various reasons...
...On the other hand, Kaganovich always considered himself one of the most important "economic managers," while Malenkov, with twenty years of service, can hardly be set apart from the Party apparatus...
...Actually, neither Khrushchev nor Bulganin nor Zhukov wants war as such...
...Malenkov yields to Khrushchev only in adventurism, judging from Khrushchev's fanciful projects of agro-cities and Siberian soil reclamation...
...The victors have been described as very aggressive toward the West and in favor of all possible strengthening of heavy industry at the expense of developing light industry...
...the four new ones are Avramy P. Zavenyagin, Pavel P. Lobanov, Vladimir A. Kucherenko and Mikhail V. Khrunichev...
...The February events did show, however, the further collapse of the myth of Communist "collective leadership," already dubious after Stalin's death and publicly exploded with Beria's fall and execution...
...Malenkov personally was left disgraced, but his proteges were promoted—perhaps for lack of other suitable "economic managers," perhaps in order to establish a temporary truce within the Party...
...If there was any disagreement between them in this matter, it was one of emphasis...
...Several Americans met him in 1930, when he came to the United States to negotiate with an American firm for construction work at the Magnitogorsk steel plant...
...In some cases, it is not quite clear whether the changes represented promotion or demotion...
...Moscow censors usually bar speculation about members of the Government...
...After Magnitogorsk, Zavenyagin was First Deputy Minister of Heavy Industry, and, in March 1941, he became Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs under Beria...
...But it does shed considerable light on the crisis produced by Malenkov's exit and the entrance of Bulganin, and on how the Party chiefs expect to resolve this crisis...
...If Malenkov yields to Molotov at all, it is only in the unceremonious treatment of Western diplomats...
...Mikoyan...
...Molotov had stubbornly resisted the position of Premier ever since Stalin's death...
...and Minister of State Farms Kozlov was replaced by Benediktov, just fired as Minister of Agriculture...
...In Russia in 1917, the Bolsheviks turned a foreign war into a civil war...
...Having had less contact with them, Malenkov had not learned, as Molotov had, that arrogance sometimes bears more fruit in negotiations than diplomatic courtesy...
...Is Malenkov's fall a gain for international peace, for the West, for Russia...
...Only two of these, Molotov and Kaganovich, remained after Bulganin replaced Georgi Ma-lenkov as Premier on February 8. Now there are three new First Deputy Premiers: Anastas Mikoyan, only recently removed as Minister of Domestic Trade, Maxim Z. Sabu-rov and Mikhail G. Pervukhin...
...I do not think so...
...Only Bulganin remained...
...To make Khrushchev Premier would have been to repeat the mistake made after Stalin's death, when Malenkov was both Premier and First Secretary of the Party and ten days later had to quit as Secretary in favor of Khrushchev...
...Many more American readers read about Zavenyagin in John Scott's Behind the Urals...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 12
