RUSSIA: Where Is Klim?

From a five-line announcement on the back page of Moscow’s Izvestia, Russians learned last week that Marshal Klementi (“Klim”) Voroshilov, 63, had been “relieved of his duties as a member of the State Committee of Defense.” Into his job stepped Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin, 49. Bulganin had risen slowly in the Soviet hierarchy. He had been a textile worker, organizer of city Soviets, mayor of Moscow, a member of the Supreme Soviet, vice chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Neither a soldier nor a diplomat by training, he was both a general and Soviet representative to the Polish National Council of Liberation.

Why had the change been made? Voroshilov was one of the few Old Bolsheviks in Russia’s Government to survive the Great Purge. A war comrade of Stalin’s from the days of the civil War, few men had been so closely associated with the Soviet leader. Was the change an individual question, or did it portend a shake-up in the Soviet Government? As a result of the war, the Red Army could become a much greater political power in the Soviet state. As a Defense Commissar, had Voroshilov aspired too far? Stalin, a close student of Machiavelli, dislikes ambition in his official family. Or did Russia need a younger, more progressive man than Voroshilov to head its enormously developed war commissariat?

While foreign observers speculated that Voroshilov might be sent abroad as a diplomat; or to Siberia to head Russia’s Far Eastern armies, the Kremlin said nothing. All that most Russians knew was that little announcements of this portentousness do not appear inconspicuously in Izvestia without a reason.