Number 2 1/2

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In Soviet Russia's hierarchy, the tightest concentration of naked power in the world, a short, fat man from the southern Ural steppes named Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov now stands just a level below the eminences where Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov stand. He seems, in fact, to be pressing so hard on Comrade Number 2 that Western diplomats call him "Number 2 1/2."

Stalin and Molotov are Old Bolsheviks, the aging top-dog survivors of the conspiratorial crew who seized power 32 years ago. Malenkov, an adolescent when the Revolution began, is a New Bolshevik. His character was fashioned in the dark and stormy laboratory of civil war, purge trials, slave labor, thought control and the midnight calls of the secret police. He worked his way through the anonymous, self-anointed inner core of the party to its all-highest Politburo, to be Deputy Premier of the U.S.S.R. His rise to a position within touching distance of Stalin's mantle bears considerable portent. After more than three decades, the vast power of the old Communist revolutionaries is passing into the grip of younger men whom they taught and trained.

Of this rising Soviet generation with whom it will have to deal, the non-Communist world knows even less than it does of the greying Red masters. Malenkov is a sharp case in point. No Western diplomat or journalist seems ever to have had a serious, revealing talk with him. He has taken part in no international parley, save with comrades in the Soviet satellite belt. He has never traveled in countries outside Moscow's orbit. His career is known only in a framework as spare as the man himself is fleshy.

Impression of Menace. If the non-Communist world has not yet plumbed the leading New Bolshevik, it has, at least, an impression of him--an ominous impression. Western diplomats at Kremlin dinners have been struck by Malenkov's grim reserve and aloofness. Stalin, in the brief days of East-West banqueting, cracked a joke now & then, and Molotov sometimes unbent with vodka, but Number 2 1/2 remained stiff and oddly repellent.

Usually at banquets, he talked earnestly with his neighbor and apparent close friend, bald, pince-nezed Lavrenty Beria, boss of the Soviet police. Obese, agate-eyed, sallow and waxy-faced, Malenkov exuded a vague menace. "If I knew I had to be tortured," said a former Western envoy to Moscow last week, "and if I were picking people from the Politburo to do the torturing, the last one I would pick would be Malenkov."

Another former top-level diplomat had a similar remembrance: "Malenkov did not bother to talk with the guests. It seemed as though he resented just being there. You could not tell what sort of fellow he was. He did not drink too much, and he did not abstain--a calculating toyer with a glass. Always he wore that party uniform [a drab, high-collared tunic, once affected by Stalin], which went out long ago in Russia . . ." The diplomat paused. Then, spacing his words for emphasis, he continued: "I -would -hate -to -be -at -the -mercy -of -that -man."

Expression of Peace. Last week the unknown, disturbing Malenkov made one of his rare public addresses. The occasion was the windup of Russia's election festival when the masses are led to the polls by the party to approve the party's unopposed candidates for the Supreme Soviet.

The final pre-election ritual is a series of speeches by Politburo members. Malenkov spoke from Moscow's marble Hall of Columns, which the Czars built as a playhouse and where the dead Lenin lay in state before he was embalmed and moved to his red granite tomb in Red Square. It was a long spiel (some 7,000 words in its English translation), full of stock praise for Soviet achievements. The keynote lines were aimed at Western ears:

"The Soviet government . . . will not abandon further efforts directed toward insuring peace, and is ready to be an active participant in all honest plans, measures and activities to avert a new war."

This seemed to repeat the invitation to another conference, and another deal, which the Moscow press extended to the West last month (TIME, Feb. 27). Police Boss Beria and two others of the Politburo's hierarchs, Deputy Premiers Anastas Mikoyan and Andrei Andreev,* echoed Malenkov's bid. They were followed next day by Molotov, who first held out the olive branch, then knouted the West for "blackmail . . . with the so-called hydrogen atomic bomb, which does not exist in fact." He wound up by promising that a new world war would "sweep away imperialism from the world." Much to the outside world's surprise, Number 1 himself, who usually brings the election ritual to its climax, remained silent.

On Sunday, to no one's surprise, 99-odd% of the Russian electorate (some 105 million people) voted for Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov & Co.

A Parallel. By the jobs he has held and from his few public statements known to the West, Malenkov may be classified as a practical more than a theoretical Marxist. His talent and the stages of his career tend to parallel those of Stalin. He is unquestionably a first-rate organizer, with a flair for totalitarian political management. As a party intellectual, he is a sort of lower middlebrow, whose unshakeable ideological orthodoxy is tempered with hard common sense. He is tough and abusive to his associates--perhaps the same temper that the dying Lenin found obnoxious when he wrote, before his death, that "Comrade Stalin is too rude." Malenkov uses the Russian equivalents of four-letter words, and behind his back his underlings have dubbed him "the Kremlin's turkey."

The standard Soviet privacy surrounds Malenkov's personal life. If he does not drink heavily, he obviously eats well; a favorite snack is French pastry. He smokes an expensive brand of Russian cigarettes, Northern Palmyras. Despite his Kremlin pallor, he likes fresh air. He goes duck hunting in the marshes outside Moscow. He rates a suburban villa on the Mozhaisk Road, a bulletproof limousine, and an armored-car escort.

Malenkov has been married twice. His first wife was one of Molotov's secretaries. He divorced her and married Elena Khrushchev, a handsome actress. The present Mrs. Malenkov turned from the stage to the schools. As director of Moscow University, she motors in a long black Zis (the U.S.S.R.'s copy of the Packard) from her husband's Kremlin quarters, dresses in severe, mannish suits, is served by two housemaids, rates an office with a thick Persian rug, a mahogany desk, a daily vaseful of roses, an ornate silver samovar.

Of Malenkov's parental and class origins hardly anything is known. He was born on Jan. 8, 1902 in Orenburg, since renamed Chkalov in honor of the famed Soviet flyer who in 1937 hopped over the North Pole to the U.S.* His father was presumably a Cossack subaltern. Orenburg, on the southern flank of the Urals, where Europe meets Asia, was in those days a terminal for camel caravans from Turkestan. It also had the reputation of being a restless, independent place. The Cossacks and peasants of the Orenburg region had mounted one of the most troublesome popular uprisings of the 18th Century against Catherine the Great, an event made memorable for all Russians in Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter.

The Red uprising of 1917-18 came to Orenburg while Malenkov was a pupil at the local high school. He cut his classes, joined the Bolshevik army, fought in bitter campaigns against the local anti-Bolshevik forces of Ataman (Chief) Alexander Dutov. At 18, Georgy Malenkov joined the party, was assigned as politruk, i.e., political commissar, to a Red army battalion. He was an effective indoctrinator, kept a keen check on the loyalty of his men. Within three years he moved up to be commissar for a regiment, then for a brigade, and finally for the whole "Eastern and Turkestan Fronts."

A Meeting of Lines. The civil wars ended and the zealous politruk went back to school. The party had its eye on him. In 1922 he entered Moscow's Higher Technological School. While he studied mechanical engineering, he kept on practicing political technique. He became boss of the school's Communist Party cell. Then, by a chance not clearly known, Student Malenkov met and impressed Stalin, who whisked him from mechanical to political engineering.

The party, under General Secretary Stalin, had need of an engineer such as young Malenkov. The Communist apparatus was grinding and bumping under the pressure of Old Bolshevik rivalry and suspicion. While Stalin cut down and purged his rivals, Malenkov served him as personal secretary and snooper. The student technician of power had charge of all party dossiers in the middle and upper levels. He developed an astonishing memory, became a walking file from which Stalin could extract at any moment whatever record was needed to help along the ruthless struggle for power.

Stalin's victory, consolidated by the great purges of the '30s, was also Malenkov's victory. He climbed swiftly up the party ladder--into the Central Committee, into the Orgburo (the Central Com mittee's organization subcommittee, which handles the choice and assignment of party personnel throughout all walks of Soviet life), into a job as a deputy party secretary under General Secretary Stalin. His special task, in the years just before World War II, was to check and double-check discipline and loyalty to the party line--and he carried out the job, so he reported in 1939, through "strict scrutiny" of every one of 2,477,666 comrades.

Rude Words. In 1941, a few months before the Nazi invasion, Malenkov jarred a party conference in Moscow with a major blast of his rude common sense. He was reporting on "flaws, shortcomings and errors" in the party's direction of industry and transport.

He berated bureaucrats: "Some of them like to sit in swivel chairs and run things by correspondence." He scolded "windbags," who made excuses for the lag in production quotas, and "ignoramuses" who turned up their noses at technological improvements or "cleanliness and tidiness in a factory." He snapped at managers who "study genealogy to pick subordinates by their proletarian ancestry rather than by capacity." He added, startlingly, that there were people outside the party who were better Communists than those within it.

It might have been coincidence, but his report was followed by the demotion of several commissars and the retirement to private life of Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, who had bumbled first as director of the Cosmetics Trust and then as Commissar of the Fish Industry. Victor (I Chose Freedom) Kravchenko, then an engineer in the Kremlin, tells how Molotov, at a meeting of the Politburo, took his wife's dismissal deeply to heart.

"The fault, comrades," he said, "is one which I must share myself. I have failed to give sufficient attention to the matter."

Stalin cut in. "That's beside the point, Vyacheslav," he said. "The crux of the matter is that too many fish are swimming in the sea when they ought to be on citizens' tables."

As for Malenkov, the day after his tough talk he was elected a candidate (or junior) member of the Politburo.

Impressive Show. During the war years, Malenkov's organizational talent was applied to the production of Soviet armament. In charge of tank and plane manufacture, he put up an impressive performance. For days on end he stayed in his Kremlin office, snatching a cat nap now & then on an army cot set up beside his desk. His factories were turning out 40,000 planes a year by the time the tide turned on the Russian front in 1943.

In March 1946 Malenkov became a full member of the Politburo. Perhaps his fast climb made him lose the shrewd middlebrow touch, perhaps times had changed. At any rate, he made another speech, calling for a new application of party principles, and got into trouble.

"We who follow the Marxist teaching," he urged, "must study our contemporary experience . . . incorporate it into day-by-day practical leadership . . . The war has forged new people, new personnel capable of pushing the work ahead." He advised all comrades: "Avoid getting into a rut, and stop living by old formulas . . .

"We have people, rightly called bookworms, who have quotations from Marx and Engels ready for every occasion and every pretext. Instead of laboring to think up something new or studying experience, they have one answer: 'No, that was not said by Marx,' or 'Engels said something else.' If Marx could rise from the grave and see such a follower (if this term is permissible), he undoubtedly would immediately disown him."

Down & Up. This speech turned out to be "erroneous." It seemed to be a bid for power by Malenkov and the younger men brought forward by the war. The Old Bolsheviks cracked down. The late Andrei Zhdanov, who was then a close rival of Malenkov for advancement in the party hierarchy, saw how to turn Malenkov's blunt words against him. In a ringing call for orthodoxy, intellectual Zhdanov retraced the party line afresh. In the game of Bolshevik parchesi, Malenkov had to move back several spaces.

He lost his job in Stalin's private secretariat. He found himself stuck in a secondary role in the Agricultural Administration. He dropped from fourth to ninth in Politburo listings (Zhdanov moved up from eighth to fourth). For his fling in ideological heresy, Malenkov was properly penitent and rueful, and on the next throw he moved forward again. In 1947, at the birth of the Cominform in Poland, Zhdanov, the party theoretician, had to share leadership with Malenkov, the party organizer.

A year later, perhaps from shock, worry, and a fall from favor because of the rise of Titoism, Zhdanov died. At once Malenkov more than made up his lost ground. In the process, a blight fell upon the fortunes of outstanding Zhdanov men.

Most striking was the complete disappearance of N. A. Voznesensky, an amiable younger member of the Politburo, in charge of five-year planning. Voznesensky, something of an opportunist, had switched from Malenkov's camp to Zhdanov's. In March 1949 Voznesensky was fired. For a while, slighting and insulting references to him appeared in the Russian press. After that, it was as if Voznesensky had never been. For example, a recently published popular Soviet history book omits his name from a wartime list of Politburo members. George Orwell's "Ministry of Truth," which rewrote history to suit the doctrine of Nineteen Eighty-Four, was not more thorough than the erasers of Voznesensky.

Prospects. In listings of Politburo members, Malenkov has now bounced up to third place behind Stalin and Molotov. And there are hints, not conclusive by any means, that 48-year-old Georgy Malenkov, more than the older (60) Molotov, is being groomed to succeed Joseph Stalin.

The recent decrees devaluating the ruble and reducing prices were signed by Stalin and Malenkov. Last November, on the 32nd anniversary of the October Revolution, Malenkov was orator of the day--an honor accorded to Zhdanov in 1946, to Molotov in 1947 and 1948. On Stalin's 70th birthday, Malenkov's tribute took precedence over Molotov's. More significant perhaps than such fine points of Soviet place are some signs that Beria is an ally of Malenkov. With party and police backing, Malenkov stands at the pivot of Soviet power--for the moment.*

The problem of succession is surely troubling the Communist hierarchy. They know from history (including their own) how factions get disastrously tangled when a strong leader dies. They seem to be preparing, behind the scenes, a Party Congress, the first since 1939, that may establish the mechanics of succession.

For the non-Communist world, what might Malenkov's succession portend? During last fall's Revolution anniversary, he gave a clue. "What," he said oratorically, "does history teach us? The First World War . . . brought about the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution in our country. The Second World War brought Popular Democratic (i.e., Soviet) regimes in Central and Southeast Europe, the victory of the great Chinese people. Can there be any doubt that a Third World War will become the grave for world capitalism?"

* Andreev's appearance was regarded as significant. Pravda had recently denounced him by name for an "erroneous conception of Soviet agriculture," of which he is boss. After that, some never expected to hear of him again.

* Chkalov's host after he and his over-the-top crew had unexpectedly landed at Pearson Field, the Army's air base at Vancouver, Wash.: Brigadier General George Catlett Marshall, commander of the Army post.

* What does Stalin really think of Molotov? A Western visitor at the Kremlin, after talking with the two Soviet leaders, told this anecdote: "Stalin loves to think of himself as a great military strategist. At the drop of a hat he will get out the military maps. He offered to take me right down to the map room to make a point, and he rose to lead the way. I saw Molotov was bored stiff, so I said, 'Generalissimo' (he loved that 'generalissimo'), I'd like to look at those maps with you, but it seems to me Mr. Molotov is bored.' Molotov was standing there, his mouth puckered like a stuffy butler. Stalin looked around with a terrific contempt. 'Oh, him . . .' he said." There is no reason to believe that Stalin's opinion of Malenkov is any higher.

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