RUSSIA: Stalin’s Stooge

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He is not a man anyone would choose to sit next to at dinner. His face is pale, round and expressionless; his cheeks are flabby, his chin is double, but his eyes are hard as carborundum. His stiff black hair looks as if it had been pasted on. He does not attempt to make himself agreeable. Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov is not what anyone could describe as a cuddly personality.

A prominent diplomatic visitor once described meeting him at a Moscow dinner: “My most vivid memory is the sight of Malenkov. It was the most sinister thing in the Soviet Union. I was struck by his repulsive appearance, bulbous, flabby and sallow . . . He was apparently oblivious of what was going on around him at the table. When toasts were made, he would lift his glass automatically, then relapse into sneering silence.” Said another diplomat: “I would hate to be at the mercy of that man.”

Georgy Malenkov holds millions at his mercy. As a secretary of the Central Committee, a member of the Politburo and of the Orgburo, he controls the party machinery, a vast, complex mechanism that reaches into every corner of Russia and beyond Russia’s boundaries into the satellite nations and the party cells in the free nations.

Americans are beginning to recognize his face: a pudgy, petulant face which has begun to appear in official Soviet photographs next to Stalin’s aging, feline mask. Malenkov was once even empowered to affix the dread signature of Stalin to certain documents, with a special rubber stamp. And more is rumored: that this short (5 ft. 7 in), fat (250 Ibs.), 50-year-old man will inherit Stalin’s power. This week, as the19th Congress of the Russian Communist Party convenes in Moscow, great new honors will come to the wielder of Stalin’s rubber stamp.

The Succession. “Our country lives in exciting days,” proclaimed the party newspaper Pravda last week. All over Russia, from the smallest rayon (precinct) to the capitals of the 16 republics which make up the U.S.S.R., party bosses were picking delegates for the big event. Daily, the press ran stories about Stakhanovite workers doubling and tripling their output in honor of the forthcoming congress. Moscow’s Hotel Metropole set aside its entire second floor for the incoming delegates. But, as usual, the preparations were for the most part hidden in secrecy. Even the location of the hall in which the 2,000 delegates were to meet was being kept under careful wraps until the last moment. In marked contrast with an American political convention, there would be no prying TV eyes, no creepie-peepies to eavesdrop on unrehearsed moments, no hooting and howling from spectators in the galleries—and nothing to be really voted on, either.

As usual, the delegates had been called to Moscow to sit through the act, obediently “voting” as they are told to vote, obediently applauding when they are told to applaud. They will be there to hear and cheer the decisions already made by the party’s high command.

Those decisions will be embodied in the party’s political report, usually a four-or-five-hour-long discourse which, in the past, has been delivered by the Big Boss himself: Lenin, while he lived, then Stalin. This year, aging (72) Joseph Stalin, like a venerable chairman of the board, has decided to take a back seat and let Malenkov post the orders of the day.

For some years the Soviet hierarchy has been: Stalin, No. i; Molotov, No. 2; Beria, No. 3. Malenkov was rated No. 2½, between Molotov and Beria. Now, the experts who study the Russian tea leaves for signs and portents think that Malenkov has moved up to No. 1½. Though Molotov has not been officially downgraded, it is said that Stalin treats him as little more than an errand boy; Beria, the boss of Russia’s secret police, seems content to wield his dreadful power in the background and is, moreover, Malenkov’s pal —apparently his one & only. There has been speculation that Stalin may will his powers to these three men jointly, to rule Russia as a triumvirate after his death.* Even in that case, Malenkov, because of his friendship with Beria and his grip on party machinery, could have a good chance of eventually becoming sole boss.

Stalin knows that few dictators in history, and none in the 20th century, have managed to ensure a smooth succession. He himself had thousands of men murdered before he felt safe as Lenin’s heir. It is not thought likely that he will name a successor while he still lives. For years he has kept the balance of power nicely adjusted among the pretenders to his throne. It may be that he is now trying to give Malenkov enough real power to make his succession possible without the sort of bloody struggle that Stalin himself inflicted on Russia in the ’30s.

Like Stalin, Georgy Malenkov has been a party machine man from the first. Unlike Stalin, Molotov and the other “Old Bolsheviks” who plotted in cellars and brooded in jails before the Revolution of 1917, Malenkov was never a revolutionary. Little is known of his early life except that he was born in 1902 in the Cossack city of Orenburg (now Chkalov) on the Ural River, perhaps of bourgeois parents (“Maximilian,” his father’s name, is not one likely to be borne by a Russian peasant). When the Revolution broke out, Georgy was in high school. He joined the Red army, the Communisty party a year later. A humorless, methodical youth of 18 with a knack for mechanics, he was given such jobs as checking on the loyalty of fellow soldiers in the army and screening candidates for party membership. He did well, and was put in charge of Communist groups in Moscow schools. In 1925 he got the break he was built for: he was picked to be one of Stalin’s private secretaries.

Tyrant’s Standin. As good secretaries will, the 23-year-old Malenkov set about making himself indispensable. When Stalin wanted a name or a fact in a hurry, it was there, on the tip of his secretary’s tongue. Malenkov’s memory is phenomenal; to supplement it, he collected a monumental file of facts & figures on everyone, big or small, who might come under the leader’s eye.

The young secretary’s duties were expanded to include several important executive posts (organizing secretary, Moscow Party Committee, 1930-34; personnel chief, All-Union Party Central Committee, etc.), but he managed to remain the eyes & ears of Stalin. During the gory purges of the 1930s, Malenkov’s inexhaustible memory worked late hours behind the scenes. He kept his own head so carefully below the parapet that in 1939, when Malenkov was chosen to make a minor report to the 18th Party Congress, his name was still virtually unknown to all except a few high party officials.

Two years later Malenkov was appointed to the all-powerful Politburo. It was a long way up, but not quite the top yet. The war carried him there: when Comrade Stalin became Generalissimo Stalin, he gave most of his purely party functions and many of his home-front tasks to Malenkov. More & more, while Stalin ran the war, Malenkov ran Russia.

Setback. Now his head was over the parapet, and now the snipers had something to shoot at. Even in Russia, seniors, pushed aside, resent young upstarts. Molotov, for one, could bear him a grudge because Malenkov exposed Mrs. Molotov’s inefficiency. She lost her job first as head of the Cosmetics Trust, then as head of the Fish Industry. Kaganovich, a ranking Politburocrat and a Jew, could resent Malenkov’s ill-concealed antiSemitism. But Malenkov, unlike Judy Holliday (see CINEMA), was not born yester day: he cultivated one mighty friend in the Politburo, Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police.

He felt, and failed to conceal, an utter contempt for the Old Bolsheviks’ sentimental, old-grad memories and their pious reverence for the prophets Marx and Engels. “It is impossible to believe,” wrote a British observer, “that there is no contempt in [Malenkov’s] eye as he watches older men putting themselves through absurd and elaborate contortions to reconcile what is with what was supposed to be. His is the world that is.” Apparently he did not mind being considered a heretic by such passionately doctrinaire Marxists as Andrei Zhdanov (touted frequently in the mid-’40s as Stalin’s heir apparent). In fact, Malenkov put his heresy to the test in a 1946 party address: “We have people, rightly called bookworms, who have quotations from Marx and Engels ready for every occasion . . . Instead of laboring to think up something new or to study experience, they have one answer: ‘No, that was not said by Marx,’ or ‘Engels said something else.’ If Marx or Engels could rise from the grave . . . they would disown them immediately.”

This proclamation cost Malenkov his job as party secretary and resulted in a vigorous campaign by Zhdanov for the revival of strict Marxist orthodoxy in the party. But Malenkov had bet on the right horse. Zhdanov died unexpectedly-in 1948. Soon afterwards, most of his partisans lost their jobs. The Five-Year-Planner Vosnesensky, Zhdanov’s most ardent disciple, was liquidated so completely that his name was erased from the Soviet history books. Since then, Malenkov has apparently had a clear track.

Man & Wife. Little is known about his personal life beyond the facts that i) he is a tireless worker who can go for days without sleep; 2) he lives in a Kremlin apartment with a wife & two children; 3) he smokes expensive cigarettes (Northern Palmyras); 4) like all Politburocrats, he has a dacha outside Moscow to which he commutes by bulletproof limousine, and likes to go duck hunting.

Malenkov’s first wife was Molotov’s former secretary. He divorced her in 1940 and married again. The present Mrs. Malenkov seems to have been bored by her husband’s late hours, and sought relief by becoming an actress. One day in the late ’30s, she appeared at a Moscow little theater group, and, giving a false name, got a job. Her colleagues wondered about her fine clothes and the fact that a car and chauffeur often picked her up after the performance. One day, when one of her fellow actors got into trouble with the secret police over some ideological impurity in a pamphlet he had written, Mrs. Malenkov announced who she was and arranged for the man to go to see her husband. He found Malenkov in a box in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. “Malenkov was having tea and French pastry,” said the actor. “He didn’t offer me any but he said: ‘My wife has told me everything; it is all pure nonsense. Come to see me tomorrow at the Central Committee.’ ”

Mrs. Malenkov’s fellow actors occasionally got a glimpse of her home life. “One morning,” recalls one, “Mrs. Malenkov came in and told me she hadn’t slept a wink all night because her husband had a toothache and the dentist came in with all his machines to fix his teeth.”

Purge Ahead? Malenkov still has a boss and aims to please him. While other Soviet bigwigs have gone in for goldspangled uniforms or the blue serge suits detectives have made famous, Malenkov wears the high-buttoned grey military tunic that Stalin once affected. There seems to be little reason to doubt that, as long as Stalin lives, and probably even after, Malenkov will continue to speak with his master’s voice, and continue to be his master’s rubber stamp. Will Charley-Mc-Carthy-Malenkov present the world with any major surprises this week? It is possible but not likely. The congress seems to have two main aims: i) whip up enthusiasm for the new five-year plan; 2) tighten party discipline and organization.

Malenkov’s party machine has developed a few ominous knocks in the last decade. Party membership has almost tripled and party discipline has loosened. The new party rules (e.g., the Politburo and the Orgburo are merged into a new presidium) are calculated to cut away the dead wood in the party, and open the way to an axing of lax officials by urging all party members to inform against delinquent comrades. All over Russia, a wave of denunciations and self-criticism is rapidly rising.

To the Western world, the only interesting possibility in the congress is the chance of getting a slightly better look at the man who seems likely, some day, to hold the issue of war & peace in his pudgy fingers. There is no reason to expect that that chancy glance will be in any sense reassuring.-For no one in the Western world can honestly envision a dinner table at which it would be a pleasure to sit down with Georgy Malenkov. Even the nursery-rhyme liberals have given up hope in such fairy tales. If that metaphorical meeting ever does take place, Malenkov’s fellow diners will have to come equipped with very long spoons.

†Gossip is tireless about Stalin’s health and the fantastic precautions he takes to preserve it. The latest, from the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, describes a clinic in the Caucasus, where a group of 40 carefully selected Georgians of Stalin’s age and general physical make-up are forced to lead a life precisely patterned on his, eating the same meals, keeping the same hours, while a corps of doctors observe and test them with life-prolonging serums. Weltwoche does not explain how the worries of ttie most feared and powerful man on earth are simulated, or whether Stalin gets the serum too. Stalin, according to French Ambassador Louis Joxe, who saw him last August, looks like a robust, healthy man.

*There has been no .serious suggestion that Zhdanov was murdered. Natural deaths do occur in the Soviet Union. -Last spring, when he left for Moscow as the new U.S. Ambassador, the State Department’s top Russian Expert George F. Kennan expressed the cautious hope that Russian-U.S. relations might possibly be taking a turn for the better. Last fortnight Kennan told reporters in Berlin that his stay in Moscow has been one of “icy cold” isolation, little different from the treatment he got in Nazi Germany back in 1941 when he was interned as an enemy diplomat. The U.S. Ambassador, snarled Pravda in reply last week, was an “ecstatic liar … an enemy of the peace and [hence] of the Soviet Union.”