Foreign News: NEW PREMIER: BULGANIN

JTNANIMOUSLY elected Premier of Russia last week, replacing Georgy Malenkov: Old Bolshevik Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin, 59.

Bulganin is a bureaucrat in marshal’s uniform. Big and bluff, with a splendidly barbered goatee and a Goring’s penchant for fancy uniforms, he looks every inch a soldier but has never actually commanded anything more than a squad of cops. Bulganin owes his rank entirely to Stalin, who used him to insure the Communist Party’s supremacy over the army. Bulganin, all his life, has cut a fine figurehead of a man.

Early Career. Bulganin was born in the old Volga city of Nizhni Novgorod (now Gorky). His comparatively well-off family paid for him to go to school, though his official biography now disguises his unproletarian origin. Bulganin. aged 22, joined the party as an organizer a few crucial months before the Revolution, is thus one of the few old Bolsheviks still in high places. Assigned to the dread CHEKA during the bloody civil war. he showed so much efficiency in jailing and executing the “People’s enemies.” and in putting down a workers’ revolt in his old home town, that Stalin called him to Moscow. He knew nothing about business management, yet he ran one of the largest electrical plants in the Soviet Union; he knew next to nothing about banking but became head of the GOSBANK, the Soviet Federal Reserve. In the ’30s at Stalin’s order. Nikolai Bulganin. rising executive, was elected chairman of the Moscow Soviet—for six years he was in effect mayor of Moscow (his successor:Nikita Khrushchev). Bulganin traveled abroad, bringing back such improvements as a fleet of trolley buses, a manual of French traffic 20 signals and an order for natty white gloves for Moscow’s traffic cops.

The “War Years. When the Nazis attacked Russia, Bulganin became the civilian organizer behind Georgy Zhukov’s defense of the capital. He mobilized the entire population, drafting men and women alike into the front lines, where they died by the thousands, but saved the city. He was made a lieutenant general.

Throughout World War II. the ex-policeman’s job was to look over the shoulders of the fighting men as a political commissar, spying for Stalin. During the advance on Warsaw, he was attached to Rokossovsky’s army, and it was he who (after consulting Moscow) prevented any help from reaching the” Warsaw uprising. One day in 1944, Bulganin reported to U.S. Ambassador W. Averell Harriman that a certain U.S. officer had been overheard cursing President Roosevelt and voicing his hope that the President would be defeated. When Harriman appeared unexcited by the tip, Bulganin was overheard to mutter in Russian: “Harriman must be one of the conspirators, too.”

Postwar Promotion. Stalin, after the war, shunted aside the triumphant combat soldiers like Zhukov. but Bulganin the policeman-politician-executive rose to Minister of the Armed Forces, Marshal of the Soviet Union, and finally a full member of the Politburo. Medals jangling, he reviews Red Square parades, sometimes on horseback, but more recently, as his weight has increased, in a ZIS limousine. Soviet officers still joke that he does not know the difference between a mortar and a howitzer.

When Stalin died, Bulganin became one of the four first Vice Premiers, but appeared to take little part in the ensuing struggle for power. His oratory, though frequent, flowery and fiery, betrays no originality. “He is reasonable, intelligent and able,” said an American diplomat who has met him often. But no Western observer rates Bulganin ,as a first-rate brain. A professional figurehead, he appears to have been chosen Premier because of his second-rate qualities, not in spite of them.

In case his promotion, or that of Marshal Zhukov’s to succeed him, should be taken as a sign that the army might take over the country. Molotov last week went out of his way to underscore a vital statistic: 77% of all men in the Red Army belong either to the Communist Party or to the Komsomol (young Communists).