The 'New' Soviet Leaders

...They fear the prostrate and atomized people over whom they rule and to whom they give no peace...

...The Soviet Generation: The enigmatic figure of Malenkov stands on the borderline between the above two and the next generation...

...militarized life for a supreme commander...

...This slight shift was due to their weaker power position and their need to meet and play on the expectation of change...

...The few who survived were Stalin men rather than Lenin men, cronies and factional lieutenants of Stalin's even when Lenin was alive...

...Wolfe was invited to deliver to the American Historical Association...

...But it was Bulganin who administered the tongue-lashing to the more important Communist industrial managers, men who, for the most part, owed their places to Malenkov's favor while the latter administered Stalin's cadre machine...

...On the other hand, they cannot altogether extinguish his name, for what other claim do they have to rule except association with Stalin and discipleship to Lenin in an unbroken "apostolic succession...

...Because it thus wages unending war on its own people and on the world, the reverse side of its inordinate power is its inordinate fear...

...The ups and downs of his race with Khrushchev and Zhdanov for promotion arc outside the scope of this article, but they suggest a continuous personal rivalry...

...When Franklin Roosevelt died in office in wartime, or George VI or Gustav V, could such words creep into the communiques...

...In Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism (1952) are to be found literally the whole stock of formulae on which Khrushchev, Bulganin and Company have been proceeding...

...First, his name became famous as a leader of the Chekist terror in the Nizhni region...

...These men were brought up entirely under the bureaucratic-totalitarian regime...

...the whole dynamics of the totalitarian dictatorship drives toward a continued, muted struggle for a single successor...

...And they fear each other...

...in short, a system which describes itself as a dictatorship in permanence and is what it describes itself to be--such a system has not developed a legitimacy in a third of a century of existence nor can it develop a legitimacy...

...Now that he is dead, they are able to cut the losses of some minor errors with which his stubbornness or prestige had become involved...

...In foreign affairs, first Warsaw and Prague, then China, then Yugoslavia, Geneva and East Germany, and lately India and Burma have given resonance to his garrulousness and enabled him to bring home the trophies of success...

...In 1947, on the anniversary of tho Bolshovik coup d'ecat, only 138 old Bolsheviks who had joined in 1917 or oarlier were alive and in good standing to sign a letter thanking Stalin for what be had done for the Parts...

...The Big Three in that "collective" leadership were Malenkov, Beria and Molotov...

...Around Khrushchev and Bulganin, supporting them yet anxiously seeking to restrain them, are other lieutenants of Josef Stalin...

...It is well to remember--historians at least should have a memory --hat Stalin ruled as modest party wheelhorse in a "collective leadership" from 1923 to 1929, that he denounced Zinoviev for "wanting Trotsky's blood," then denounced the Left Opposition for wanting "to run the Party without Bukharin," and did not himself shed the blood of his comrades until he had been thirteen years in effective power and seven years the sole and absolute ruler...

...The war to win the world will take ever new forms, as it has done in the preceding three decades, but will continue undiminished, too...

...Malenkov nosed out Zhdanov shortly before the latter's death...

...Having thus briefly examined the nature and dynamics of the totalitarian system, let us look at the "new" measures of the post-Stalin era...

...autocracy for an autocrat...

...But all their major policies--from "peaceful coexistence" and "anti-colonialism" to "partyness in literature," "primacy of production of the means of production" and "increase in labor productivity" in industry to continuation of the agrarian revolution from above--are envisaged in Stalin's last work and political testament...

...When there is only one party, every controversy within it must reflect the hopes of some part of the population outside of it...

...But the direction of change was determined in large measure by the dynamics of the developing totalitarian system for which Lenin had laid the foundations--by his party organization, by his theory of elite dictatorship, by his seizure of power, and by his power-oriented rather than welfare-oriented use of it...

...and found his life work in the Cheka in 1918...

...Increasingly his name was connected with fresh revolutions from above in agriculture, culminating in the agrogorod drive, the plowing of the "new lands," and the drive to grow corn everywhere regardless of soil and climate...

...at the 18th Parts Congress in 1939, less than 20 per end were from this culegory...

...The one-party state has long ceased to possess a living party, for parties are parts and need each other to maintain party life as the sexes need each other to maintain sex life...

...Bulganin, born 1895, joined the Party on the eve of its seizure of power in 1917...

...It is a pretorian guard, a recruiting of activists to carry out the Leader's plans, the eyes and ears of an espionage system, a "transmission belt" to convey the Leader's will to a will-less nation and to members and sympathizers in other lands...

...authoritarianism for an authority...

...Khrushchev, born 1894, joined the Party only in 1918...

...Because this type of Leader dwarfs and deprives of personality even his closest associates, it was not hard to foresee that their first step would be the proclamation of a '"collective leadership...

...Actually the heirs and contestants for the heritage are divided into several generations (in an age of revolution, a few years may mark off a "generation"): The Old Bolsheviks: These joined the party before 1917, knew the excitement and misery of the Tsarist underground, prison and exile, and joined in the seizure of power...

...If we add this Civil War generation to the Old Bolsheviks, we find that, though they make up an insignificant part of the Party membership and comprised less than 7 per cent of the delegates to the 19th Party Congress (1952), they hold two-thirds of the places in the Presidium...

...This leaves Nikita Khrushchev as Number 1, with the main power lever, the Party machine, in his hands...

...The abortive thaw in the arts was officially pronounced dead with a return to the Stalin-Zhdanov line on November 25, 1955 (see Pravda, "The Leninist Principle of Partyness in Literature...

...Then he became a Party Secretary, a position Khrushchev did not get until ten years later...

...Already Khrushchev is the only one free to say foolish things...

...Three years after Stalin's death, the Kremlin Presidium is still dominated by his trainees, using his basic set of stratagems The 'New' Soviet Leaders By Bertram D. Wolfe Joseph Stalin had been dead six hours and ten minutes before the Kremlin announced his passing...

...a system which seeks to continue the revolution from above and the remaking of man according to a new and arrogant, not to say a blasphemous, blueprint...

...separate the drive for partyness in culture from Lysenkoism and the nonsensical refusal to learn technology openly from abroad which characterized Stalin's last but not his earlier years...

...1914...

...Hence the funeral orations of the ostensible triumvirate spoke of a "collective leadership...

...In the September Kommunist of this year, Molotov confessed that six months earlier he had been guilty of an ideological error "theoretically erroneous and politically harmful introducing confusion into ideological questions contradicting Party decisions and casting doubt upon the existence in our country of a socialist society that has in the main already been built...

...Stalin's Leninism differed from Lenin's, too, but the differences are not so radical and the continuities are greater...

...Now with Stalin's death, yet other personalities will set their stamp upon the era...

...show new tactical imagination disciplined by the same inflexibility in strategic aims in their international drives...

...now he was preparing to sow fresh divisions by a gentler policy in Europe, and to seek recognition of his gains in Europe, while he continued and sharpened his offensive in "colonial" Asia...

...Lenin's Marxism was so different from that of Marx that Charles Rappoport, an admirer, styled it marxisme a la tartare...

...Their training has taught them when to jump, and sterilized them against loyalty and gratitude to a declining patron...

...a system which has "a vested interest in confusion" and unsettlement and lives by the uncertainty and unending strain of all its subjects...

...But they have no intention of diminishing the "revolution from above," the war on their own people, the drive to win the world, that represent the continuity of Lenin, Stalin, and Comrade X in a continuing totalitarian system...

...Malenkov was deprived of his post of First Party Secretary by Khrushchev two weeks after Stalin's death...

...Only then did he begin to acquire a "military" figure: Lieutenant-General, 1943...

...The same Stalinist "paranoiac" account of the Second World War has just been retailed by Khrushchev and Bulganin in India...

...The unending war on their own people, to speed up, to remake, and to reduce them to animate instruments of the power of the state, will continue...

...In December 1953, the second Triumvir, Lavrenti Beria, ended with a bullet in the base of his brain, became a retroactive traitor from the beginning of time, then an unperson...

...totalitarianism for a charismatic or synthetically manufactured charismatic leader, a Duce, Fuehrer, Vozhd...

...Zhdanov and then Malenkov in literature...

...Because the death of a tyrant in Russia has always been accompanied by a general expectation of change, because the war-weary free world was longing to yield to new illusions, because his lieutenants were freer to maneuver with fresh imagination after the "Old Man's" death and because their power position was more uncertain, they carried out his suggested maneuver with unexpected verve...

...Not even in young states still aborning--the death of Chaim Weizmann or Kemal Pasha, the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan or Gandhi--could any one think of pronouncing such ominous words as "disorder and panic...

...There is not even a provision in the Soviet Constitution or in the Party Statutes for a dictator, much less a provision for a legal succession to the post which grew out of the real dynamics of the totalitarian regime...

...But we would do wrong to exaggerate these...

...They fear the outside world which they plan to conquer and to which, even in their peace-mongering campaigns, they give no peace...

...There is in the Soviet system no machinery to provide a peaceful, legal and legitimate succession...

...A system which has ruptured the fabric of legitimacy first in its traditional monarchist, then in its democratic form...

...The Party Congress set for February and prepared by unobtrusive purges and a hail of "self-criticisms" will provide a vaster sounding board...

...But not one thing they did went outside the formula he had there laid down for them, or went as far toward "relaxation of tensions" as had Lenin's New Economic Policy and concessions, or Stalin's Collective Security, Disarmament and Popular Front, or his Grand Alliance maneuvers...

...Yet it is the natural, if incurably transitory, form of interregnum in a system of totalitarian dictatorship...

...The words "confusion and panic'' escaping from the lips of the "orphaned" rulers of the world's most powerful government betray the fear that is in their hearts...

...More than Stalin would admit or they dared to claim while he was alive, these men worked out the Stalinist policies with him...

...Chekist director of the Polish Committee of Liberation, Minister of Defense, 1947-49...

...This article is based on paper entitled "The Political Context of the New Course," which Mr...

...The Party is anything but a party in the normal sense of the word...

...Marshal, 1947...

...Trained in the same hard school, with the same blood of comrades on their hands, they know enough to make many moves in their heads before they touch a single piece on the chessboard of power...

...But the method of their selection--they are Stalin's men--and the dynamics of their totalitarian system continue as overall shaping forces...

...The Soviet Government has long ceased to be a government by Soviets...

...And after the long period of driving into the power vacuums in Europe and Asia from 1946 on, Stalin was actually preparing another peace drive and getting ready to roar you gentle as any sucking dove when death claimed him...

...Though he worked in its Secretariat, Malenkov did not become a member of the Central Committee until five years after Khrushchev...

...Supported by "the Army"more pecisely, by Bulganin's Special Section, the secret police machine and the Party machine in the Army--Kshchev was able to depose Malenkov, dispose of Beria, and compel Molotov to put himself out of the running by a confession that he didn't know socialism when he saw it...

...The broadcasts were not a cry of grief for irreparable loss, but a call to "monolithic unity high political vigilance, intolerance in the struggle against the inner and outer foe to insure uninterrupted leadership and the prevention of disorder and panic...

...Deluded by the Stalin cult and our own propensity to personalize, we have forgotten that even while Stalin lived these men were co-makers of his policies: Khrushchev in agriculture...

...Khrushchev was even then the man charged with giving "arithmetical values" to those algebraic formulae...

...To sum up: The "new" men who have succeeded to Stalin's power are not so new as they look to the uninquisitive eye...

...Being accustomed to use the pistol to guide the historian's pen in enlarging and glorifying Stalin's name, they immediately began a fresh rewriting of history to cut him down to size--not to actual size, but to their own size...

...Collective leadership," hard enough in a democracy, runs against the very nature of dictatorship...

...Now there is no party to decide anything or to select its servants, officials, leaders...

...He is a graduate engineer but even in the Moscow Institute went into Party and faction work, and "special section" work, among the budding technologists...

...Despite his deceptively trim beard and dignified demeanor, Bulganin may well be the toughest man in the "new" leadership...

...For a while they were forced to put more emphasis on the satisfaction of the need for consumers' goods, but always on the basis of "the primacy of production of the means of production...

...Hence Lenin forbade factions and party discussions in 1921, as Tito did in the Djilas case...

...Supporting them, yet anxiously checking on them, are other Stalin lieutenants, maintaining as best they can a "collective leadership," out of which Khrushchev increasingly emerges as "more equal than the others...

...If we add Malenkov to the elders, they have 7 out of 9 places in the Presidium...

...Thence he went into the Special or Secret Section of the Budyenny-Voroshilov Red Army cavalry...

...For the Stalin cult had so dwarfed them that who could claim to be big enough to rule after the sole repository of greatness and author of everything was no more...

...But the whole dynamics of their system makes that but the first step in a muted or open struggle for the succession...

...Bulganin might perhaps exercise this freedom, too, but in his devious and silent rise to the top he has always kept his tongue and manners in check, even while crushing those who stood in his path or the path of "the Boss...

...They have reason to combine against any man who moves too fast, yet to desert each other if they think they know who will win, and can swing aboard his juggernaut in place of being crushed by it...

...At the 17th Congress in 1934, 70 per cent of the delegates were people who had joined the Party before the end of the Civil War...

...Bertram D. Wolfe, former chief ideological adviser of the Voice of America, is the author of Three Who Made a Revolution and Six Keys to the Soviet System (to be published by Beacon on February 21...

...The men may be styled epigoni...

...The two remaining places are occupied by men whom Malenkov promoted from engineering to Communist industrial management, Saburov and Pervukhin...

...If Beria is gone, to direct the KGB there is still Serov (famed for his order to put on the political suspect list in Lithuania even philatelists and Esperantists), and Kruglov (of forced-labor construction fame) to head the MVD...

...Thus, in the so-called new men we are dealing with an authentically Stalinist leadership...

...The "collective leadership" is unstable...

...Stalin's personality set its stamp upon his era, as Lenin's did on his, and the differences in their personalities were enormous...

...Nor do they wish to abandon his policies, for in large measure they flow from the nature of the regime, and, more than we are prone to realize, they are their policies no less than his...

...In 1946, he reported that more than half of the entire Party and state personnel of the Ukraine had been replaced by him...

...With him in an enigmatic duumvirate is the secretive Bulganin...

...The Civil War Generation: Most of the Civil War generation, too, died in the purges...

...The power structure is the same and drives in the same direction...

...Molotov in foreign affairs...

...His major services to Stalin consisted in a purge of the Ukraine under Kaganovich in 1925-8, work in Moscow under the same from 1932 to 1934, and again, from 1938 to 1949, collectivization, industrialization, Russification and Stalinization in the Ukraine...

...a system in which the Leader and his lieutenants try to intervene in every local quarrel, break up every local "nest" of solidarity, make their power felt at every level high and low and in every private spirit...

...Deputy Commissar of Defense and General, 1944...

...But Stalin killed off his whole generation of Old Bolsheviks in 1936-38...

...Bulganin in the armed forces...

...Malenkov in industry...

...Conferences of architects, and, more important, of Communist agricultural managers, have been compelled to take Khrushchev's tongue lacings, cheer his rudeness, laugh at arrogant jokes which only one who feels himself among subordinates can permit himself to make...

...He became a candidate member of the Politburo five years later than Khrushchev...

...Though they are only a handful in the Party, they have four men out of the nine in the Presidium: Molotov (born 1890, joined the Party in 1906), Voroshilov (born 1881, joined the Party in 1903), Kaganovich (born 1893, joined the Party in 1911), Mikoyan (born 1895, joined the Party in 1915...

...These words bring us close to the heart of the mystery of the totalist state...

...For evidence, see the foreign-affairs section of his last work and political testament, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR...

...The "primacy" was never sacrificed, and now they have enlarged it to a more than Stalinist priority...

...Finally, we should note that out of the nine members of the Presidium seven were also members of Stalin's Politburo prior to the 19th Party Congress...

...infallible government for an infallible leader...

...Each chess game is played a little differently, but the same basic manual of "book-moves" is being followed...

...1955, and some of the pronouncements accompanying recent purges, suggest that Zhdanov is being rehabilitated along with the unadulterated Stalin line in foreign and domestic policy, which may bode ill for Malenkov's future...

...a system which seeks even to prevent the development of a stable bureaucracy operating according to rules that are impersonal and not readily subject to change...

...The thermometer measuring opposition having been deliberately broken, the quicksilver of opposition is instinctively felt to be everywhere...

...When Army work diminished, he went into the Cheka section that supervised industry, worked under Kaganovich in Moscow, helped the latter in the early Thirties to purge Moscow of the Left and Right Oppositions, held various economic posts including that of President of the State Bank, and in World War II went back into the Army as Stalin's eyes and cars...

...Khrushchev's platitudes are beginning to be quoted solemnly in black type as an ipse dixit...

...Disorder and panic...

...However, neither of these is in the Presidium, a sign of the reduction of power of the Secret Police in favor of Bulganin's Secret Special Section of the Army...

...a system which issues commands and "allocates functions" without granting control over either the decisions or the resources which those functions require...

...They can bring a fresh frankness to their drive in agriculture...

...absolute, centralized, ubiquitous power for an absolute ruler...

...On February 8, 1955, he was deprived of his Premiership and forced to confess "my guilt and responsibility for the unsatisfactory state of affairs in agriculture my insufficient experience in local work and in direct guidance of individual branches of the national economy...

...Stalin's declining years were marked by more than a touch of paranoia and increasing rigidity...

...a system which has chosen to pulverize all non-state organizations and recognizes no autonomy either of public organization or of private purpose or feeling...

...But they have the two most important men in the Presidium, Bulganin and Khrushchev...

...The drive for a fresh revolution from above in agriculture is also outlined in algebraic formulae in Stalin's pamphlet...

...The whole dynamics of dictatorship cries out for a dictator...

...Premier since Malenkov's fall...

...Colonel-General...

...He had been forced to unify the free world by his profitable aggressions...

...Born in 1902, he joined the Party only in 1920 when Bolshevik victory in the Civil War had been assured...

...However, the rehabilitation of Tito, the return to the Zhdanov line in literature on November 25...