COMMUNISTS: A Son of the Bourgeoisie

In Moscow last week 68-year-old Joseph Stalin, his eyes filled with tears, buried one man who might have been his successor. Politburo Member and Cominform Boss Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov died of arteriosclerosis in his 53rd year.

A son of the bourgeoisie (his father was a minor Czarist official), Zhdanov had spent his life fighting his father’s kind. Historians would remember that he had been a leading advocate of the Hitler-Stalin pact, that he had sparked the 1939-40 war against Finland, directed the defense of Leningrad against the German invasion, conducted the ideological purge of writers, artists, musicians, philosophers and scientists, founded the Cominform, and led the attack on Tito. Muscovites, however, were more likely to remember him for his funeral. It was the most pompous display the city had seen since Lenin was laid away in 1924.

At the head of the procession which escorted Zhdanov’s body from the ornate, white-columned hall of Dom Soyuzov (House of Unions), where it lay in state, to Red Square, two blocks away, walked a group carrying a giant portrait of the dead man. Next came nine generals, one admiral, three civilians, each carrying on a red plush pillow one of Zhdanov’s 13 military, naval and civilian decorations. ‘The open red and black draped coffin rode on a caisson pulled by six jet-black, white-harnessed horses. Zhdanov’s mustached, lifeless face was green in the glittering sunlight. Beside the caisson walked Stalin, with Molotov on his right; and behind Stalin, youngish (47), tough Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov, with Police Boss Lavrenty Beria on his right.

The formation was revelatory—it said clearly that in the Soviet hierarchy Malenkov Was Zhdanov’s replacement. Zhdanov’s death raised Malenkov and Rumania’s matriarchal but equally tough Ana Pauker to the top of the Cominform heap.

Eulogies of Zhdanov filled the newspapers and poured from radios. Fellow Politburo members, writers and workers remembered him as “a loyal disciple of Stalin,” “a simple man of powerful brain,” and a “champion of housing for the workers.”

When the eulogies were finished, Andrei Zhdanov was lowered into a grave beside the Kremlin’s wall and behind Lenin’s mausoleum. It was a hole about equal in size to the living space Russian housing provides for the average Russian.