RUSSIA: Back to the Bank

Ever a fine figurehead of a man, portly Nikolai Bulganin smiled and applauded last week as his successor tipped him into the dustbin of history.

Reading off his new ministerial list to the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev was a long time getting to his old sidekick’s name. Bulganin got the job of chairman of the state bank, the very post he held 20 years ago when B. and K. were not yet a junketing, summit-going team but only a cloth-capped pair of commissars. He now ranks 44th in the roster of 45, just after Police Chief Ivan Serov and well below such eminences as Minister of Bakery Products Leonid Korniets, No. 25.

Back in 1955, when Soviet Communism wanted to smile, shake hands and play pen pals with the West after Stalin’s death, the Kremlin had use for Bulganin’s smooth good looks, benign good manners, and easy way with a glass. Bulganin was an Old Bolshevik whose long years of managing Soviet agencies without ever saying a flat yes or no had only enhanced his ability to look, dress and propose toasts like a Belgian burgomaster. “A real gentleman;’ cooed a French chorus girl from a visiting troupe he once called on backstage at the Bolshoi. “A master at creating an atmosphere of relaxed tension,” said a Western ambassador. In a face softened by comfortable living, his courtly smile was matched by the appraising eye of a riverboat gambler. Once, when Khrushchev & Co. were out of town, he accepted a toast to the Soviet government: “I can drink to that. Tonight I am the Soviet government.”

The appraising eye expertly judged his station well until last June’s showdown fight caught Bulganin too far out between yes and no: he accepted an invitation to chair a Presidium meeting after the Kremlin opposition had objected to Khrushchev’s presiding. He has been on the skids ever since. After Khrushchev fought off the Presidium’s move to replace him by summoning the whole Central Committee to overrule them, Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich were promptly denounced as “antiparty intriguers” and banished to the sticks; Presidium Members Saburov and Pervukhin were set down soon after.

But Bulganin, though replaced as Khrushchev’s traveling partner for last summer’s tour through East Germany, stayed on as Premier. When in last month’s Supreme Soviet elections, he was shunted to a faraway Caucasian constituency and nominated for far fewer places than other big shots, Moscow watchers knew his time at last was up. How had he lasted so long? Likeliest reason: his public demotion last year would have enabled anyone capable of counting on his fingers to conclude that Boss Khrushchev had in fact been voted down last June by a majority of the eleven-man Presidium.