RUSSIA: Harvest Time

“To each vegetable its own time,” says an old Russian proverb, to which latter-day Russians add, “and to every Bolshevik his day of confession.” Last week confession day came around for the woodiest old vegetable in the Bolshevik truck garden: Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin, better known by his party name: Molotov (meaning The Hammer). In a letter to Kommunist, top party organ of the Central Committee, First Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Molotov, who got into the movement in 1906 at the age of 16, admitted that at the ripe, Red age of 64 he had committed a “theoretically mistaken and politically harmful” blunder by understating the extent of Socialist success in Soviet Russia.

Though less dramatic than the confession (of incompetence) which announced Georgy Malenkov’s fall from Premier last February, Molotov’s error was the more heinous for being ideological. At that same time Molotov had said: “Side by side with the Soviet Union, where the foundation of a Socialist society has already been built, there are people’s democratic countries which have so far taken only the first, though very important, step towards Socialism.” Molotov’s error lay in the use of one word: foundation. Said he in his confession: “This mistaken for mulation leads to the incorrect conclusion that allegedly a Socialist society has not yet been created in the Soviet Union; [this] . . . does not correspond to reality and contradicts the numerous estimates of the result of the construction of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. given in party documents.”

Foreign diplomats who in recent months have closely watched (and sometimes admired) Molotov’s tough, smiling, but guarded performance were not surprised. Since Stalin’s death, the order of precedence among the U.S.S.R.’s “collective leaders” has changed subtly against Molotov. His letter of confession was dated Sept. 16—a date between the West German negotiations in Moscow and his visit to New York for the U.N. General Assembly, indicating that he was still held in a position of trust. Some diplomats felt that his official resignation was not far off, perhaps after the Big Four foreign ministers meeting at Geneva. Others guessed he might keep the trappings if not the power of office for some time to come. After all, Georgy Malenkov is still around. It was the manner of Molotov’s decline which interested the onlookers most, for all the slaphappy cordiality of Soviet leaders, there was still some high-level weeding going on in the Soviet garden.