For years, as head of the Communist Party's Agitation and Propaganda Section, balding, sharp-eyed Philosopher Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov had been Russia's No. 1 ideological vigilante. In the magazine Bolshevik, and his fortnightly paper, Culture and Life, he had denounced novelists, playwrights, journalists, artists, cinema directors for pernicious ideological errors. Last week his smarting victims could loose a Homeric guffaw—Aleksandrov himself had been popped onto a hot critical griddle.
It was no ordinary Soviet witch-burning, and Aleksandrov no ordinary witch. Ally of Politburo Member Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov, son-in-law of Politburo Member Nikita Khrushchev,...
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