RUSSIA: Beards

On April 26, 1698, Peter I called the leading Russians to his country place, Preobrazhenskoye, and told them they had to conform to Western custom by shaving off their beards. With his own hand Peter gave his noblemen’s whiskers a rough-cut.

On March 15, 1946 Joseph Stalin called the leading Russians to the Kremlin and told them they would have to conform to Western custom by calling themselves ministers instead of commissars. With his own hand Stalin signed the suggestion to have his own title changed to prime minister.

In neither case was the effort at conformity more than superficial. The fate of the Old Bolshevik word “commissar” was just a finishing touch in Russia’s new nationalism. Commented one U.S. diplomat: “Now they have everything back but the Czar.”

Other changes wrought last week:

Seventy-one-year-old Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin resigned as President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet after 27 years in office. From the early days of the Soviet Union’s precarious fight for survival down to the latter days of its expansive glory, the “little father of the peasants” had dispensed friendly fatherliness and earthy philosophy. Now, with his eyesight almost gone, he was happy to quit. The shriveled sage with the oldfashioned, tip-tufted beard had the distinction of being one of the few top-ranking Old Bolsheviks to be removed from office merely by old age.

Kalinin’s successor is gruff, bustling, 57-year-old Vice President Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik, who will now function both as President of the Union and as an alternate member of the policymaking Politburo. The Soviet Union’s longtime trade-union chief, he is primarily the workers’ man, where Kalinin was the peasants’ champion. The son of a Leningrad janitor, he was the only member of the All-Union Soviet of Trades Unions Secretariat to survive the purge of 1937. As Russian leaders go, he has a wide horizon: he made two wartime excursions to trade-union conferences in Britain. But he is isolationist enough to cultivate a bushy, eminently Russian mustache.

Shvernik’s successor as trade-union boss, and perhaps as Vice President of the Soviet Union, is Vasili Vasilevich Kuznetsov, who is even more cosmopolitan than Shvernik—he was educated at Carnegie Tech and worked in a U.S. Ford plant. When he returned to Russia, he reported so enthusiastically about his life & times in the U.S. that friends kept snapping: “Well, if you liked it so much there, why don’t you go back?” Conforming to Peter’s Western ideal, he is clean-shaven.