The Comrade Generals

The Soviet Union's all-embracing police system had its origin about 35 years ago as an extraordinary emergency commission, called the Cheka, to combat sabotage and counter-revolutionary activities, In the civil war it became a kind of battle gendarmerie empowered to execute Whites and waverers in the Red army. With the end of the civil war, the Cheka switched its attention back to civil affairs, but it never loosed its hold on the army. The system of commissars and political instructors, which extends down through the army command to company level, is Chekist, and popularly called so, though the official name has changed many times --OGPU, GPU, NKVD, MGB, MVD.

The control is ruthless: when a group of high army officers, led by Marshal Tukhachevsky, tried to throw off Chekist control in 1937, they were liquidated, along with some 30,000 regular career officers. Behind every high Red army commander in World War II stood a Chekist with the power to veto military orders. The system paid off: Chekist disregard for life accounted for some of the Red army's more daring and costly victories. With the war's end, many of the Red army's greatest marshals were not soldiers, but cops. Such a one is goateed Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, now Minister for Defense.

Last week in Moscow, Bulganin called a meeting of the top army Chekists and a sprinkling of those genuine fighting marshals who are regularly on call to give luster to Chekist authority. Purpose of the meeting: to pledge support of Premier Georgy Malenkov's arrest of Internal Affairs (MVD) Minister Lavrenty Beria, himself an oldtime Chekist (TIME, July 20). The declaration was intended to 1) end speculation that the army may have acted independently of the government in the arrest of Beria, and 2) preserve the front of solidarity behind which the struggle for power is raging. It could not help but raise another speculative question: If the powerful army Chekists are behind Malenkov, may they not be riding him?

Behind the fac,ade of solidarity, the purge went on. Beria men were falling.

P: Ousted in Azerbaijan: Premier Mir Dzhafar Bagirov, one of four alternate members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was the highest-ranking arrest since Beria's.

P: Ousted in Georgia: Internal Affairs (MVD) Minister Vladimir Dekanazov, put in the job by Beria after Stalin's death, onetime Ambassador to Germany (1940-41). The purge in Beria's native Georgia was made by General Aleksei Antonov, a wartime army chief of staff.

P: Ousted in East Germany: Justice Minister Max Fechner. His replacement: a woman, swarthy Hilde Benjamin, 51, popularly known as the "Red Guillotine," a jurist with a reputation for dealing mercilessly with offenses against the Communist regime.

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