“How old might this Gletkin be? . . . He must have taken part in the Civil War and seen the outbreak of the Revolution as a mere boy. That was the generation that had started to think after the flood. It had no tradition and no memories to bind it to the old, vanished world. It was a generation born without umbilical cord, . . . It is just suck a generation of brutes that we need now.”
—Comrade Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon
The most powerful, most important Gletkin in the Soviet Union reached his Soth birthday last week. The tallowy face of Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov glowered from the front page of every important newspaper in the land. As a birthday gift he got the Order of Lenin, Communism’s highest decoration. The Kremlin’s praise was laid on with a trowel:
“The Central Committee . . . and Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. warmly greet you, true pupil of Lenin and companion-in-arms of Stalin, outstanding leader of the Communist Party and the Soviet State, on your 50th birthday . . . We wish you, our friend and comrade, dear Georgy Maximilianovich, many years of health. . .’
Special Significance. Such praise comes to each Soviet bigwig on his soth and sometimes his 60th birthday. But there was something in the tone of the Malenkov birthday observance that vibrated political antennae all over the non-Communist world. Soviet censors allowed the Associated Press Moscow bureau to say that it “seemed to have design and special significance.” The implication was that Georgy Malenkov, a New Bolshevik who was an adolescent when the Revolution began, had become the likely heir to the aged (72) and ailing Joseph Stalin.
Malenkov is the youngest, most vigorous of the men now within reach of Stalin’s mantle, and his hand is on the most powerful political lever in Russia—the Soviet Communist Party apparatus with its 6,000,000 members. He grew to power with Stalin’s help. He was studying mechanical engineering and bossing the Communist cell in Moscow’s High Technological School when Stalin spotted him in the 1920s and whisked him off to be his personal secretary and snooper. He became known as Stalin’s walking card-index file.
By 1941, cold-eyed Georgy Malenkov had grown strong enough to electrify a party conference with rousing attacks on Communist bureaucrats, “windbags” and “ignoramuses.” Soon after, several commissars were demoted and Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, was booted out of her job as Commissar of the Fish Industry. Malenkov was honored with a junior membership in the Politburo, later became boss of the party apparatus.
Naps at the Office. During World War II he not only ran the party, but also directed Soviet tank and aircraft production. Often working around the clock for days at a time, except for short naps on a cot in his office, he sent plane production up to 40,000 a year. In March 1946 Malenkov became a full member of the Politburo, and a few months later a deputy Premier of the U.S.S.R. (all but two of the twelve Politburocrats are deputy Premiers). His power and influence swelled. Highly popular decrees revaluating the ruble and reducing prices were jointly signed by Stalin and Malenkov. When tributes to Stalin on his 70th birthday were published, Malenkov’s got first play in the Russian papers. Georgy Malenkov has been the fat man at Stalin’s elbow in recent group pictures of the Kremlin hierarchy.
Of all the top men in the Kremlin, he alone still affects the plain military tunic and cap Stalin made famous. He has been married twice, first to one of Molotov’s secretaries, now to a Moscow actress. He has, like Koestler’s Gletkin, no cord to the outside world: he has never set foot on non-Communist soil, never been known to speak to Western newspapermen or Western diplomats. In the few speeches comrade Malenkov has made for public consumption, perhaps the most memorable line is: “Can there be any doubt that a Third World War will become the grave for world capitalism?”
The Big Three. Despite last week’s demonstration, not all Western experts agree that Georgy Malenkov is clearly No. 2, for there is still Old Bolshevik Molotov, who has the seniority and prestige that goes with having helped Lenin hatch Communism. Molotov is still in high favor 35 years later. The experts prefer to put it negatively: it is no longer clear that Molotov outranks Malenkov. And not far behind is Lavrenty Beria, the mysterious, pince-nezed master of the midnight arrest and lord of the slave camps, whose Gletkin-like climb has paralleled Malenkov’s. But there have been signs that 52-year-old Beria is Malenkov’s friend & ally, not his competitor.
Some think Stalin deliberately juggles the three men to save any one of them from the temptation to speed up the process of succession. Another theory: that Molotov, Malenkov and Beria might take over together after Stalin’s death, to rule the Communist cosmos as a troika (trpumvirate). Those who think this would not last long are increasingly putting their money on “Dear Georgy.”
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